Dom Phillips And Bruno Pereira’s Deaths Were An Inevitable Tragedy In Bolsonaro’s Brazil

SÃO PAULO ― Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, has waged a furious campaign against the country’s Indigenous population since he was elected in 2018, targeting tribal people and lands with a relentless array of verbal assaults, legislative proposals, efforts to gut environmental agencies and the outright elimination of laws and regulations to protect them.

In August 2021, a coalition of Brazilian Indigenous groups produced a dossier of the attacks that had occurred during the first two years of Bolsonaro’s presidency in order to detail the “broad and comprehensive anti-Indigenous project” he and his right-wing allies had implemented.

The problem went beyond Bolsonaro’s legal attacks on Indigenous rights. The “hate speech” Bolsonaro directed toward them and his characterization of the Indigenous as “enemies” of Brazil, the authors wrote in the report’s introduction, had also inspired others to attack and even kill Indigenous Brazilians, especially in conflicts over territory in the Amazon rainforest and other environmentally sensitive regions.

“When the example of the country’s highest authority is one of contempt for laws and hatred of humanity,” they asked, “what can be expected from those who are inspired by such an abominable figure?”

The world found out this month, when Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Araujo Pereira, a Brazilian Indigenous affairs expert, disappeared during a trip to the Vale do Javari, a remote region of the Amazon rainforest in far western Brazil. On Wednesday, Brazilian police found human remains near the site where they had gone missing on June 5 and confirmed that a suspect had confessed to participating in their murder.

Phillips and Pereira were, individually and especially as partners, the antithesis of Bolsonaro’s anti-Indigenous project. Phillips was a veteran reporter who had written about the environment and Brazil’s Indigenous tribes for years. He was in the Vale do Javari to complete his reporting for a book about sustainable development of the Amazon, an idea that runs against Bolsonaro’s belief that the forest must be bulldozed to promote economic development.

Pereira, a career employee of Brazil’s top Indigenous affairs agency who had helped tribes within the Javari Valley utilize technology to monitor and protect their lands, was “a dedicated defender” of the forest and the Indigenous people Bolsonaro and the Brazilian government now target for…