A fisherman has confessed to killing the two men. His brother has also been arrested. Brazil mourns the latest victims of violence in the Amazon.
In the end, what everyone feared has come to pass. A fisherman has confessed to killing British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian advocate Bruno Pereira, who disappeared in Brazil on 5 June. The alleged killer showed the authorities where he had hidden their bodies. Police confirmed they had found human remains buried in the rainforest and had begun work on identification. Meanwhile, the self-confessed perpetrator and his brother have been arrested in connection with the men's disappearance. The two have not yet been formally charged.
The disappearances became a particularly dark chapter in the recent and bloody history of the Amazon. Now, the killing of Phillips and Pereira shows just how far people are willing to go to illegally exploit the rainforest.
Dom Phillips dedicated much of his career to telling the stories of the ongoing conflict in the rainforest. Bruno Pereira spent years trying to protect indigenous tribes and the environment amid that conflict. Phillips, a freelance journalist aged 57, was born in Merseyside, in the county of North West, in the United Kingdom. As the Guardian recounts, he had moved to Brazil in 2007 to find some peace and to finish writing a book about rave culture. But after submitting the manuscript of what would become a book titled "Superstar DJs Here We Go!", Dom never returned to the United Kingdom. He had fallen in love with Brazil and had quickly carved out a new career as a foreign correspondent.
Much of his work was published by the Guardian and the Washington Post, but in recent years he had focused on the Amazon and on writing a new book about the conflicts in the forest. His encounter with Pereira took place during an expedition in 2018, when the Brazilian advocate was working for Funai, the government organisation tasked with protecting Brazil's approximately 235 indigenous tribes, many of which have had little or no contact with the outside world.
For decades, Funai's task has been to ensure that those peoples remained isolated, shielded from the diseases, threats and burdens of outside society. But the land inhabited by indigenous peoples is a coveted resource for loggers, hunters, miners and fishermen, and it is valuable to drug and wildlife traffickers who find the remote waterways of the jungle an ideal setting for their operations.
Bruno Pereira was 41 years old and the father of two children aged two and three. As head of Funai's division for isolated indigenous peoples, he helped to transform such areas into protected reserves where residents could feel safer. But the work became much harder in 2019, when Jair Bolsonaro assumed the office of President of Brazil. The former army captain and hardline conservative never concealed his contempt for indigenous peoples: he once stated that it was a shame the Brazilian cavalry had not been as efficient as its North American counterpart, which had exterminated Native Americans.
Bolsonaro's support for miners and farmers in the region was the antithesis of everything Pereira stood for, and he was forced to leave Funai owing to internal pressure. But Pereira did not leave defeated, and found a new calling shortly afterwards, joining Univaja, an indigenous rights organisation in the area near Brazil's border with Peru.
It was in that very area that the advocate disappeared alongside the journalist the previous week. The two had travelled to the indigenous reserve of the Javari Valley — a territory the size of Austria — to interview indigenous patrol teams that had cracked down on illegal fishing and hunting. And it was there that they met their deaths.
In its account of the two men killed, the Guardian recalls that "in a series of trips over the past four years, they crouched together in canoes and hung their hammocks side by side among ancient trees. They shared meals from tins, nudged each other at the silent passing of a monkey or a crocodile, and when one of them fell face-first into the murky waters of a river or a swamp, the other was there to drag him out."
"He had a deep love, an enormous fascination and respect, but above all a need to understand the complexity of the Amazon," his wife, Alessandra Sampaio, said of Phillips. "This tragic outcome puts an end to the anguish of not knowing where Dom and Bruno are. Today we also begin our search for justice."
"The government is trying to criminalise Univaja: persecution and intimidation are not directed only at me — there are many of us — but all of this will end, I hope, it will end. These have been four very intense years," Bruno Pereira had recently told the NGO Survival. "We think about what we will be able to rebuild afterwards. In the meantime, I am here and I resist. They attack me but I will not give up." A battle that will need to be continued as a tribute to their memory.