Investigate Bolsonaro for genocide, says Brazil’s Marina Silva

Exclusive: Environment minister calls for ex-president to be held to account as she prepares to tackle illegal gold miners

Former president Jair Bolsonaro should be investigated for genocide, Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has said, as she prepares an operation to drive illegal gold miners from the site of a humanitarian disaster on Indigenous land.

In the coming days, armed police and environmental protection agents will launch the first of a series of operations by plane and helicopter to expel thousands of miners, who proliferated in Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous territory during Bolsonaro’s administration, contaminating Amazonian rivers, wrecking the rainforest and spawning Brazil’s worst health crisis in living memory.