Brazil ministers to visit site of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira’s murder

Indigenous activists are planning to take some of Brazil’s top ministers to the spot where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were murdered in the Amazon rainforest amid reports security forces are poised to launch a major environmental clampdown in the remote border region.

Leaders of Univaja, the Indigenous association for which Pereira worked in Brazil’s Javari valley, said senior politicians, including justice minister Flávio Dino and the minister for Indigenous peoples Sônia Guajajara, would travel there on 27 February.

The visit is part of a high-profile push by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s new government to beat back the illegal miners, loggers and poachers who wrought environmental havoc during the four-year term of his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.

Last week special forces operatives from the environmental protection agency Ibama and federal police launched what is expected to be a months-long operation to drive tens of thousands of illegal miners from the Yanomami indigenous territory after claims its 28,000 inhabitants had faced “genocide” under Bolsonaro.

Beto Marubo, one of Univaja’s main leaders, said the government delegation would be taken to the decrepit riverside base which guards the entrance to the Javari Valley territory, the world’s largest refuge for Indigenous tribes living in isolation.

The ministers would also be taken to the spot where Phillips, a British journalist who reported for the Guardian, and Pereira, a Brazilian Indigenous expert, were shot dead on 5 June last year as they traveled by boat down the Itaquaí river.

“We will show them,” said Marubo. “This is going to be a historic moment.”

As the activists spoke, the Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported that the defense ministry planned to launch a “mega-operation” in the Javari valley on the same day as the ministerial visit. The springboard for that operation will reportedly be Atalaia do Norte, the isolated river town Phillips and Pereira were trying to reach when they were attacked by a trio of men apparently enraged by Pereira’s defense of the region’s Indigenous communities.

The Univaja activists welcomed the new government’s moves to protect Indigenous communities and the environment but voiced skepticism about the “mega-operation”. Rather than a cinematic, headline-grabbing crackdown, Beto Marubo said they wanted to see a forceful, long-term intervention that would protect Indigenous communities and activists from ongoing violence.

“The threats continued [after Phillips and Pereira were murdered]. The invasions continue. We are constantly being threatened … No one is safe in our region – be they Indigenous people or those we call ‘the whites’,” said Paulo Marubo, Univaja’s president.

Paulo Marubo said urgent government action was now needed in the Javari valley – which, as well as environmental crime, has become a major thoroughfare for cocaine produced over the border in Peru – “so that what happened to the Yanomami Indigenous territory doesn’t happen here”.

“We lost a great friend,” he said of Pereira. “And we do not feel safe on our own land … There is no security in our region … We are human beings too. We have lived on these lands for thousands of years … and we are the greatest protectors of the forest.”

The planned ministerial visit to the Javari is another highly symbolic gesture of how Brazil’s attitude towards the environment and environmental defenders has changed since power passed from Bolsonaro to Lula on 1 January.

After Phillips and Pereira went missing, Bolsonaro’s administration faced international condemnation for dragging its heels with the search effort. Bolsonaro claimed the men had embarked on an “ill-advised adventure”. No ministers visited the Javari region in the days or months after their murders.

Lula’s ministers, in contrast, have voiced solidarity with the families of the murdered men and the Indigenous communities whose plight they were chronicling when they died. After Lula’s election last year, his environment minister, Marina Silva, said the new government would battle to honour the memory of the rainforest martyrs killed trying to safeguard the Amazon.