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Illegal gold mine surges in Brazil state bordering Amazon

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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 (August 22).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 (August 21) and showed the mine to be on a protected Indigenous territory called Sarare.Greenpeace cited federal prosecutors&#x27; 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&#x27;s environmental protection agency Ibama.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&#x27;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 Sarare reservation, some 250 Indigenous people live in seven villages that are now threatened by illegal mining.Data from Brazil&#x27;s DETER satellite imagery system that detects new deforestation and mining sites, shows that alerts of new mining areas, known as &quot;garimpos&quot; in Portuguese, soared from 273 alerts of new hectares mined last year in Sarare to 570 hectares in the first six months of this year, Greenpeace said. -Report from 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.

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.