Flying low over the Kayapó Indigenous territory, the poisoning of the Amazon is starkly apparent in a string of mud polygons carved out by illegal goldminers. From a Greenpeace plane, the Indigenous chief Raoni Metuktire Kayapó stares at the scars – tinted red, blue, green, white, brown, yellow and grey – and jabs his finger in anger. “I don’t like this at all. The destruction is so big and the land will never go back to what it was.”
Raoni, a lifetime campaigner for the rainforest, has invited the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to his territory this week for one of the most important meetings of Indigenous leaders in recent years.
