Four years after a first expedition, Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira returned together in early June to the heart of the Brazilian jungle. They were killed there while working to protect the Amazon from traffickers.
At the beginning of June, the British journalist and the Brazilian expert on indigenous peoples, each at a turning point in his professional life, had returned to the remote valley of Javari (north-west), one of the largest indigenous territories in Brazil, as big as Austria.
During their first trip there in 2018, Pereira, then director of the support program for isolated tribes of Funai, the Brazilian government agency for indigenous affairs, had invited Phillips, a reporter for the British daily The Guardianto cover the grueling 17-day expedition into the bowels of the rainforest.
It aimed to identify the lands occupied by an isolated tribe, and thus avoid conflicts with other populations.
Phillips will draw from it an article admiring Pereira, described among other things squatting in flip-flops in front of a campfire, eating monkey brain for breakfast while chatting about politics.
A strong friendship was born between the two men.
Four years later, Phillips, 57, had put his work as a journalist on hold to write a book on the Amazon, the largest rainforest in the world.
Pereira, 41, married with three children, had taken time off from Funai and set up a project to help indigenous people report invasions of their lands by timber traffickers, illegal miners and poachers.
He wanted to show it to his friend, and the two men had left Atalaia do Norte, a peaceful town at the junction of the Itaquai and Javari rivers, on Thursday, June 2.
The expedition was to last three days. But they never came back.
According to local police, they were returning by motorboat on Sunday when they were intercepted and killed by fishing poachers, who then buried them in the forest.
App for natives
Pereira, who was married with three children, had taken a leave of absence from Funai after a dispute with its management following the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in 2019.
And joins an association for the defense of indigenous peoples, the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (Univaja).
There he trained indigenous volunteers to patrol the valley and identify illegal incursions via an application specially created for this purpose.
Increasingly invaded by traffickers, the reserve is threatened. However, many studies have shown that land monitoring by local indigenous tribes is one of the key conditions for protecting the Amazon, a vital lung for the Earth in the face of the ravages of climate change.
A project that did not please everyone: Pereira received death threats.
“The application made it possible to show in full and in detail the crime scene” of the illegal exploitation of the forest, “and they were preparing a report to show it to the authorities”, explains to AFP Monica Yanakiew, a Brazilian journalist. from the Al Jazeera English channel, which had accompanied Pereira on a similar expedition in December.
This mix of organization and intimate knowledge of the terrain has made Pereira “one of the best experts on the natives”, points out one of his longtime friends, the Brazilian journalist Rubens Valente.
“His death is a huge loss. He was someone who we knew would do great things, become Minister of the Environment or something like that, ”he adds.
“How to save the Amazon”
Phillips, married to a Brazilian and one of the most respected foreign correspondents in the country, had put work aside last year after winning a prestigious scholarship to complete a book project.
A deep dive into the heart of the Amazon and its peoples, the book was meant to be a living account of how to protect it. Its working title: “How to save the Amazon”.
“He was enthusiastic” about this project, notes Jenny Barchfield, a journalist friend met in the 2010s in Rio.
She remembers a sympathetic, attentive man, with a devouring and “magnetic” curiosity, with his sky blue eyes and his mischievous smile.
“He was talking about how exciting it was to be able to think beyond an article, on this long-term project with very important implications,” she recalls. Because “there is no subject more important than this for all that exists on Earth”.
According to several of his friends, Phillips was already well advanced in writing his book. They are now looking to see how to complete and publish it.
“I’m sure Dom would want us to get something positive out of this tragedy,” said another journalist friend, Scotsman Andrew Downie. He sees at least one: with these murders, “today, people are looking towards the Amazon”.