For decades, the Indigenous Yanomami have suffered at the hands of illegal gold miners, who destroyed vast stretches of their homeland and polluted their rivers with mercury. But since 2019, the crisis has reached new heights, with hundreds of Yanomami dying from conditions related to the mining. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has gone so far as to declare the situation a “genocide.”
This year, Kopenawa and other Indigenous leaders took an unusual step. They teamed up with Salgueiro, one of Rio’s celebrated samba schools, to stage an awareness campaign, right in the middle of the annual Carnival festivities in Rio.
The result was unveiled in the early hours of February 12 at Sambadrome, one of the premier destinations for Carnival parades. Floats dedicated to the “people of the forest” sailed down the Sambadrome’s wide parade avenue, surrounded by stands packed with thousands of spectators.
From January to November last year, 308 Yanomami people died in clashes with illegal miners or from conditions linked to the expansion of mining. Half of the deaths reported last year were children under the age of four.
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