Miners' threat to Indians

Brasilia (AFP) - Some 500 gold miners have renewed their attempt to invade the Yanomami Indian reservation, on Brazil's northern border with Venezuela, an Amazon state Indian spokesman said yesterday.

Dinarte Nobre de Madeiro said the prospectors had rebuilt a number of clandestine landing strips in the reservation, whose borders President Fernando Collor de Mello delineated in May at the United Nations-sponsored Earth Summit.

The miners represent a threat to the 9,200 Indians on the 9.4 million hectare (23.2 million acre) reserve because they bring with them diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis that often prove fatal to the Indians, he said.