Threats, Then Guns: A Journalist and an Expert Vanish in the Amazon
Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian expert on Indigenous groups, have not been seen since Sunday. They faced threats before they disappeared.
Threats, Then Guns: A Journalist and an Expert Vanish in the Amazon
Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian expert on Indigenous groups, have not been seen since Sunday. They faced threats before they disappeared.The Javari Valley in the Amazon rainforest is one of the most isolated places on the planet. It is a densely forested Indigenous reserve the size of Maine where there are virtually no roads, trips can take a week by boat and at least 19 Indigenous groups are believed to still live without outside contact.
The reserve is also plagued by illegal fishing, hunting and mining, a problem exacerbated by government budget cuts under President Jair Bolsonaro. Now local Indigenous people have started formally patrolling the forest and rivers themselves, and the men who exploit the land for a living have responded with increasingly dire threats.
That tension was the kind of story that has long attracted Dom Phillips, a British journalist in Brazil for the past 15 years, most recently as a regular contributor to The Guardian. Last week, Mr. Phillips arrived in the Javari Valley to interview the Indigenous patrols for a book. He was accompanied by Bruno Araújo Pereira, an expert on Indigenous groups who had recently taken leave from the Brazilian government in order to aid the patrols.
About 6 a.m. Saturday, the two men were with a patrol, stopped along a snaking river, when another boat approached, according to officials at Univaja, a Javari Valley Indigenous association that helps organize the patrols. The approaching vessel carried three men known to be illegal fishermen, Univaja said, and as it passed, the men showed the patrol boat their guns. It was the kind of threat that Univaja had been recently reporting to authorities.
The following morning, Mr. Phillips, 57, and Mr. Pereira, 41, began their journey home, traveling on the Itaquí River in a new boat with a 40-horsepower engine and enough fuel for the trip. They were scheduled to arrive in Atalaia do Norte, a small city on the border with Peru, at about 8 a.m. Sunday.
The men and their boat have not been seen since.
Over the past three days, various search crews, from Indigenous groups to the Brazilian Navy, have scoured the area; Brazilian politicians and celebrities have called for more action to find the men; and their disappearance has led the morning newspapers and nightly news across the country.
On Wednesday, state police officials said they were questioning a suspect and had seized a boat and illegal ammunition from him. Officials said the suspect’s green speedboat with a visible Nike symbol was seen traveling behind Mr. Phillips and Mr. Pereira’s boat Sunday morning.
The suspect was one of the fishermen who showed the patrol their guns on Saturday, according to Soraya Zaiden, an activist who helps lead Univaja, and Elieseo Marubo, Univaja’s legal director. They said the man had shot at a Univaja patrol boat months earlier.
“We will continue the search,” Ms. Zaiden said. “But we also know that something serious, very serious, may have happened.”
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