“Unfortunately, with your passing, we have succeeded!” Beto Marubo wrote to his friend Bruno Pereira in a farewell letter a few weeks after Pereira’s murder. “We have managed to make everyone see our problems. We have exposed how forgotten we, the Indigenous people of the Javari Valley, have been …” British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were shot to death June 5, 2022, in a remote area of Brazil’s Amazonas state. Phillips, a longtime Guardian reporter, was in the Javari Valley researching a book about rainforest conservation with Pereira as his local host. Pereira was one of the most prestigious Brazilian Indigenous experts and was serving as a consultant for an Indigenous organization after working several years at Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai. They were ambushed by a group of illegal fishermen, possibly in response to Pereira’s investigation of environmental crimes in the region. The murders shocked the world, leading to an international outcry for justice. In his goodbye letter, Beto denounced the authorities’ neglect of the region, which has suffered for decades from violence caused by mining and illegal fishing associated with drug trafficking. A member of the Javari Valley Indigenous Peoples’ Union, UNIVAJA, he also expressed his hope that the state would begin to look at the region more carefully after the tragedy. Two years after the crime, however, little seems to have changed. “Some people have been arrested for the crime, but the motives that led to the murders are still there,” Beto told…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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