Missing in the Amazon: the disappearance – episode one

0:00Hi, it's Helen here. Today in Focus is on our summer break and in our absence we wanted to give you the chance to listen to this really excellent series called Missing in the Amazon. It's hosted by The Guardian's Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips and it's from our new narrative strand, Guardian Investigates. It's a feed where you can find all of The Guardian's award-winning narrative podcasts, plus every new series we release. We'll see you on September 1st with a new Today in Focus, but in the meantime, here is episode one.

0:43It's a Sunday morning in June 2022, the Amazon jungle. Forests so dense, it can be hard to know if it's night or day. and teeming with wildlife, most of which you can't see, but you can hear.

1:07Macaws, jaguars, howler monkeys, frogs, creatures constantly moving between the trees.

1:19On the riverbank, at a small ramshackle port, two men were waiting.

1:33Orlando and Tataco talked to me in Portuguese. Their words are being spoken here by actors. It was early, but the sun was already rising high, ferociously hot, glinting off the muddy waters of the Javari River. Orlando and Tataku worked for the local indigenous association. They were here to meet their colleague, Bruno Pereira, and a British journalist he was traveling with, Dom Phillips. Bruno was late, and he was never late. Yeah, we'd agreed to plan. 8 a.m., me and Tataco would be there. 8.30, and there was no sign of the two men. After half an hour here, you start to wonder what might have happened.

2:27No growl of Bruno's outboard motor, no familiar shouts across the water, just the occasional sound of river dolphins breaking the surface of the waterway below the port. They waited anxiously, occasionally checking the time on their phones. We waited until 10 o 'clock and they didn't come. I already had a feeling that something padded happened, so we got the boats ready and started the search. Tataku and Orlando jumped into their boat and as Orlando pulled away from the riverbank, with one hand on the steering wheel, phone clutched in the other, he began sending WhatsApp messages to his team. 40, which is very fast.

3:12We are all working on the train. We are going to start a little bit. People aren't always on time in Brazil. But Bruno wasn't your average Brazilian. And this was not your average place. This region, the Javari Valley, is one of the most remote and inhospitable places on earth. It's a vast, seemingly never-ending expanse of rainforest, pushed right up against Brazil's most distant border with Colombia and Peru, and home to the highest concentration of uncontacted indigenous tribes anywhere. People who have little or absolutely no interaction with the outside world.

3:55Bruno's job was to protect those tribes, and that was a very dangerous job because it put him in conflict with some very dangerous people. Illegal gold miners, loggers, poachers and organised criminal gangs. These regions' endless rivers are used to move drugs into this country and from here to the rest of the world.

4:21As coca production in Peru has soared in recent years, the Javari and the surrounding region has become one of the world's biggest drug smuggling routes. Billions of dollars worth of cocaine moves over the borders into Brazil, along the winding Amazon rivers towards the Atlantic. From there, the cocaine crosses the ocean to Europe. The police told us that in the last four months they have captured more than three tons of cocaine hidden in... Sometimes these drugs are stuffed inside the corpses of giant Amazonian river fish, their bellies slit open and stitched back together. Sometimes the drug traffickers build their own submarines that disappear beneath the river and don't surface again until they reach Portugal or Spain.

5:07This is a battlefield disguised as a wilderness. That is what had brought both Dom and Bruno here. And now they disappeared.

5:20I'm Tom Phillips, The Guardian's Latin America correspondent and this is Missing in the Amazon a six-part podcast series Episode 1 The Disappearance

5:55That's me, recording a frantic voice note to a contact in the Amazon. I'm asking about Dom. We were both based in Brazil and both reported for The Guardian.

6:09I think my voice sounds shaky.

6:17Dom and I worked on dozens of stories together over the years and shared countless bylines. We have almost identical names, so many people wrongly thought that we were the same person, or brothers, or that he was my dad. People even used to joke that we should form a Brazilian country music duo, Dom e Tom. Dom had started his career reporting on dance music, but over the years had become an environmental journalist obsessed with investigating the destruction of the Amazon. Leaving most of the forest standing so the satellite imagery can't spot it and then burn it. In fact, he was writing a book about it and this trip to the Javadi was researched for that.

6:57We'd been in touch a few days before he set off. It was my 40th birthday and I was down in the dumps. Have a wonderful day, loads of happiness, he texted me. Thanks, man. 40. I wrote back. In his ever-optimistic way, Dom replied, 40 years young. 40s is a great decade. And then he vanished.

7:25As I was having these frantic back and forths over WhatsApp, my guardian colleague, John Watts, who actually lives in the Amazon, was also hearing the news about Dom. I immediately was extremely worried. So I called his wife, Ale, and that was one of the most difficult calls I think I've ever made. Because I didn't really know what I was telling them except that Dom was missing. They are lost. And we have no idea what happened. And it was a shock, so huge shock. And I said, my goodness, what will I do?

8:18I really believed he was alive. Beatriz Matus, Bruno's wife, and the mother of his two young sons, got a call too. Beatriz's words are also being spoken here by an actor. At first, she wasn't too worried, she says. Or at least, she tried not to be. Maybe they had a problem with the boat, maybe they're stranded somewhere on the river shore, maybe they've been attacked and got away somehow and they are hiding somewhere. Things happen in the Javari. Bruno is strong, even if somebody shot him, even if he was out there, right now, losing blood, I still believed he was alive. and he was still alive.

9:31Tall, rugged, but kind-looking, with rectangular glasses and a bushy salt and pepper beard. Fear is growing over the safety of British journalist Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, a protector of Brazilian indigenous communities. After the pair were reported missing Sunday... ...part of the Amazon jungle. Don is a Javari Váruskas, peru indigenista Bruno Pereira, peru jornalista inglês... My brother Dom has been living in Brazil with his Brazilian wife. He loves the country and cares deeply about the Amazon and the people there. We are really worried about him and urge the authorities in Brazil to do all they can.

10:10It was my job to report on what was happening, but I also wanted to help with the search for my friend in any way I could. From Rio, it was going to take several days to get to the Javadi, so I needed to get on a plane as soon as possible.

10:27Back on the river, the search party had grown. Orlando and Tapaku were now accompanied by a dozen indigenous men and a couple of local police officers. As night began to fall, they passed a tiny riverside hamlet, called Ladario, right by the spot where Bruno and Dom had been sleeping the night before they disappeared. And as they got closer, they began to hear loud music blasting from one of the houses. There was a party going on there. They were partying. They were celebrating. It felt jarring, this scene. Off, somehow, Orlando thought. By now, surely everyone along the river must have known that the men were missing.

11:12Were these people glad? That might have seemed crazy, but tensions had been rising for months. specifically between Bruno and a gang of poachers who lived in a handful of riverbank communities near Ladario. They made a living from invading the nearby protected indigenous territory and stealing fish and turtles from its rivers and lakes. And Bruno had been trying to stop them. We were getting in the way of their operation. We'd confiscate their equipment and set it on fire, stop them from fishing inside the indigenous land. which would infuriate them. Some members of the search team wanted to march right up to the house with the music blasting and confront the people there.

11:58Maybe, but the policemen said, no, that's not a good idea. We don't know how many people are there. They've been drinking. It would be dangerous.

12:17Finally, four days after Domabruno disappeared, I arrived on the river.

12:28That's a video I recorded on my phone as I reached the floating search base on the Itaquai. Orlando, sporting a camouflared t-shirt, is perched on the bow of a wooden boat, briefing us all. His black jeans and trainers are spattered with mud, a roll-up cigarette smouldering in his hand. He looks weary.

12:53I'd been to the region before, but I hadn't really prepared myself for quite how difficult this surge was going to be. the terrain is daunting one minute it's baking hot the next minute these huge black clouds roll in and you'll be soaking wet and then at night time the temperature plummets there are alligators flesh eating fish there are snakes you're trying to navigate the boat through areas of flooded forest clearing your path with machetes cutting your way through vines and branches clambering over trunks that have fallen into the water or that maybe someone has deliberately chopped down to block our path.

13:33There are spiky trees that if you brush up against them will cut a big chunk out of your arm and you really don't want to get an infected wound in the middle of the Javadi jungle. By now there are three or four boats of men, mostly indigenous guys, Bruno's colleagues, combing different parts of the jungle. Maybe five or six military policemen, a few dozen soldiers, although at first I never saw them. One helicopter. Almost nothing else from central government. And the search area was huge. The Javarri Valley is the size of Scotland. I just kept thinking, where the hell is everyone?

14:18Bruno wasn't the only one who made enemies over the years. Dom's reporting had rubbed a fair few people up the wrong way too. and that included the far-right president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. It took him days to respond to the disappearance and when he finally did, he basically said it was their own fault.

14:41It was an ill-advised adventure, he says. So this absence of help on the ground, I don't know, it began to feel deliberate and Dom and Bruno's family felt that too.

14:59I'm asking Beatriz here what she felt when she heard Bolsonaro's words.

15:11Disgust, hate, anger, absolute desperation. I felt sick. I wanted to punch him in the face. I don't know, I never felt that way about anybody in my life before. If you've not got a soul, if you've not got a heart. This is Dom's brother Gareth, answering the same question about Bolsonaro. What's the matter with you? I just don't understand what kind of person you are. You're just a heartless monster.

15:45I made a video asking for the government to, how can I say this, intensify the search. To accelerate or to intensify the search. Yeah, intensify the search.

16:05She begs the federal government to act and calls Dom the love of her life. Well, we knew we had to make as much of a fuss as possible so that the Brazilian government would feel obliged to put real resources in the search. My guardian colleague, John Watts, again. So we started a WhatsApp group with all of Dom's journalist friends and started to mobilize as many other people as we could and get the word out on social media. And it started to work. We had tweets from Richarlison, the Brazilian footballer, from senior politicians in Brazil, the United States, the UK, and several other countries.

16:51There were these advertising trucks in Hollywood bearing the images of Dom and Bruno with a message flashing on the screen, threatened, now missing, where are Dom and Bruno?

17:12Where are Dom and Bruno? That's what Orlando was asking everyone. He and the search team stopped at every village along the river shore. Someone must have seen something. But in a place like the Javari, where a lot of money is being made from drug trafficking and poaching, most people don't like to talk. But finally, Orlando says, there was an exception. A story that really disturbed me. A fisherman had seen Dom and Bruno's boat coming down the river at first light on Sunday morning, towards the port where Orlando and Tataco had been waiting. Exactly as planned. But, this guy told Orlando, Dom and Bruno were not alone on the river.

18:00So this guy says, I saw Dom and Bruno passing by, and right behind them, he said that there was these two men going after them. Men, he says, he didn't recognize in a black speedboat. They were being followed.

18:41You feel very alone and exposed out there, on these vast, sparsely populated rivers. You can go for hours without seeing another soul. Occasionally, we'd pass another boat, and there'd be a strange mood. Sinister, almost. Maybe they've got information that we don't know about, right? Did the people on board know anything about what had happened, I wondered? Was that the boat that had been seen following Bruno and Dom? What are they doing there? And what do they think we are doing there? For the police, though, the speedboat was just one lead. One person's account. Maybe it meant something, maybe it didn't.

19:25And on the search, too, people were divided. Some people were convinced we were looking for the bodies of our friends. Some thought they'd never be found. Maybe Dom and Bruno had seen something they shouldn't have on the river and had been taken across the border into Peru by drug traffickers who wanted to silence them. Others, including myself, still had hope we'd find them. I imagine that in a few days, Dom might roll up on the riverbank, stinking of sweat and with a big beard, but alive and desperate for a cold beer.

20:10I spent a lot of time on the search with a man called Benin Machis from the Machis people. He'd worked with Bruno. Bruno was his mentor.

20:23Benin said that Bruno had spent his life defending the indigenous people of Javari and that now it was the turn of the indigenous to defend Bruno. So whatever had happened to him and to Dom, whether they were alive or dead, they were never going to give up looking for them. And so on we looked.

20:54Sometimes, as we searched patches of flooded forest, you'd hear something moving around amongst the trees, and motors would be cut to try and hear anything that might be out there. Oh my God, what was that? Everyone was so on edge, so paranoid. Distant noises in the forest sounded like gunshots.