(News in development)
Military and state officials participate in an operation against illegal mining in the Yutzupino sector, in Napo, where environmental damage due to gold extraction in the area has been detected, according to the authorities.
Members of the Armed Forces and the National Police found machinery and people who were working in the illegal activity that affects the watersheds of the sector, the Armed Forces of Ecuador exposed on their social networks.
????Urgent#Napo
In support of state institutions, @FFAAECUADOR executes an operation against illegal mining in #Yutzupinowhere machinery and people immersed in this activity were located, which affect the water basins of the sector.✅ News in development. pic.twitter.com/0InwGxdfDY
— FFAAECUADOR (@FFAAECUADOR) February 13, 2022
The intervention would have begun in the early hours of this Sunday, February 13. All the elite units of the Armed Forces participated in this action. Some 900 soldiers entered the area, according to the Defense Ministry.
The Minister of Government, Alexandra Vela, also attended the site. “We will not allow the impact on the environment or the lives of Ecuadorians,” she recently published on her social networks.
Until 3:30 p.m., the operation continued in this area of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
In social networks, activists and residents who use the Yutzupino River report that there were clashes and that the evicted people damaged several military vehicles.
They also denounced an alleged leak of information, since some miners began to remove their machinery at night and at dawn, before the military entered the area. They ask that the Prosecutor’s Office act ex officio and immediately.
Ecologists, inhabitants and defenders of the rights of nature have denounced for some time the damage that mining would be causing to the rivers or water basins in the area. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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