The brutal murders of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous rights activist Bruno Pereira this month mark a new escalation in the battle for the Amazon, its resources, and its Indigenous defenders
The brutal murders of a British journalist and an Indigenous rights activist this month in the Amazon hit especially close to home for me. I knew them both; I know the community and the stretch of river where the killings took place. Most uncannily of all, I know the confessed killer.
Going back into my notebooks from 20 years ago, I found traces of a darker side to Oliveira. The week before the start of the expedition, he told me around the campfire one night, he and two other fishermen had been assaulted by masked bandits as they made their way through a– one of the many shortcuts between bends in the region’s twisting rivers that open up during the high-water season. The assailants took their outboard motors, shotguns, and 200 kilos of fish.
Under Bolsonaro, the budgets for FUNAI and the environmental protection agency IBAMA have shriveled. Experienced field hands have been reassigned or dismissed, replaced with political loyalists. Shortly after taking charge in 2019, FUNAI’s Bolsonaro-appointed president, Marcelo Augusto Xavier da Silva, dismissedwithout warning. Perhaps most ominously, he removed Pereira from the helm of the Department of Isolated Indians, where he’d served for the previous 14 months.
“Sure, it’s dangerous. Our teams are out there, confronting the intruders,” said Paulo Marubo, general coordinator of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley, or UNIVAJA, when I reached him by phone last week at his office in Atalaia do Norte on the Javari River. “It’s a risk, but if we don’t do anything, if we don’t face this, who’s going to do it for us?”
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