Lula vows to win ‘war’ against illegal miners invading Indigenous lands

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: ‘We cannot lose a war to illegal miners, we cannot lose a war to illegal loggers … to people who are breaking the law.’ Photograph: Adriano Machado/Reuters

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has insisted his government must not lose the “war” against the environmental criminals devastating Indigenous lands in the Amazon after claims that thousands of illegal miners were resisting eviction from the country’s biggest such territory.

After taking power last January, Lula made expelling an estimated 20,000 gold and tin ore prospectors from the Yanomami Indigenous territory a top priority after four years of Amazon destruction under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. Environmental special forces and federal police teams were sent deep into the region’s remote jungles as part of a supposedly historic crackdown.

At first those high-risk airborne operations bore fruit but in recent months they have been dramatically scaled back. Speaking last month, the veteran Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa claimed thousands of miners were again causing havoc in his people’s mountainous, Portugal-sized territory. “Mother Earth is angry,” Kopenawa told the Guardian, urging Lula to re-escalate an anti-mining campaign critics say has been allowed to fade.

On Tuesday, almost a year after his Yanomami crackdown started, Lula summoned more than a dozen top ministers, as well as military and federal police chiefs, to review their progress in dislodging miners blamed for a surge in child mortality and diseases such as malaria.

“This meeting is about deciding – once and for all – what our government’s going to do to make sure Indigenous Brazilians no longer fall victim to massacres, hooliganism, mining, and to people who want to invade preserved areas that belong to the Indigenous people and cannot be used [by outsiders],” Lula told his cabinet, vowing to tackle the Yanomami crisis with “the full force of the government machine”.

“We cannot lose a war to illegal miners, we cannot lose a war to illegal loggers [and] we cannot lose a war to people who are breaking the law,” Lula added.

The president’s remarks come amid growing frustration from Indigenous and environmental activists over how the anti-mining offensive waned after its initially positive impact. Despite a flight ban imposed last April, “illegal aircraft are flying as normal” within the Yanomami territory, a government source admitted last month. No permanent river blockades have been set up to cut off the supply routes of miners.

“My sense is that the battle [against the miners] has gone back to square one – and that in some areas the situation is even worse than before,” the source warned.

Writing on social media, Lula said his government was planning “new, even more serious actions targeting the invaders”. Lula’s chief of staff, Rui Costa, told reporters “permanent incursions” by security forces would replace “sporadic actions” in the Yanomami territory. The role of the armed forces would be rethought.

Despite exasperation that miners continue to torment Yanomami communities, overall Lula’s administration made major environmental progress during its first year. Last week Brazil’s national space agency announced that Amazon deforestation had fallen by 50% in 2023 compared with 2022, the last year of Bolsonaro’s government.