Pereira helped lead the government’s efforts to identify and protect such groups. Pereira “cracks open the boiled skull of a monkey with a spoon and eats its brains for breakfast as he discusses policy.”Īt the time, Mr. “Wearing just shorts and flip-flop as he squats in the mud by a fire,” Mr. Pereira deep into the Javari Valley - 590 miles by boat and 45 miles on foot - for a story about the Brazilian government’s search for signs of isolated Indigenous groups. Phillips joined a 17-day journey led by Mr. The Ministry of Defense said that the armed forces started assisting the search “as soon as the first information about the disappearance was released.” On Wednesday, a Brazilian judge ruled that the government had failed to protect the reserve and must use aircraft and boats to search for the missing men. On Tuesday, the navy and army said they had deployed aircraft, as well as additional boats in the search. “Even if we don’t find the love of my life alive, they have to be found, please. Phillips’s wife, pleaded with authorities to intensify the search in a video posted online Tuesday morning. In 2019, a Brazilian government worker was shot and killed in apparent retaliation for his work combating illegal activity in the Javari Valley.īy Monday evening, the army said it was still awaiting authorization from the “upper echelons” of the Brazilian government to join the search, before eventually saying it was sending a team.Īlessandra Sampaio, Mr. But hardly any of those attacks were against Brazilian government officials or journalists who were outsiders in the region. From 2009 through 2020, there were 139 killings of environmental activists and defenders in the Amazon, according to data compiled by a journalism project called Tierra de Resistentes. Violence has long been common in the Amazon, but it has largely been between locals. Pereira had faced threats in the region for years. Pereira “has profound knowledge of the region,” and local officials said that if the men had gotten lost or faced mechanical issues, they likely would have already been found by search crews. Now fears are growing that their latest journey deep into the rainforest could end up as one of the grimmest illustrations of that conflict. Pereira has spent years defending Indigenous groups under the resulting threat. Phillips, who also wrote regularly for The New York Times in 2017, has dedicated much of his career to documenting the struggle between the people who want to protect the Amazon and those who want to exploit it. It was the kind of threat that Univaja had been recently reporting to authorities. 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. 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. 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.Ībout 6 a.m. Phillips arrived in the Javari Valley to interview the Indigenous patrols for a book. 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. 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. The reserve is also plagued by illegal fishing, hunting and mining, a problem exacerbated by government budget cuts under President Jair Bolsonaro. 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. RIO DE JANEIRO - The Javari Valley in the Amazon rainforest is one of the most isolated places on the planet.
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