One year ago on a Friday afternoon, Bruno Pereira, an expert on Indigenous peoples, and Dom Phillips, a British journalist, motored along the Itaquai river in far western Brazil, to the settlement of Ladario. The line of wooden houses here marks a boundary — between the sprawling Javari Valley Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon and the non-Indigenous world.
They were greeted by the man everyone knows as Caboclo, Laurimar Lopes Alves. Pereira’s relationship with people like him in these river communities had often been tense. Pereira had been a lead official with the nation's Indigenous agency until recently, and these non-Indigenous communities were frequent trespassers onto Indigenous land to hunt and fish. He had fought those practices fiercely, confiscating and destroying fishing gear.
