“Amazônia, sua linda” (Amazonia, you beauty) said Dom Phillips in his last social-media post at the end of May 2022. He and a fellow activist Bruno Pereira, on their way to the Javari Valley in northwest Brazil, were murdered six days later.
Sean Sheehan
Dom Phillips was researching for the book he was writing about threats facing the Amazon and Bruno Pereira32was the co-founder of a group patrolling a protected Indigenous territory in the Javari Valley.
Some 6,000 people lived in the territory and shared it with groups of voluntarily isolated Indigenous people that formed a higher concentration of isolados than anywhere else in the world.
The immediate problem in the Valley was caused by riverine villagers, illegally entering the area to fish and poach, and the last photograph of Phillips shows him engaged in conversation with one of them.
A few bends of the river downstream, two other poachers were waiting in their speedboat to ambush and murder Phillips and Pereira. The larger problem was posed by a transnational fishing network and other criminals using the area for smuggling drugs and guns. The situation had been made worse by the election of Bolsonaro in 2018 who pledged to halt demarcations of Indigenous lands and promote the exploitation of natural resources in the Amazon.
Dom Phillips was no white saviour, arriving like the evangelical missionaries to pursue an invasive brand of cultural damage. Living in Brazil since 2007, his activism and journalism was on behalf of the Amazon.
His book’s introduction and its first three and a half chapters had been drafted and this material makes up the first half of “How to save the Amazon: A journalist’s deadly quest for answers”. Based on his extensive notes and transcripts, the book’s remaining six chapters have been written by contributors who followed his notes and plans. ‘No reader should be in any doubt these pages have been stained by blood’, write the editors, and ‘The killers blasted a gaping wound in this book that is far too great for any infusion of solidarity to heal’. But this is a work of solidarity, and this is no mistaking the validity of the cause that cost Phillips and Pereira their lives. The ‘Cattle Chaos’ chapter by Phillips is a devastating indictment of the deforestation of the Amazon and the burning of the land to create pastures for the profit-making business of serving carnivores.
“It’s difficult,” Phillips writes, “to think of anywhere else outside of a war zone where it’s so easy to find people blatantly breaking the law.”
It is depressing to know that the plight of the indigenous residents of Javari Valley remains a precarious one: hence – see here – the urgency of pressing calls for the authorities to act and do more to protect them and the Amazon against organized crime and environmental vandalism.
“How to save the Amazon: A journalist’s deadly quest for answers”, by Dom Phillips and Contributors, is published by Ithaka Press.
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