Nearly two years after Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were murdered during a reporting trip in the Brazilian Amazon their families are still waiting for justice and activists fear their deaths will not be the last.
The British journalist and the Brazilian Indigenous expert were ambushed and killed on 5 June 2022 while travelling by boat to the river town of Atalaia do Norte. They had been investigating the criminal assault on Brazil’s second-largest Indigenous territories, the Javari valley, a vast expanse of rainforest that is home to the world’s largest concentration of uncontacted peoples.
Three men are behind bars awaiting trial for committing a crime that caused international outrage and cast a spotlight on the growing lawlessness of the backlands of the Amazon.
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They are the fishers Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, whose nickname is Pelado; Jefferson da Silva Lima, who is known as Pelado da Dinha; and Pelado’s brother, Oseney da Costa de Oliveira, who is known as Dos Santos.
In the days after the murders on the Itaquaí River, Pelado and Pelado da Dinha were arrested and confessed to killing the two men and burying their bodies in the jungle. They later alleged they had acted in self-defence after Pereira shot at them – a claim Pereira’s friends and relatives dismiss as a preposterous slur. Dos Santos has denied involvement, claiming he was only on the river at the time of the murders because he had gone out to fish.
Last October, a judge ruled that the three men would face trial by jury in Tabatinga, an edgy border town near the murder scene, on Brazil’s crime-ridden frontier with Colombia. However, no date has been set and lawyers for Phillips’s family believe any trial is unlikely to take place in 2024.
“I suspect it will be in the first half of next year,” says Rafael Fagundes, a Rio-based lawyer who represents the journalist’s family. “If it happened this year it would be a pleasant surprise.”
As well as the three men awaiting trial, police have charged two other men in connection to the murders.
One is the alleged mastermind, Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, who investigators describe as the leader of a transnational illegal fishing network that operates in the tri-border region between Brazil, Colombia and Peru.
The other is Jânio Freitas de Souza, a fisher who police have claimed was Silva Villar’s “right-hand man” in São Rafael, the riverside village where Phillips and Pereira stopped just minutes before being shot.
Silva Villar, whose nickname is “Colombia”, is being held in custody while the investigation continues. His group is also suspected of the 2019 assassination of Pereira’s former colleague Maxciel Pereira dos Santos, an official for Brazil’s Indigenous protection agency Funai.
Despite those arrests, Eliesio Marubo, an Indigenous lawyer and Javari valley activist, fears police have not sufficiently scrutinised powerful local politicians he suspects were also involved in the crime, and others who tried to cover up the murder.
“This goes way beyond [the people already in custody],” Marubo claimed this week on the eve of the second anniversary of the killings. “There needs to be more investigation.”
Marubo said Indigenous activists had hoped that with the change of government in Brazil in January 2023, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s new administration would do more to protect the estimated 6,000 Indigenous people who live there. That group includes the Kanamari, Kulina, Korubo, Marubo, Matis, Mayoruna and Tsohom-dyapa peoples.
Lula’s far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, had been accused of encouraging a historic assault on the Amazon – something Lula vowed to interrupt, creating a ministry for Indigenous peoples and vowing to eradicate illegal mining on Indigenous lands.
However, nearly two years after the crime, Marubo said there was little sign of government action. Illegal miners, poachers and fishers continued to invade the Javari valley Indigenous territory and organised crime groups still operated with impunity. A floating federal police base deployed to Atalaia do Norte last year called Nova Era (New Era) has been withdrawn.
In a sign of activists’ discontent, Lula was not invited to the Terra Livre camp, an annual gathering of Indigenous groups in Brasília in late April.
“It’s so frustrating – nothing has changed and it feels as if [Phillips and Pereira] died for nothing,” said Marubo. “Today, we’re in the same situation or worse … The government always … uses lots of gerunds: it’s doing, it’s thinking, it’s planning, it’s looking. But there’s nothing concrete.”
In the meantime, the death threats against Javari valley activists go on.
In late April, two helmet-wearing men on a motorbike approached a Kanamari activist as he travelled to Brasília for the Indigenous summit and ordered him to stop speaking out about illegal fishing. “Wise up or the same thing will happen to you [as happened to Phillips and Pereira],” the assailants warned, according to Marubo.
“He was terrified,” said Marubo, who claimed he had received more than a dozen other reports of threats to Indigenous activists in the region. “Everyone is afraid of dying.”
