YANOMAMI BLOOD GOLD

For almost four decades from now “mineworkers have been there illegally with their colleagues, business partners and accomplices”. This confession was made by José Altino Machado, “Zé Altino”, known as a living memory of gold mining in the Amazon. The pictures on this site also left no doubt: that whole partnership and complicity have already gone too far in the search for the Gold Out of Yanomami Blood. One more time it has installed itself in Brazil’s most powerful spheres during the government led by Jair Bolsonaro, a fiercely declared supporter of mining in indigenous lands. If everything would depend solely on him, a former army captain, there would be mining, but no more Yanomami, Munduruku or any other indigenous nations.

Brazil is currently on its fourth gold rush, which takes place in the Yanomami Indigenous Land. Looking backwards, the first rush was in the 1970’s, financed by the armed forces during military dictatorship in the country. The second one, in the first years of redemocratization. That was followed, in the early 1990’s, by the third rush, that resulted in the murder of sixteen Yanomami in Haximu, an indigenous community in Venezuela. Only five out of the twenty-three miners accused of leading the massacre and the illegal extraction of gold were condemned for participation in the genocide. Some of those 23 people are now in the Yanomami Indigenous Land. The current rush strengthens continuously since 2019 and more than 26,000 invasor miners are currently in Roraima, a Brazilian state historically hostile to indigenous rights.

A new partnership among Brazilian independent media vehicles Amazônia Real and Repórter Brasil resulted in the Gold Out Of Yanomami Blood series, seven special journalistic reports on the illegally extracted gold market chain works. To have access to the whole series, just click on each image aside.

In a four-month investigation, a team of journalists found out the crime route starts with cheap workforces in the mining sites, but only stands still because of a rich and complex structure: rich miners, airplane owners, government employees, politicians and governors, indigenous, luxurious jewelry stores and narcotraffic are all involved in it. Brazil needs to know, once for all, who buys the gold out of Yanomami blood.

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‘I’ll buy everything’: Yanomami gold is freely sold at Rua do Ouro

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R$ 200,000: that’s how much a pilot working for miners makes a week

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‘Bolsonaro’s mining bill will turn into a mess’, says the living memory of mining in Brazil

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The destruction of Yanomami land caused by mining