Brazil's New Indigenous Affairs Chief Sets Sights On Illegal Gold

Bras�lia, March 9 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 9th Mar, 2023 ) :Joenia Wapichana is used to charting new territory: the first Indigenous woman to earn a law degree in Brazil, she was also the first elected to Congress.

But she faces one of her biggest challenges yet in her new job as the first native person to lead Brazil's Indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, which she said was dismantled for the past four years under far-right then-president Jair Bolsonaro.

The feisty 49-year-old is the first to admit she faces a daunting to-do list, starting with the issue that thrust her into the spotlight almost from the day she took office last month: rampant illegal gold mining on protected Indigenous reservations.

Newly inaugurated leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has ordered a police and army crackdown to wrest back control of the country's largest reservation, the Yanomami territory, from illegal miners, who are accused of poisoning the water with mercury, destroying the rainforest, raping and killing inhabitants, and triggering a humanitarian crisis.

But it is proving difficult for federal authorities to stop the boom in illegal gold, Wapichana said in an interview with AFP at her office in Brasilia.

At least 30 percent of the gold mined in Brazil is irregular in origin, according to a recent study by the Federal University of Minas Gerais.