BRASILIA: Eight people were found dead on Indigenous territory in northern Brazil, police said on Tuesday, where miners have been illegally occupying protected reserves.
Federal police said in a statement that the bodies were found on Monday in the state of Roraima, and an investigation was underway. It did not provide the identities of the victims.
Five others, including an Indigenous person, were killed over the weekend in the same area during armed confrontations with illegal gold miners.
The police and the military have been conducting an operation since February to force out illegal miners from territory belonging to the Indigenous Yanomami people in the Amazon rainforest, along the border with Venezuela.
Yanomami leaders say around 20,000 miners have killed and raped people in their community, contaminated rivers with mercury they use to separate gold from sediment and caused a food crisis.
Authorities are investigating possible acts of genocide against the Yanomami people, after at least 99 children under the age of five died on Brazil’s largest Indigenous reservation last year, mainly due to malnutrition, pneumonia and malaria.
Police said they shot four illegal miners over the weekend in an operation to dismantle one of their clandestine camps.
“The federal government is not going to give an inch in this confrontation, that is why it is also reinforcing the security of those who act on the front line, so that they have total security in the exercise of their institutional activities,” Indigenous Minister Sonia Guajajara wrote Monday on Instagram.
The Yanomami reserve is one of several that suffered a massive influx of illegal miners — known as “garimpeiros” — during the government of former president Jair Bolsonaro, whom environmentalists said encouraged the invasions.
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