A Murder in the Forest

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1:27This week on Explain It To Me, we help with the turkey so you can worry about everything else. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. It was intended to be a short trip, three days on the river. And they would go down, they're going to spend two nights at the end of the river and come home. And that was going to be it. This was in a part of northwestern Brazil called the Javari Valley. It's near the borders of Peru and Colombia. There were two men on the trip. One of them was Brazilian Bruno Pereira, an expert on indigenous issues who lived and worked in the region. The other man was a British journalist named Dom Phillips.

2:11He had lived in Brazil for over 15 years, but was visiting the Javari Valley to write about Bruno's work. They'd planned to set up from a small town and sail down the Itaquai River, which cuts through the rainforest. The night before they left, Dom Phillip stayed in one of the only hotels in town. The morning he left, he was talking to the manager. And he told the manager, we're heading east down the river. But actually, they were heading south. Terry McCoy is the Washington Post's Rio de Janeiro bureau chief. And so he obviously was trying to confuse people on where he was going. and then they headed down the river to do their work, going the opposite direction of what he told the hotel manager.

3:02They'd made a plan to go and visit one of Bruno Pereira's friends and collaborators when they got back, an indigenous lawyer named Ileazio Murubo. They'd worked together protecting indigenous territory in the rainforest. Bruno had called Ileazio to let him know they would be coming.

3:25He said, I'll arrive on Sunday and we'll stop by your house. But then, on Sunday morning, Ileazio received a phone call.

3:38Saying, look, Bruno didn't get here. He should have arrived at 8 a.m. So I said, stay on the watch. He said, no, I'm going to take the other boat and I'm going to try to find him because his boat might have broken down. So he set out to do that. They talked again later. And he got back and said, Eliesio, I didn't find Bruno. I didn't find any sign of Bruno. Eliesio Marubo is speaking to us in Portuguese. Reporter Julia Carnero translates. I called the authorities, I set up a team, and I went up the river again. But we didn't find him. Ileazio organized a search team. And we carried out a very thorough search.

4:28When I saw that Dom had gone missing, I didn't know where he was, what was happening. I did know that region, though. I had reported before in the Javari Valley, and I knew how remote it was, I knew how distant it was. and I know that hours, if not days, can go by without having cell service. And so I thought, you know, I think this could still turn out okay. I called a police source and I asked him what he thought had happened. And he was like, I think they'll show up in a day or two. You know, this happens. People go, you know, they got maybe a boat thing, boat malfunction. So I was feeling, okay, I think this could still turn out okay.

5:16Then Terry McCoy talked with Ileasio Morubo. I remember he told me, I don't have any hope anymore. They suffered an attack for sure. He knew it.

5:31We always thought he had been murdered. We didn't share this with anyone, with other people outside of our group, but we already imagined what had happened. Ileasio started worrying that other people might be attacked too, Things felt so unsafe to him that he left his home.

5:53I packed a few clothes, a toothbrush, and left for an unknown destination. I went to a different city to live in a different city. I completely changed my life. I had to break up personal relationships. I had to live alone. I had to reinvent myself.

6:11I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

6:25I was born in a Marubu community at the head of the Curaçao River. Ilesio Marubo is part of the Marubo Indigenous Tribe.

6:37Ilesio is my first name, and my last name comes from our people, the Marubo people. Ilesio grew up in the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory. one of the most remote areas in the world. It's about the size of Portugal. The territory is home to 26 indigenous tribes. 19 tribes are what's called uncontacted and basically have no communications with the outside world. The Javari Valley is home to the largest known number of uncontacted people. There are no roads in the territory. People use the rivers for transportation. Ilesio says his community largely lives off the forest, hunting and fishing, and keeping small plantations.

7:23We cut down very few trees. The areas designated for plantations are not permanent ones. We choose a place near the community, but not too close to it. We plant, and after we harvest, we plant somewhere else, so that the forest can grow back again. So there's generally a lot of fruit, whether wild or cultivated fruits. There's a specific area in the community where we only have medicinal plants, which are more difficult to find inside the forest. The logic is as follows. You guys buy things and store them and put them in the fridge. We don't need this because everything is at hand. If we want fish, we go to the lake and catch fish.

8:04The same thing with meat. The basis of marubo food is red meat. And we really enjoy taper meat. So we hunt tapers, because taper meat is the best, the most nutritious.

8:19A taper sort of looks like a pig crossed with an anteater. They're sometimes called a living fossil, because they've been around for 55 million years. People illegally hunt the taper, along with yellow-spotted river turtles and a prehistoric fish that looks like a giant snake. It's known as the Amazon giant and can grow up to 10 feet long. There's also illegal logging. People cut down the forest to sell the wood and to make space for gold mining and large cattle farms.

8:56Then we start talking about how people are starting to go hungry because many animals that were the basis of our diet no longer exist. So we no longer have that food safety. We have to readapt our food needs. There are regions where indigenous people lost 100 % of their territory.

9:18A few years ago, a government agency captured a video of a member of an uncontacted tribe. The man was the last survivor of his community. The government agency believes everyone else was likely killed by ranchers or illegal miners. The man lived alone in the forest for over two decades, avoiding contact with other people. His body was found in 2022. Ilesio Morubo works as a lawyer for a small organization called Univaja, or Union of Indigenous People of the Javari Valley. In 2020, Ilesio Marubo filed a lawsuit against American evangelists trying to approach uncontacted tribes in the forest to convert them.

10:08Bruno Pereira was also working with Unavasha when he disappeared on the river. Ilesio and Bruno had known each other for years and had first met through Ilesio's brother. The three of them all had daughters who were close in age.

10:27They're just a year apart, so our daughters became friends. So we ended up doing things together because they wanted to be together. We started to do things like friends. Bruno Pereira was born far away from the Javari Valley, in a city in the northeast of Brazil. He often went on expeditions into the forest that lasted for weeks, and he learned to speak at least four indigenous languages.

10:57We'd always say he was very similar to us. We'd say, boy, how can it be that you're so similar? His thinking was very similar to ours. So we got along very well because of that. There's something in Brazil called an indigenista. An indigenista is somebody who dedicates their lives to the indigenous cause. In Brazil, like so much of the Americas, there's a story ultimately of colonization and indigenous people losing out on their territories and rights. And Brazil, this is a very animating political issue. And Bruno, he decided to dedicate his life to this cause. At Univasha, they felt that the authorities weren't doing enough to protect indigenous populations from poachers or people encroaching on their territory.

11:51They decided that if the government, wouldn't investigate criminal activity in the forest, they would do it themselves. They formed groups of people who would work as scouts. They would travel the forest and the rivers to find out about people who were poaching, fishing, or logging illegally. These indigenous scout teams would go out for a week or two and take photographs, get geographical positions, video record, find out who's ravaging the territory, make a dossier, and give it back to Bruno. So Bruno would go out on the water with the scouts, and then he and his colleagues would share what they found with the police, hoping that they would arrest the poachers.

12:35British journalist Dom Phillips wanted to write about Bruno's work with the scouts. So we got in touch with Bruno, and Bruno brought him out to say, like, come on, I'll show you the work that we're doing. They decided to spend a few days on the river. During his 15 years in Brazil, Dom Phillips had written about the impact of agriculture on the rainforest, especially big cattle farms. He'd written about JBS, which is the world's biggest meat processor. They sell meat under more than 100 brands. The U.S. is the second biggest importer of Brazilian beef. Dom Phillips reported that some JBS beef comes from cows raised on land that's been illegally cleared.

13:18Dom was an idealist, and he threw himself into that research and into that work in the hope that by educating people of what this region was, it could help to preserve it. He was inspired by what he saw on his reporting trips, how indigenous communities hunt and grow things with no fertilizers. And he was going to write a book. He got a grant to go on reporting trips and interview indigenous people, including the scouting teams fighting illegal poaching and logging that Bruno was leading. So he spent months researching different solutions in different areas of the Amazon that he could go visit, understand why the solution is working, what can we learn from it, how can we apply this to other places, and then he was going to come back and write a book about it.

14:09His river trip in the Javari Valley with Bruno was one of the last reporting trips he'd planned. And then they disappeared. Ten days later, their bodies were found deep in the forest.

14:26We'll be right back.

14:38Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

15:19Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So, I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with, hey, where are you going?

15:54To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us, no trade-in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just$25 a line. With 24-month legal credits and four eligible portings on essentials for well-qualified customers, auto pay plus taxes, fees and$35 device connection chart credits. Ended balance, do if you pay off earlier. Cancel. Contact us. Finance agreement. 256 gigabytes,$830 required. Visit T-Mobile.com. Growing up in the Javari Valley in the 1980s, Ilesio Morubo said he felt very safe. I always liked this place. It's a very special place for me.

16:32I really liked playing in the river. I'd go to the river and spend hours on end. I also went out with the elderly women, who generally don't like to take boys or men with them when they go do their activities. But they made an exception with me and said, let's go, I'll take you or your brother. Ilesio says they would sometimes meet people from a state agency who gave them toys.

16:59And we tried to play ball. My dad hated it. He said it was a white man's thing, a white thing. But we played there on this little field.

17:11So I learned to shoot a bow and arrow to imitate things from the adult world. And at night, everyone, a bunch of naked boys, we'd run to the river and jump from the riverbank into the water and bathe until about six o 'clock when our mothers would come and say, come on out, threatening to punish us. and we'd run into the big hut because we knew that the elders there would protect us. When we got there, there was food, so we had dinner, ate and played and got dirty again until our mothers took us to the river again for a last bath. I really liked it when there was a full moon. We lay down on the hammocks, one next to each other, me, my brothers and sisters, and we'd talk about things and make fun of each other or laugh at something silly someone did during the day.

18:00We would talk and talk until we got sleepy. And the next day started very early. We woke up around 3 a.m., already playing, doing mischief, doing loads of things. Life was very good. When he was a teenager, Ilesio says things changed.

18:21When the child is born, the father or the man say, this one is going to be such and such. So I was born with this purpose, to do politics and to defend the territory. So when I was 16 years old, one day they called me to go to the main hut for a conversation. I got there, my grandfather said it was necessary for me to go to the city. I would learn to speak Portuguese, I'd get to know money, everything. My journey started there. Ilesio moved to the nearest city to go to school.

18:59It was a very painful, very complicated process. I knew what needed to be done, but I had no idea how to do it. So I had lots of ups and downs, with bullying, with a lot of prejudice. And then, after some time, my family, my mother, came to join me. And from then on, we started to develop in the city. After a long time, I finally managed to finish high school. After high school, I took the entrance exam to university. I didn't pass. I only passed on my third attempt. And then I went to study law, because I realized that everything I was set to do my whole life had to do with the world of law. When Ilesio returned to the Javari Valley, he says he noticed a change.

19:53Life no longer unfolded in the same way. We started to face scarcity of certain things that we had very easily in the past. We started to experience fear of things that we had never been afraid of, like the fear of strangers appearing. And we also noticed this impact on the environment, the presence of people hunting, fishing, and exploring the territory illegally. Today, the entire Amazon rainforest is home to about 30 million people. A lot of people came in the early to mid-1900s to collect sap from rubber trees and sell it. You had a lot of very impoverished people going to very remote places, working for ultimately rubber barons.

20:40A lot of people ended up living along the rivers and becoming fishermen and hunters later on. That was one wave of migration. Another wave of migration was driven by the government. In the 1960s and 1970s, a military dictatorship took over with a dream of taming what had thus far been untamed. And they called it a land without men for men without land. And that meant that we're going to populate this area and make it ours. Because until then, the Amazon had been part of Brazil, but totally separate from Brazil. They called it Operation Amazon, and the military built highways through the forest.

21:21So it became completely anarchic that people would just take land, claim it was theirs, sell it to someone else, and also became this huge system of cutting down the forest to claim it. So pretty much it was, they built a pathway into this new area. They did that, but they didn't do enough to develop what was at the end of the pathway. and it created this very anarchic, violent, and lawless place. The Javari Valley is designated Indigenous Territory, meaning non-Indigenous people are not allowed to hunt there. But lots of other people live in the region, near the Indigenous territories, and it's hard to make a living.

22:04In the nearest city, only 7 % are employed. This area in recent years has been subsumed by crime. It's at the nexus of three different countries with a lot of drug trafficking going on between them. And this driving of crime also resulted in a ripple effect of people becoming illegal fishers and illegal hunters. And they would poach inside of these indigenous territories. These are armed fishermen, poachers, and armed hunters.