The Yanomami are the largest relatively isolated tribe in South America. They live in the rainforest and mountains of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela.

During the 1970s and the 1980s, the Yanomami suffered immensely when Brazilian gold-miners invaded their land after the discovery of important mineral deposits in the territory. A highway was built and, suddenly, miners, woodcutters, workers, corporations and military arrived. They destroyed many villages, and exposed them to diseases to which they had no immunity. Twenty percent of the Yanomami died in just seven years and anthropologists predicted their extinction by the year 2000.

After a long international campaign led by Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Survival and the CCPY (Pro Yanomami Commission), of which Andujar is a founding member, Yanomami land in Brazil was finally demarcated and officially recognized in 1991 as the ‘Yanomami Park’. Since then, many Yanomami communities have begun to live and prosper, and today they are one of the largest tribes in South America still living self-sufficiently and in relative isolation. However, the invasion of Yanomami land continues. Indians in Brazil still do not have proper ownership rights over their land – the government refuses to recognise tribal land ownership, despite having signed an international agreement that guarantees it. The Congress proposed a constitutional amendment, known as ‘PEC215’, which would cause further delays and obstacles to the recognition and protection of the tribes’ ancestral land.

Claudia Andujar has documented the daily lives of Yanomani people and their fight for survival since 1958. She shares the same goal with Survival International: help the Yanomami people defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own futures. The success of the campaign proves that if tribal peoples are allowed to live on their own land they will be invariably healthier, with a far better quality of life than the millions of impoverished citizens marginalized by growing inequality. Also, evidence proves that tribal peoples are better at looking after their environment than any one else and that the lands they inhabit are the richest in biodiversity. They are the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world and the Yanomami Park, the largest area of protected rainforest in the world, it is a clear and captivating example.

Text by Survival International Italia