The last time they were seen alive, Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips were driving a metal boat along the Itaki River, with a 40-horsepower Yamaha engine hanging from the stern, from a small riverside settlement near the Border between Brazil and Peru to the town of North Atalaya, two hours away.
Pereira, an expert on indigenous brazilian affairs who worked as an advocate and researcher at the Brazilian government's indigenous foundation FUNAI, was fired by FUNAI in 2019 after successfully destroying an illegal mine on indigenous land. Such achievements might have been commended if another government had been in office, but President Bolsonaro's approach to governing was to commercially develop the Amazon rainforest to drive economic development and to advocate for indigenous peoples to leave the rainforest and integrate into modern society. After leaving FUNAI, Pereira worked for an NGO, working with Indigenous groups and promoting the importance of protecting the land.
Sitting next to Pereira in a hat, Phillips is an independent journalist who came to Brazil from England fifteen years ago to cover stories about emerging nightclubs and avant-garde DJs, which later became his second home. He taught himself Portuguese but stopped reporting on electronic music, and the issue of ecological damage in Brazil became his focus. Phillips has written dozens of first-hand reports for international media such as The Washington Post, the Financial Times, and The Guardian about deforestation, illegal mining, overgrazing, and the destruction of "untouched" Indigenous territories.
The Last Images Of Pereira and Phillips / New York Times
Phillips is planning a book on Pereira's work and how indigenous communities scattered deep in the rainforest are joining forces to fend off the threats amazons face today – deforestation, drug trafficking, illegal fish hunting, illegal grazing, log smuggling, mineral exploration... The title of the book is How to Save Amazon.
Indigenous people and rainforests in perilous situations
The deforestation in the Amazon is severe enough to affect global climate change. It has lost 17 per cent of its forest cover and another 17 per cent is being degraded. Between 2018 and 2021, deforestation increased by 76 percent. Scientists warn that if both deforestation and forest degradation exceed the 20-25 percent tipping point, rainforest ecosystems will cross irreversible "red lines," leading to the demise of entire ecosystems.
Deforestation across Brazil threatens more than just the country. Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 10% due to frequent forest fires. According to the analysis of carbon brief, a climate watching agency, Brazil is the fifth largest emitter in the world, and the main source is land development and commercial exploitation of forest resources, including livestock and aquaculture. At the same time, forests are crucial in the fight against the climate crisis, and losing them means more carbon is being emitted into the atmosphere and fewer resources are available for forest carbon sequestration.
For decades, climate scientists have often traced the beginning of global climate change back to the Industrial Revolution, which has been linked to increased greenhouse gas emissions. But as scientists gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which land-use change, biodiversity loss and climate change are closely linked, including the latest IPCC climate report, a growing number of analyses point to colonialism as one of the drivers of climate change.
Aboriginal Andre Kalipner shows an ancient tree that has been illegally cut down within the territory. / Greenpeace
One of the phrases that the European colonists liked was that the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific were all unexplored natures, naturally open to them. But in fact, the nature of these areas has not been discovered by humans since the colonial era, and the world's forests, plains, deserts, swamps, shallow seas and oceans have long interacted with humans. Indigenous communities have successfully lived with their environment for tens of thousands of years – before the beginning of documented history. However, in just a few short years, indigenous peoples have been driven out of their lands, and the exploitation of land resources has subsequently left the planet in trouble.
This forced displacement and exploitation is not a history that has been sealed, nor has it only occurred during the European colonization process. Those crimes are still happening today. And indigenous peoples remain today the most active and effective protectors of land and sea.
According to the World Bank, although indigenous peoples today own, occupy or use only a quarter of the world's surface area, they protect 80% of the world's biodiversity. They have ancient wisdom and expertise on how to adapt, mitigate and reduce climate and disaster risks.
In the Amazon, indigenous peoples have created some miracles that protect the environment with practice. Once the territory of the indigenous Denis, the Xeruã River was depleted to the point of collapse after being taken over by the Brazilian central government, and a famous local species of fish, the Arapaima (Pirarucu), nearly extinct. However, the situation changed after the Indigenous peoples successfully pushed the Government to demarcate the territory that belonged to them. Under the management of the Denis, the population of arapaima has increased by 425% in 11 years and is fished by a production chain managed by communities through social organization, territorial control, selective fishing, rational use of natural resources and income generation.
Arapaima / Wikipedia
Such miracles do not only happen in the Amazon. Papua is currently the most plant-rich island in the world, largely due to the management of the Papua Indigenous People, who are made up of 250 ethnic groups that own the western half of the island.
However, most of the land occupied by indigenous peoples comes from customary ownership, and without going through the formalities of land ownership in modern society, many governments recognize only a small part of it. Unstable ownership poses a persistent risk to indigenous peoples, while also putting the environment and biodiversity at risk.
For decades, researchers on environmental issues – often from developed countries – have assumed that environmental issues and human rights are separate. This approach can lead to "fortress protection", where local communities are forcibly separated from their land and, in some cases, may even be done at the expense of human life.
Only recently has the environmental community begun to recognize that external groups are clearly ineffective in protecting land compared to "indigenous and local communities". "Indigenous peoples" was a formal term in the negotiations at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and indigenous rights have become a central topic of debate between governments, indigenous groups and environmental groups. Researchers are beginning to demonstrate that a "rights-based approach" – where conservation efforts focus on ensuring indigenous peoples' rights to their land – is the most effective way to protect forests and biodiversity.
Battle of the Amazon
In the Amazon region, indigenous peoples face serious threats. Under brazilian president Bolsonaro, who has called his resource policy a "war on Amazonas," a "fertile land" for "poor Indians," the Brazilian government has attacked organizations that protect local communities and forests, opening up space for legal and illegal logging, fishing and poaching, and drug cartels. Brazil's environmental policy, which attracted worldwide attention during the tenure of former President Lula and his environment minister Marina Silva from 2003 to 2008, has now been reversed by Bolsonaro. Under Bolsonaro's national economic development agenda, hopes for environmental protection and indigenous rights in the Amazon are fading. Officials' tolerance for illegal trafficking, fishing and mining has led to the Amazon rainforest being degraded at an unprecedented rate.
Since Bolsonaro took office in 2019, the rate of deforestation in the Amazon has repeatedly set new records. Between January and June 2022 alone, 3,988 square kilometres of forest were deforested in the Amazon, a new historical record.
Greenpeace Brazil's office documents the deforested Amazon rainforest/Greenpeace by drone
In 2020 alone, the Bolsonaro government made 593 environmental-related regulatory changes, including opening up indigenous lands to loggers and miners, increasing the amount of pesticides authorized for use in Brazil, and making it easier for illegal settlers to legalize seized land. In July 2021, the Brazilian government passed legislation to legalize ownership of land that had been illegally seized and cleared before 2014.
In its three years in office, the Bolsonaro government systematically undermined Brazil's Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs (FUNAI), IBAMA, the ministry's branch dedicated to conservation and sustainable development, INPE, an agency that monitors deforestation, and the Chico-Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, which itself was named after a rubber craftsman murdered in 1988, a tragedy that kicked off Brazil's modern environmental movement. Staffing changes, diminished roles and reduced budgets also plague the remaining sectors. According to the international environmental group Greenpeace Brazil's office, from 2019 to 2020, the budgets of some of the core agencies responsible for environmental policy were slashed, with 10 percent fewer environment-related jobs.
At the same time, Bolsonaro's government has been weakening government agencies responsible for monitoring the environment and enforcing laws to protect forests.
In 2019, at a media event shortly after Bolsonaro's election as president, Phillips asked him: "The new numbers on deforestation show an alarming increase. Mr. President, how do you intend to show the world the government's serious concerns about the protection of the Amazon? Bolsonaro's expression was very displeased: "You need to understand that the Amazon belongs to Brazil, not to you." ”
But the indigenous people of the Amazon are equally intolerable to Bolsonaro. In 1998, Bolsonaro, who was still an ordinary mp at the time, told a Brazilian media outlet that brazilian cavalry had failed to eliminate The indigenous people of Brazil in the same way that the United States eliminated Indians, "which is a shame."
After two decades, he once again said that he would remain vigilant about even "one square centimeter more land" allocated to indigenous people.
On April 25, Bolsonaro announced that even if ordered by Brazil's Supreme Court, he would not designate any new protected areas for indigenous communities.
After the government took a stand, illegal developers in amazons began to expand their business rapidly, and clashes with them were often fatal. Hostility is spreading, and the probability of death threats against Indigenous peoples, as well as indigenous rights supporters like Pereira and Filippo, is increasing.
Pereira and Phillips knew the dangers involved, and they still took the risk of heading to the Indigenous territories of the Chavalli Valley to tell the story of the Native Americans whom the Amazon and Pereira called "heroes."
Aerial view of the Chavalli Valley / Wikipedia
Located in the State of Amazonas, the Chavalli Valley, which is almost the size of the entire portuguese state, is a high-risk area of conflict between indigenous and settled residents, and in 2001, the Brazilian federal government established the Chavalli Indigenous Territory to protect the area. It is one of the furthest places on Earth from modern society, with an estimated 6,300 Indigenous people living here, including at least 19 isolated Indigenous tribes. Recently, it was also considered the most dangerous area in Brazil. In addition to logging and poaching, the indigenous people here also have to deal with drug traffickers: the Chavalli Valley, bordering Colombia and Peru, is the first and second largest exporter of cocaine in Latin America, respectively. From 2019 to 2020, UN figures show an increase of nearly 20 percent in coca cultivation in Peru. As government oversight weakened and indigenous communities are attacked, the Chavalli Valley and the Amazon region have become major conduits for cocaine trafficking to Brazil.
In 2019, Maxciel Pereira dos Santos, head of funai, anti-logging and anti-poaching in the Chavalli Valley, was shot dead in front of his family in the city of Tabatinga. The case remains unsolved.
Pereira himself has received death threats for working here, but no one thought he would be next.
On 6 June, Pereira and Phillips were declared missing. On 15 June, search and rescue teams found their bodies in the forest, the cause of death being shot. Although the Chavalli Valley is not an area of conflict and belligerence, it is, in a sense, a different front. Brazilian police later released the findings saying the killers were illegal fishermen and that three of them had been arrested.
Data released by international rights groups say more than 300 people have been killed in Brazil as a result of land and resource conflicts in the decade between 2009 and 2019.
In non-war zones, defend the front lines
Vast rainforests in the Amazon, Congo Basin, Yunnan and Papua are increasingly being described as frontlines in the fight against biodiversity and climate change. Around the world, locals who stand up against fossil fuels, agriculture and logging are increasingly called "land defenders." Many of them are indigenous.
Less than a month after the killings of Pereira and Phillips, an indigenous leader defending the Amazon in southern Venezuela was shot dead in broad daylight. His name is Virgilio Trujillo Arana, who leads the Indigenous Territorial Guard in his Uwottuja community in Autuna, the Amazon region of southern Venezuela.
Arana's death received less international attention than Pereira and Phillips, perhaps because Phillips, a journalist who died deep in the Amazon, was a British citizen in the legal sense.
In 2021, drones recorded footage of illegal mining in the indigenous territory of the Brazilian state of Pará. / Greenpeace
In fact, indigenous peoples are often murdered for their work in protecting territorial rights. Since the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, four land defenders have died every week, a large proportion of them indigenous peoples. In 2020, 227 people were killed while trying to protect the forests, rivers and other ecosystems on which they depend. Indigenous peoples make up a third of these victims, even though they make up only 5% of the world's population. Chris Madden, author of the Global Witness report, said databases around the world showed that attacks were on the rise.
Indigenous people have been murdered for being forced to leave their land, the Amazon destroyed, the global biodiversity lost, and the climate crisis... This is part of a massive crisis that is interlocking.
If there's anything useful about these crimes, it's what Phillips' wife, Alexandra Sampaio, told us: "We will redouble our efforts so that the families of other journalists and environmentalists don't have to face the pain we and Bruno-Pereira's family have experienced." "In this sense, the upcoming Un Convention on Biological Diversity Summit (CBD15) in December could be decisive for the fight to end natural destruction and violence. (Editor-in-Charge / Zhang Xibei)