Brazil, Amazon, World: Anything can happen

We’d planned for some time to write about the politics of Indigenous protection in Brazil. How dangerous this has become. Now, there are two more victims in the story, journalist Dom Phillips and his friend, defender of Indigenous rights, Bruno Pereira. Their deaths are tragic confirmation, if such a thing were needed, that President Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s response after they disappeared, “Anything can happen”, was a threat rather than a lament. The murderers of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira weren’t just some illegal fishermen in a remote part of the jungle. Responsibility also lies with an exceptionally criminal system called a “government”.

In a 2019 article, Dom Phillips quoted a Macuxi spokesman, Edinho de Souza, “We are not fighting the farmer, a little garimpeiro. We are fighting the government.” As Indigenous people and environmental defenders know, “The bullets that kill journalists, activists and Indigenous people in Amazonia are bought with money from land grabs, illegal mining and logging”, high priorities of the Bolsonaro government. Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips were murdered in the remote Amazon region of Vale do Javari, Brazil’s second largest Indigenous territory, near the borders with Peru and Colombia, home to more uncontacted tribes (who reject contact) than anywhere else in the world, and also an extremely violent place because of illegal mining, logging, drug, and poaching activities. However tragic these two murders are in themselves, they’re even worse because of what they represent: the danger to anyone who tries to protect the Amazon and its peoples.

In fact, Bolsonaro himself, delaying the search efforts and callously attempting to blame the two men for their fate, actually obeyed the compulsion to confess what Edinho de Souza and his people know all too well: “Really two people just on a boat, in a region like that, completely wild, is an adventure that is not recommended to do … Anything can happen.” If the region is “completely wild”, the Bolsonaro government has done everything possible to make it so. If defending Indigenous rights is an “adventure”, he’s proclaiming his contempt for Indigenous rights. If Phillips was “disliked” in the region, as Bolsonaro claims, the question is who disliked him (no prizes for guessing the answer: the government and its henchmen). Finally, the mainstream press, which prominently reported politicians like Boris Johnson and other eminences as expressing “deep concern” about the two men, mostly gave said concerned eminences more coverage than the valuable work Pereira and Phillips were doing. Their deaths were reported, arrests were reported, but there was little attempt to explain why they were killed and, going up the chain of responsibility, who wanted this. Bolsonaro can feel that his threat is successful.

Since the climate crisis and impending demise of the planet aren’t as sexy as the Amber and Johnny show, and since the media must always present new stories, what both men were passionately devoted to, the inseparable issues of the ravaged rainforest and Indigenous rights, will soon vanish under the weight of, say, reports on the soon-to-be G7 blatherskite fest in some Bavarian schlöss. Yet what they gave their lives to is the crucial issue embedded in all the grief over their brutal murders, not only for identifying who is really responsible for their deaths and why, but also because their work is an example to follow for anyone who’s concerned about human rights and the extremely grave matter of the fate of the Amazon and thus of the planet.

Unsurprisingly, the police claim the killers acted alone. A poacher called Amarildo da Costa Oliveira (or Pelado) has been arrested and, at the time of writing, the police say there are other suspects. The day before the murders, when patrolling for poachers, Pereira, Phillips, and a team from Univaja (Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley) had been threatened by Pelado and other men. A few days earlier, reports by Indigenous teams had led to confiscation of illegal catches, and Pereira had given the police and officials from the Ministry of Justice detailed information about an international criminal network involved in illegal fishing and poaching, a venture that is reportedly controlled at an even higher level by drug traffickers. Univaja emphasises that the authorities habitually ignored complaints about the activities of criminal gangs, that the crime was well planned, and that “a powerful criminal organisation (had) tried at all costs to cover its tracks during the investigation” of the double murder. It also states that it reported Pelado for illegal fishing last April and recalls that, in 2018 and 2019, he’d fired on a base of FUNAI National Indian Foundation—the government body that is responsible for policies relating to Indigenous peoples—which Pereira was working for at the time. The murders are understood in the Javari Valley as a symbolic attack on anyone who represents what (some employees of) FUNAI, Univaja, and other Indigenous organisations stand for, and of course on the Indigenous peoples themselves.

FUNAI is central to the story because it shows how responsibility for lawlessness in the Amazon lies more in the corridors of power in Brasília than in remote reaches of rainforest rivers. Bolsonaro has eviscerated FUNAI, turning it from an organisation that is legally responsible for protecting the rights of Indigenous peoples into something more like a Pogrom Department.

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