Hyundai urged to stop illegal miners using its machines in Amazon

theguardian.com:

Hyundai is being urged to prevent its heavy machinery products from being used in illegal mining and environmental destruction in the Brazilian Amazon.

A report published by Greenpeace on Wednesday found the South Korean conglomerate’s excavators and other heavy machinery are precipitating the destruction of the rainforest and putting the survival of Indigenous populations at risk.

In flyovers carried out over the Yanomami, Munduruku and Kayapó protected Indigenous territories between 2021 and March 2023, Greenpeace recorded 176 diggers illegally carving up the forest. Of these, 75 were identified as Hyundai-branded.

The arrival in recent years of hydraulic excavators in the Brazilian Amazon has dramatically accelerated the expansion of illegal gold mining there. One of these machines can in 24 hours perform work that would take three men 40 days to complete, the report said.

This increased efficiency is pushing wildcat miners ever deeper into supposedly protected areas of the forest in search of new gold deposits, said Danicley de Aguiar, senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace Brazil.

The Guardian saw diggers wrecking Yanomami land last December. Excavators are believed to have only recently been moved into Brazil’s largest Indigenous reserve, where the large-scale invasion of illegal miners combined with the neglect of the previous Jair Bolsonaro government has produced a humanitarian catastrophe.

But diggers were first sighted in the Munduruku territory, located about 620 miles south in the state of Pará, in 2014, while the worst-affected Kayapó land has been affected by the use of heavy machinery since 2010.

“Illegal mining breaks up our villages, it destroys our culture and annihilates our Kayapó tradition,” said Doto