On Tuesday, Brazil’s federal police found eight bodies in the Wuxiu district of the Yanomami Indigenous Sanctuary in the state of Roraima, in Brazil’s far north, where miners killed an indigenous man and seriously injured two others over the weekend. According to the first information, none of the dead were indigenous people.
It’s still too early to tell what actually happened, but police sources say the victims found on Tuesday were likely killed in retaliation for the weekend miners’ attack. During the attack on Saturday, a group of miners with live weapons attacked the indigenous people who were participating in the funeral ceremony, resulting in the death of one of them on the spot, a Yanomami who was working as a medic in the middle of the forest, and injuring two others in the abdomen. Tuesday were still hospitalized at Roraima General Hospital, in Boa Vista, the state capital.
Now that eight bodies have been found, the number of people killed in just three days has risen to 13 in the Yanomami Game Reserve, Brazil’s largest, partially occupied by security forces who have tried in vain to expel thousands of miners for three months. who destroy forests and pollute rivers in search of gold. In addition to the Indigenous man killed on Saturday and eight non-Indigenous people found on Tuesday, four other men, all miners, were killed on Sunday evening by agents of the Federal Highway Police, PRF, as police disembarked from a plane into a region known to as “Ouro Meal” to combat illegal mining.