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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Killing and outrage: little has changed in the Amazon after years of violence

The Guardian

(...) Before the world was outraged by the murders of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira, it was aghast at the killings of Chico Mendes and Dorothy Stang.

Mendes was a rubber tapper and unionist murdered by ranchers in 1988 in the southern Amazon; 73-year-old Stang was a US nun assassinated in 2005 for standing up to illegal loggers on the other side of the rainforest. (...)

But for those hoping the recent murder of Phillips and Pereira will mark a turning point for the Amazon – some combination, say, of greater environmental protections, more oversight or broader rights for Brazil’s Indigenous communities – the killings of Mendes and Stang do not offer very comforting lessons. (...)

“We don’t believe that anything changes because of these cases,” said [Ronilson Costa, national coordinator of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic church organisation that monitors land conflicts]. “There is not less violence or fewer deaths and the numbers prove that.”

“The level of impunity is very high,” he added. “Areas such as Amazonia are always in conflict, there is something every week, whether it is a threat, an attack, a prison, and murder as well. I think the expansion and invasion of capital has generated more violence.”

According to CPT statistics, Stang was one of 39 people killed over land disputes in 2005. In the years since, more than 600 people have perished, an average of 38 each year. (...)

Only around 10 % of the cases recorded by the CPT come to trial and even then it often takes years of delays, appeals and retrials. (...)

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Brazilian ecologist Chico Mendes and Dorothy Stang, a 73-year-old American nun, were both shot dead. Composite: AFP/Getty images/Reuters.

Tags: #brazil #brasil #brazilie #amazon #killings #dom_philips #bruno_pereira #chico_mendes #dorothy_stang #indigenous_people #mining #illegal_mining #logging #illegal_logging #cattle_farming #deforestation #rainforest #bolsonaro #jair_bolsonaro #marina_silva #impunity