Illegal Gold Mine Surges In Brazil Farm State Bordering Amazon

By Anthony Boadle

BRASILIA (Reuters) - As Brazil attempts to crack down on illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest, thousands of wildcat miners have converged on a new prospect in the farm state of Mato Grosso, Greenpeace said on Thursday.

Shocking photos of dozens of hectares (acres) of forest stripped of vegetation and dug up by the miners were taken from a Greenpeace plane on Wednesday and showed the mine to be on a protected Indigenous territory called Sararé.

Greenpeace cited federal prosecutors' estimates that there are 5,000 illegal miners on the site, numbers that have surged since last year, despite enforcement efforts by police and the government's environmental protection agency Ibama.

"In July, Sararé territory was the target of an operation by the federal police, Ibama and other federal agencies to clear the area and burn the excavating machinery used by the miners. However, as the images show, dozens of excavators remain there," Greenpeace said in a statement.

Under Brazil's constitution, formally recognized Indigenous lands are out of bounds for mining and commercial agriculture.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pledged to eliminate illegal mining from Indigenous lands and reduce illegal deforestation to zero by the end of his term in 2026.

Last year in the Amazon, his government marshaled military and police forces in an operation to evict thousands of gold miners from the Yanomami territory, Brazil's largest reservation the size of Portugal on its northern border with Venezuela. 

But illegal miners, spurred by record-high gold prices, have continued to infiltrate the territory, bringing disease and violence and causing widespread malnutrition among the Yanomami, the largest relatively isolated tribe in South America.

On the Sararé reservation, some 250 Indigenous people live in seven villages that are now threatened by illegal mining, which comes on top of an agricultural frontier that advances relentlessly into the Amazon forest, opening new soy plantations.

Data from Brazil's DETER satellite imagery system that detects new deforestation and mining sites, shows that alerts of new mining areas, known as "garimpos" in Portuguese, soared from 273 alerts of new hectares mined last year in Sararé to 570 hectares in the first six months of this year, Greenpeace said.

The Sararé territory, on 67,000 hectares (165,560 acres) of ancestral land, is located some 500 km (310 miles) west of the Mato Grosso state capital of Cuiabá and close to the border with Bolivia.

The nearest town to the reservation is called Conquista d'Oeste (Conquest of the West).         

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Sandra Maler)