Amazon wild west: where drugs, fish and logging are big money but life is cheap

The Guardian

Illegal businesses form an interlocking web in the Brazilian remote region where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed, threatening Indigenous communities and local ecology. (...)

Such are the contrasts in this underreported part of the Amazon rainforest where magnificent natural beauty has become a backdrop to increasing violence and impunity. It is the setting for a battle over access to resources that has intensified following the election of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in 2018.

Law enforcement officials say the Javari Valley, an area the size of Portugal and home to the world’s largest concentration of uncontacted Indigenous tribes, is now Brazil’s second largest drug trafficking route, where the interwoven illicit industries of fishing, logging and mining have proliferated over the past decade. (...)

With sweeping government cuts in the region – there has been no federal environmental agency [Ibama] base here since 2018 and just three, poorly resourced Indigenous protection agency [Funai] outposts – seizures have plummeted under the Bolsonaro administration, according to a report by Publica, a Brazilian investigative newsroom. According to internal Funai documents seen by the Guardian, the Funai outpost closest to where Pereira and Phillips were killed has come under fire seven times in the past two years. (...)

“Dom Phillips was not on an ‘adventure’. He was a war correspondent documenting a war.”

Saraiva argued that the Brazilian government has more than enough resources to end the crime surge here, citing his own experience combating illegal gold mining in the Yanomami Indigenous territory by using the army to target illegal infrastructure such as boats and equipment.

“But they [the Bolsonaro administration] are not doing it for lack of political will.” (...)

Traffickers have also begun recruiting younger Indigenous men and boys into the drugs operations themselves, said Tamakuri. Drawn in by payments of a few hundred dollars for months of work, promises of clothing and mobile phones, the recruits then face execution if they try to escape. (...)

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