Brazil police identify fish trader behind Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira killings
Brazil’s Federal Police say they have identified the mastermind behind the 2022 double homicide of The Guardian journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira. The police released their finding Nov. 1, following a two-year investigation.
Phillips and Pereira were shot to death June 5, 2022, in Javari Valley, a remote area of Brazil’s Amazonas state, where they were investigating environmental crimes for a book on Amazon conservation. Their bodies were found 10 days later.
The investigation concluded that Ruben Dario Villar, allegedly involved in illegal fishing and poaching in the region, funded and armed the criminal organization that carried out the killings. He is also accused of coordinating efforts to conceal the victim’s corpses.
Eight other people have been indicted since the start of the investigation for their roles in carrying out the assassinations and concealing the victims’ bodies.
Não podemos mais aceitar que defensores da natureza sejam assassinados no Brasil. Segundo a Global Witness, o aumento de ameaças e mortes tem sido documentado desde 2018. Somos o 4º país mais perigoso para indígenas e ambientalistas no mundo e devemos nos envergonhar do tamanho descaso da Justiça e do governo, fazendo pressão por ação concreta e mudança.
Bruno Pereira formava equipes de vigilância indígena contra criminosos na fronteira com o Peru. Nessa viagem, acompanhava o jornalista britânico Dom Philips durante apuração para um livro sobre as violações que ocorrem na Terra Indígena do Vale do Javari, território onde vivem povos de recente contato e isolados.
Nos solidarizamos com as famílias e amigos das vítimas que têm se arriscado para defender a Amazônia e a floresta em pé, por defenderem seus territórios, o direito à terra, seus meios de subsistência e o meio ambiente. Estamos em luto por Bruno Pereira, Dom Philips e por assassinatos de indígenas, ribeirinhos, quilombolas, extrativistas, lideranças de movimentos populares, defensores do meio ambiente e defensores dos direitos humanos que estão na floresta e correndo risco diariamente.
Que o governo brasileiro atue sem demora para responsabilizar os culpados e para impedir que esse clima de terror continue. Quem mandou matar? Por quê?
Illegal businesses form an interlocking web in the Brazilian remote region where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed, threatening Ind
The outpost is intermittently frequented by members of Univaja, the Indigenous rights collective for whom [Bruno] Pereira had worked. But it is currently manned by a lone resident: a 76-year-old Peruvian named Juan da Silva and his black labrador mutt. Equipped with a torch, a fishing rod, a few cans of food and occasionally a radio, he fears for his life every night.
"I want to get out of here,” says Da Silva. “I don’t want to die. I want to live.”
The outpost is where [Dom] Phillips and Pereira slept the night before they were killed. Da Silva points to the hooks that held their hammocks, bolted to wooden posts under a small porch.
Pereira had slept on the right side of the building, which overlooks a small estuary used by illegal fisherman to enter a lake with thousands of valuable pirarucu fish – and a pathway into Indigenous land that evades a government checkpoint a few miles upstream.
"The fishermen get very angry if we don’t let them through,” Da Silva says, pointing to the stream, where a shaggy crested Amazon kingfisher sits on a branch scouring the water. “Sometimes I can’t stop them, because if I did they would kill me.”
Such are the contrasts in this underreported part of the Amazon rainforest where magnificent natural beauty has become a backdrop to increasing violence and impunity. It is the setting for a battle over access to resources that has intensified following the election of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in 2018.
Law enforcement officials say the Javari Valley, an area the size of Portugal and home to the world’s largest concentration of uncontacted Indigenous tribes, is now Brazil’s second largest drug trafficking route, where the interwoven illicit industries of fishing, logging and mining have proliferated over the past decade.
Pereira had worked with villagers here, trying to steer them away from illegal fishing – many of the river’s species are subject to strict regulation to manage stocks, and it is prohibited to fish in Indigenous territory further upstream. But a single pirarucu, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish, which grows to over 100 kilograms, can be sold for $1,000 at market price, while a single Amazon river turtle can be sold for $200.
Locals say illegal activities have become commonplace in recent years. One villager recently spotted a boat with three men carrying shotguns, laden with illegally caught fish. Illegal fishermen use small boats, laden with ice, to navigate into Indigenous land under cover of darkness, according to a report by Univaja, and then return to deliver their catches to larger boats waiting on the main river.
MANAUS, Brazil (AP) — Brazilian police said Wednesday night a fisherman confessed to killing British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira in the remote Amazon, ending more than a week of searching as he led officers deep into the forest to where he buried their bodies.
Murdered journalist Dom Phillips’ unfinished book to be published in 2025
How to Save the Amazon: Ask the People Who Know will be completed by writers and environmentalists thanks to a grant from the Whiting foundation
A book begun by Dom Phillips, a foreign correspondent and Guardian contributor who was killed in the Amazon in June last year while researching the project, will be published in April 2025.
The book, titled How to Save the Amazon: Ask the People Who Know, is being completed by writers and environmentalists. On Wednesday, the authors were awarded a Whiting creative nonfiction grant, marking the first time the $40,000 (£32,000) award has been given to a collaborative project.
The judges of the Whiting foundation grant said that Phillips’ reporting on “ecological depredations in the Amazon, completed before his murder in the field, demonstrates impressive levels of access and a deep moral curiosity.
“It’s rare to encounter travel writing that truly shows the reader something they haven’t seen before; the sense of discovery – and, inevitably, peril – is palpable,” they added.
Brazil court drops a suspect in Amazon slayings of a British journalist and an Indigenous advocate
A federal court in Brazil dismissed charges Tuesday against one of three men arrested for the killings of Indigenous peoples expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in the Amazon, ruling there wasn’t enough evidence to try him.
Oseney da Costa de Oliveira, a poor fisherman who lived by the Itaquai River, was arrested on June 14, 2022, nine days after the slayings.
Also arrested were his brother, Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, and Jefferson da Silva Lima, who confessed to the killings but claimed self-defense. The Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region upheld a lower court decision that they will now face a jury trial.
With the ruling, Oseney Oliveira, a father of four, will be released following 27 months in prison, most in a federal penitentiary thousands of miles from Atalaia do Norte, his hometown in Brazil’s Amazon, where the killings occurred.
Brazil’s Javari valley is under threat. Lula’s government must protect it and its people
Among my people, the Marubo, knowledge is transmitted through oral history, passed down by elders throughout the centuries. For many generations these stories described the approach of people we call nawas – outsiders who always brought misfortune, usually in search of natural resources from the forests we inhabit.
My ancestors spoke of Catholic missionaries from Spain and Portugal, of Peruvian rubber barons and logging companies. The stories my generation tells are of fundamentalist evangelical missionaries, illegal miners and fishing gangs bankrolled by drug trafficking networks.
This situation has made the Javari valley Indigenous territory, where the Marubo and six other contacted Indigenous peoples live, as well as 16 isolated groups, a dangerous place for Indigenous leaders and journalists.
It was here, on 5 June 2022, that one of these invaders murdered the Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and the British journalist Dom Phillips, a longtime Guardian contributor. At the time of his death, Bruno was working with me at the Javari valley Indigenous association, Univaja.
Bruno and Dom two years later: Javari Valley awaits trial and praises their legacy
The trial of three men accused of the crime is due to take place in early 2025; monitoring team led by Bruno has doubled
On June 5, 2022, two defenders of the Amazon went missing in the vicinity of the Javari Valley Indigenous Land. They were Bruno Pereira, an Indigenous affairs expert with the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI, in Portuguese), who was then on leave, and Dom Phillips, a British journalist who was in the region to write a book.
Ten days later, the two men’s remains were found in the middle of the forest, with the crucial help of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (Univaja, in Portuguese), an organization for which Bruno worked.
Two years on, the Federal Police have indicted three people accused of the crimes, who are due to go before a jury. The trial is expected to take place in the semester of 2025, according to lawyer João Bechara Calmon, a partner at Dieter & Advogados Associados, who represents Beatriz Matos, Bruno's widow.
“No court decision is going to bring back a father back, husband and citizen, especially an extraordinary citizen like Bruno has always been,” the lawyer stressed. He is also an assistant prosecutor for the Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF, in Portuguese) in the case.
