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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Was arrested in June 2022 on illegal weapons charges. An arrest affidavit reported by O Globo alleges that the 55-year-old woman used properties in Alto Alegre, a municipality in northeastern Roraima, to shuttle supplies and people to illegal mining sites, where she employed an armed escort. According to the report by Hutukara Yanomami Association and the ISA, Dona Iris ordered attacks on riverside Yanomami villages in retaliation for blocking mining operations.Mine owners charge fees for access to makeshift ports. They extort miners and tax the sale of alcohol and other products. Prostitution and drug sales are also under their control. Venezuelan women traveling across the border have been lured to mining sites and sexually exploited. One woman who spoke with Brazil news outlet Folha de S. Paulo said she was trafficked by a madame who convinced her to go to a mining site, where she was raped.Booming illegal commerce has drawn more dangerous criminal actors to the region and opened a path for them to enter the illicit gold trade. A video recorded in 2021 showed an armed gang on an aluminum motorboat speeding along the Uraricoera River. In this video, the men, some of them hooded, brandish pistols and shotguns. The camera then turns to a man in a red T-shirt and baseball cap, with a thick gold chain hanging from his neck that ends in a crown pendant.“Look at us, look at us, look at us. These damn Indians think they are in charge. We are in charge. We’re the fucking boss. Today we are going to see how this shit works. Look. Look. Look. We are the war.”One of the men in the boat later arrested was found to be a fugitive linked to the PCC gang. Charged with drug trafficking in 2013, Janderson Edmilson Cavalcante Alves had escaped from a Roraima prison and fled to Venezuela, where he was later linked to a 2019 robbery of 100 rifles at an army barracks.To escape authorities in Venezuela, the 30-year-old holed up in the Brazil border region, where he trafficked drugs and served as a hired gun for mining operations. The arrest of Cavalcante Alves, who told authorities he was an associate of the PCC, provides a glimpse of the criminal gang’s presence in illegal mining on Yanomami territory.Roney Cruz, head of an intelligence division of Roraima’s prison system (Divisão de Inteligência e Captura do Sistema Prisional de
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