Amazon search for pair boosted
Brazilian authorities are using helicopters to search a remote area of the Amazon rainforest for a British journalist and an Indigenous official who have been missing for more than three days.
Police have questioned six people since the investigation started, but no arrest related to the disappearances in Amazonas state has been made.
Journalist Dom Phillips, who has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, and Bruno Araujo Pereira, an employee of the Brazilian Indigenous affairs agency with extensive experience in the region, were last seen on Monday in the Sao Rafael community, in the Javari Valley Indigenous territory.
The two had been threatened the previous day when a small group of men travelled by river to the Indigenous territory’s boundary and brandished firearms at a patrol run by Univaja, a local association of Indigenous people.
Phillips and Pereira were returning by boat to the nearby city of Atalaia do Norte, but never arrived.
Indigenous leaders, family members and peers of Pereira and Phillips have expressed concern that authorities’ search efforts were slow to start and remain insufficient.
A Brazilian federal court issued an order yesterday telling authorities to provide helicopters and more boats. The judge noted that she had ordered the Indigenous affairs agency to maintain protections in the Amazonas region after a 2019 case filed by Univaja reported multiple attacks by criminals. Despite that order, the territory ‘‘has been maintained in a situation of low protection and supervision’’.
Meanwhile, an employee of the Indigenous affairs agency, Gustavo da Cruz, announced in Congress a 24-hour strike planned for June 13. ‘‘If public servant was a secure career, today it is a career of fear, death, violence and threats,’’ da Cruz told lawmakers.
There have been repeated shootouts between hunters, fishermen and official security agents in the Amazonas region, which has the world’s largest concentration of uncontacted Indigenous people. It is also a major route for cocaine produced on the
Peruvian side of the border, then smuggled into Brazil to supply local cities or to be shipped to Europe.
Phillips has reported from Brazil for more than a decade, and has been working on a book about preservation of the Amazon.
His wife, Alessandra Sampaio, recorded a video pleading with the Brazilian government and authorities to intensify the search efforts. Scientists, artists, journalists and football stars – including the legendary Pele – have joined her call.
Pereira has long operated in Javari Valley for the Brazilian Indigenous affairs agency. For years, he received threats from illegal fishermen and poachers.