Former vice-president Hamilton Mourão and former president Jair Bolsonaro, in the signature ceremony for the Legal Amazon National Council | Image: Valter Campanato/Agência Brasil/Used under license This article, written by Anna Beatriz Anjos, was originally published by Agência Pública on March 6, 2023, and is republished here with edits under a partnership agreement with Global Voices, translated by Liam Anderson. The report is part of the “Bolsonaro's black box” series, made possible by the support of readers of Pública. In early 2023, the humanitarian crisis in Brazil's largest Indigenous territory — of the Yanomami people, in the northern states of Amazonas and Roraima — became a nationally and internationally reported issue with the visit of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the area. On January 20, the federal government declared a public health emergency due to lack of assistance to the Yanomami people and the large-scale invasion of their lands. They have suffered from the ongoing presence of upwards of 20,000 illegal miners according to estimates from Indigenous organizations, which has led to a large increase in deforestation and health problems linked to mining activity over the last four years. Unpublished documents obtained by Agência Pública, using the Access to Information Law (LAI), show that the government was aware of the serious situation in the Yanomami territory, which had been reported for months by Indigenous leaders, but did not act to tackle the problem. At a meeting of the National Council of the Legal Amazon held on August 30, 2022, its then leader — reserve general Hamilton Mourão, then also Brazil's vice president — admitted that illegal miners continued to “invade Yanomami lands,” and so there was the “need to start a large-scale operation” in the territory, something that did not happen during the whole period of Jair Bolsonaro's government. This is recorded in the minutes of the organization's meetings, which Agência Pública obtained using the LAI. Mourão was elected senator in 2022. Reinstated on February 11, 2020 by Bolsonaro's government and placed under the vice-presidency, the National Council of the Legal Amazon (CNAL) is the body responsible for “coordinating and integrating federal efforts for the conservation, protection, and development of the Brazilian Amazon and Amazonian cooperation.“
In practice, the council’s main action was the development of three law and order operations (known as GLOs) in the Amazon. These are operations where the presidency sends armed forces to reestablish order in a particular place, with the powers of the police. These have been criticized for militarizing the fight against environmental crimes and for their inability to stop the rise of deforestation, despite having spent BRL 550 million (about USD 108.4 million) of public funds. Across the council's ten ordinary meetings, from February 2020 to the end of Bolsonaro's government in December 2022, the invasion of illegal miners in Yanomami territory was mentioned only once more, and there were not even any measures proposed to deal with it. During its seventh meeting, on November 23, 2021, the Health Minister at the time, Marcelo Queiroga, criticized what he called the creation of “narratives” around the situation.