Brazil’s Lula is losing his war against illegal miners in the Amazon

The small plane hovers low above the scrappy forest canopy, with rivers below colored a murky yellow due to mining waste. On the ground, deep in the Amazon rainforest, an armed Brazilian government agent watches as a dredge used to illegally mine gold from the Yanomami Indigenous Territory erupts into flames – destroyed on orders from the Federal Police.

The scene unfolded during a government raid earlier this year, and was part of a government crackdown on the illegal mining that has ushered in deforestation, hunger, and conflict in Brazil’s Amazon. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged millions of dollars for high-profile environmental protection operations, in which authorities destroyed 340 mining camps in the first four months of 2023 alone, and expelled invaders from 80% of the protected forest they occupied.

But many wildcat miners have since returned to the Yanomami territory, from which they have been legally barred since it became a federally protected land in 1992. In fact, the total area occupied by illegal mining was 7% larger last year than in 2022, reaching nearly 13,500 acres. The miners “were not intimidated” by the government’s high-profile and well-funded mission, says Edinho Batista, coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima, where the Yanomami reserve is located.

The Amazon, often referred to as the “lungs of the world,” stores vast quantities of carbon, and its preservation is key to fighting global warming. In Brazil, which holds about 60% of this vast rainforest, it is home to endangered Indigenous cultures and countless plant and animal species.

Although protecting the Amazon has been a global talking point for decades, illegal activities from logging to ranching, and gold mining to drug trafficking, have long put it at risk. The destruction increased under former President Jair Bolsonaro, who welcomed and even encouraged illegal exploitation of the rainforest. Widespread human-made wildfires racing across the Amazon today underscore its fragile state as rains dwindle and the forest becomes drier.

President da Silva, popularly known as Lula, has doubled down on protecting the Amazon ecosystem and its Indigenous inhabitants, vowing to eliminate deforestation by 2030 and end illegal logging, mining, and ranching on Indigenous lands. Yet observers say money and political will, at this point, may not be enough on their own.

“We don’t have a plan for the forest,” says Márcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a coalition of nongovernmental environmental groups. “And we need one urgently.”

“Sabotaged” plans?

Violence, hunger, and disease have exploded in the Yanomami’s territory since 2019, spiraling into a crisis that has captured headlines at home and abroad. Indigenous people say armed miners threaten them, scare off wild game, and pollute rivers with mercury – poisoning the fish and their drinking water. Outsiders have also brought along drugs, alcohol, sexual violence, and diseases that pose deadly risks to Indigenous people, according to Mr. Batista.

Brazil’s health ministry recorded 363 deaths in the Yanomami reserve in 2023 – a death rate more than three times the national average – with many children under 5 years old sickened by malnutrition or malaria brought in by consequences illegal mining, such as standing water.

The situation is dire. And yet “when Lula took office, he set a different tone,” says Jorge Dantas, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Brazil. He’s made good on many of his environmental promises, with deforestation dropping by half during his first year in office, and the government expelling thousands of intruders from Indigenous reserves.

“The federal government showed it was willing to combat environmental crime and preserve protected areas,” Mr. Dantas says. But their “efforts have not proven to be enough.”

Indigenous advocates say that in the Yanomami territory, Lula’s environmental strides began to unwind when cash-strapped environmental agencies pulled back from the area following early operations, handing the reins over to Brazil’s armed forces to carry the work forward.

Federal environmental agencies are still reeling from deep cuts suffered under Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. Dantas says. “You don’t have equipment; you don’t have aircrafts; you don’t have enough agents. ... You can’t stay there forever.”

The armed forces were tasked last year with blocking illegal miners from entering the Indigenous territory, as well as distributing aid to remote villages suffering the impacts of mining. But the army, sympathetic to Mr. Bolsonaro, failed to deliver thousands of food baskets to the Yanomami people, while allowing planes carrying supplies for illegal mines to fly over the region and land on illicit landing strips carved into the forest.

“The armed forces sabotaged the plan,” says Mr. Astrini. “So retaking control of the region became even more complex.”

The armed forces have denied allowing miners to return to the Yanomami reserve, maintaining that they are doing their best to contain the problem. But Lula has struggled to gain the loyalty of the military, which was implicated in the storming of Brazil’s capital in January 2023.

“This shows the government’s weakness” in the Amazon, says Mr. Batista. “And miners exploited it.”

New strategies

In addition, as organized criminals increasingly bet on illegal gold mining, they tap into the same air, land, and river routes to transport illegal gold, arms, and drugs through the rainforest, says Mr. Astrini. “The profile of environmental crime is changing,” he says.

“These forces ... require a much more powerful counterattack from the government,” Mr. Astrini says. “Today, crime in the Amazon is a highly organized, billion-dollar business. And it’s a crime that has a huge political influence.”

State and federal lawmakers have stifled efforts to bolster environmental laws and, in some cases, have even dismantled protections. Last year, Brazil’s Congress passed a law requiring Indigenous people to prove they occupied the ancestral lands they claim before Brazil’s Constitution took effect in 1988, something the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional.

Late last month, Lula pledged an additional $241 million for combating illegal mining specifically in the Yanomami reserve. His administration also created a new government base in the state of Roraima to serve as a departure point for humanitarian aid and multiagency operations that will aim to force out the miners once again. It will operate until the end of 2026.

Although large-scale environmental protection investments and the deployment of the armed forces might be a “quick, satisfying” solution to the problem, Mr. Dantas says, to keep invaders out for good, Brazil must look deeper, toward root problems. That could include investing in income-generating jobs that don’t harm the forest, such as in ecotourism or sustainable oil extraction, to give illegal miners alternative ways to earn a living.

“Everyone cheers when they see the tractor being set on fire or the dredger being blown up,” Mr. Dantas says, but that’s not creating lasting change.

While small-scale projects focused on the sustainable production of fruits or timber from the rainforest could point the way forward, they lack the financing to scale up. And, even as Lula calls attention to his green agenda, he is pushing forward megaprojects, like an oil-drilling operation near the mouth of the Amazon River.

The key, Mr. Astrini says, is investing in models that keep the forest standing. “The world is looking at the Amazon,” he says. “We just need to choose a different path forward.”