Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has accused his predecessor of genocide against the country's indigenous people after declaring a medical emergency in the Yanomami territory, the country's largest indigenous reservation.
The emergency has been declared by health officials in the territory, which is on Brazil's border with Venezuela, following reports of children dying of malnutrition and other diseases caused by illegal gold mining.
The Indigenous Affairs Ministry, newly created by President da Silva and headed by Sonia Guajajara, the first indigenous woman to be a cabinet minister, found at least 570 children have died from poisoning and hunger in the region.
News service Sumauma reports the children died of curable diseases, mainly malnutrition but also malaria, diarrhea and malformations caused by mercury used by gold miners.
"We must hold the previous government accountable for allowing this situation to get worse to the point where we find adults weighing like children, and children reduced to skin and bones," said Ms Guajajara.
The illegal mining operations dumped mercury and other waste in the river system, wiping out many fish and contaminating the rest.
President da Silva said the aim of the emergency declaration was to restore health services to the Yanomami people that had been dismantled by former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro gave a green light to illegal gold mining and illegal deforestation in the Amazon, which surged to a 15-year high under his presidency, and also gutted key services for indigenous communities.
President da Silva visited a Yanomami health centre in Boa Vista in Roraima state on Saturday, Reuters reports, following the publication of photos showing children and elderly men and women in an emaciated state.
"More than a humanitarian crisis, what I saw in Roraima was genocide: a premeditated crime against the Yanomami, committed by a government insensitive to suffering," the President said.
The government announced food packages will be flown to the reservation where some 26,000 Yanomamis live in a region of rainforest and tropical savanna.
While illegal gold mining has plagued the region for decades to some extent, under Bolsonaro's corrupt and racist presidency the incursions surged.
It has been reported men on speed boats on the rivers have fired automatic weapons at indigenous villages whose communities oppose the entry of gold miners, with Brazilian law enforcement doing little to investigate the attacks while Bolsonaro was president.
With the election of President da Silva, some of the illegal or "wildcat" gold miners have begun to flee the territory and cross the border into neighbouring countries to escape justice, Estevao Senra, a researcher at Instituto Socioambiental, an NGO that defends indigenous rights, told Reuters.
Bolsonaro, now in hiding in Florida, praised the US calvary "who exterminated the Indians".
"It's a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn't been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians," he told Correio Braziliense newspaper in April, 1998.
In a separate statement made around the same time, Bolsonaro, while complaining about the amount of land reserved for Brazil's indigenous people, said: "The North American cavalry were the competent ones because they decimated their indigenous people in the past and today, they don't have this problem in their country."
In January 2020, while president, in one of his weekly Facebook broadcasts he declared: "Indians are undoubtedly changing … They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us."
