UK’s Channel 4 to expose mining on Yanomami land
10 April 2008
Yanomami mother and child
©Steve Cox/Survival
The acclaimed Channel 4 current affairs series, ‘Unreported World’, is to broadcast a
documentary tomorrow exposing the devastating effects of illegal goldmining on the land of the
Yanomami Indians in the Brazilian Amazon.
Survival campaigner Fiona Watson has just returned from Brazil, where she visited the
Yanomami and other tribes. She says, ‘Yanomami are dying because the Brazilian government is
failing to keep illegal goldminers off their land, and its Yanomami health programme is in chaos.
More than a fifth of the tribe died in the eighties and nineties from diseases brought by miners.
It’s heartbreaking to see it starting to happen again.’
The Channel 4 programme will also discuss the Brazilian government’s plan to open indigenous
land all over Brazil for large-scale mining projects – a plan vehemently opposed by the
Yanomami and other tribes.
Shaman and president of the Yanomami association Hutukara, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, told
Survival, ‘We the Yanomami people don’t think the government’s mining project will benefit
anyone. It’s not going to do anything good for the Indians. It will just destroy the streams and the
rivers, kill the fish and kill the environment. And kill us. We do not want to die again.’
The Yanomami are one of the largest tribes in Amazonia, and live in the rainforests of Brazil and
Venezuela.
The ‘Unreported World’ programme will be shown in the UK on Channel 4 at 7.35pm on Friday
11 April.
© 2008 Survival International