Aldo Rebelo, Minister of Defense of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, has warned that removing illegal gold extractors from the Amazon, as the new government intends, will not be easy and has called for the legalization of the situation of these people for the benefit of the indigenous peoples.
Rebelo also defended that «criminalizing» these people, who are accused of being partly responsible for the humanitarian and food crisis in the region, is counterproductive since many of these indigenous communities «receive money» from this type of activities.
«Among the Yanomami they support mining. This creates conflict among them because some support it and receive money and others are against it,» said Rebelo, who cites the specific case of the Cintas Largas ethnic group, who work diamond mining in their territories located between Rondônia and Mato Grosso.
In this sense, he bet, as did the previous administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro, for the labor regularization of these people, because in this way the indigenous communities would receive payment for the exploitation rights of their lands and with them they would be able to afford the improvement of services.
«There are hundreds of thousands of Brazilians living illegally. They have already been pushed into illegality by the omission of the State», said Rebelo, who predicts that depriving these people of this work could lead them to fall into drug trafficking networks.
At the same time he maintains that the legalization of this activity will also benefit the environment since it would put an end to harmful practices such as the use of mercury which poisons the rivers, one of the issues denounced by the indigenous communities, reports ‘O Globo’.
Rebelo based his arguments on the Brazilian Constitution, whose Article 174 contemplates the role of the State to favor the «organization of mining activities in cooperatives, taking into account the protection of the environment and the economic and social promotion of the extractors», recalling that already in 2008 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva tried to carry out something similar with the Miners’ Statute.
Considered during his political stage as part of the ruralist bench of the Chamber of Deputies, in 2012 – when he was Minister of Sports with Rousseff – he participated as rapporteur of the Forestry Code, which involved changes in environmental legislation in protected areas.
However, indigenous associations, both state and non-governmental, have been pointing to the irregular extraction of gold and other precious stones in indigenous territory as part of the insecurity and humanitarian problem experienced by these communities.
Among the new measures proposed by Lula da Silva’s new government is to give the green light to new protected demarcations, as well as the «elimination» through a joint operation of the Ministries of Justice, Defense and Environment, of the infrastructure and improvised installations in indigenous territory of all these illegal structures.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
