Missing in the Amazon: the fightback – episode five

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 5. Dom's funeral took place exactly three weeks after he was killed.

0:35And I can say, with some confidence, that there's never been a funeral quite like it. So I have no words in English to explain this. Português.

0:47Na verdade, o Dom deixou um testamento muito bem organizado. E esse testamento ele já tinha antes mesmo de me conhecer, ele só foi atualizando. Alessa says that there were three very clear instructions that Dom left in his will for his funeral. The first one was that he didn't want it to be conducted by a religious leader. The second instruction was that music had to be played. And he left three songs.

1:30I love it that was the one that I think made everybody completely lose the plot and break down in tears right

1:46and a second one by an American group yeah I've been waiting I've been waiting for this moment All my life And then a third one which was a sort of disco anthem Good times

2:12You know he loved good times He loved being with his friends And having music and dancing So he'd obviously thought about it and decided he didn't want everyone just stood around, mooping about and being miserable. That's Tom's brother, Gareth, and his sister, Sian. He wouldn't have wanted a, you know, a cure song or something like that. He'd be really morbid and miserable.

2:39That just, for me, it was like, oh, my God, I've got to cry and I've got to laugh and I've got to move. I've got to do all those things because...

2:55The third stipulation of Dom's will was that a big party would be thrown. During the evening. They were drinking, the beer ended up, the beer ended up, the beer ended up, the beer ended up. So Dom hadn't stipulated a specific quantity of beer? He wasn't in the will like 5 ,000 cans of scol? No, no. so alice saying that three times during the the funeral the after party if that's the right way of describing it she had to call the the beer delivery company three times because so much alcohol was consumed and alice says that her family some of her family members said to her is this how all funerals are in england or is it just Dom?

3:44I think the answer is probably that it's... I think it was a Dom thing. That same weekend, Bruno's funeral took place in his hometown of Recife. Just like at Dom's, people from every stage of his life were there. I obviously saw Beatriz right away and we hugged and we cried a lot and Beto Marubu was there, so same with him. That's Leo Sech, Bruno's close friend from home. I mean, it's a funeral. It was horrible. But as a ceremony, it was good for the heart. In the days leading up to it, the different indigenous peoples of the Javadi Valley had honoured Bruno in their own ways.

4:34All of the indigenous peoples of Dejavari performed rituals and paid really beautiful tributes to Bruno in Atalaia do Norte. Beatriz Matos, Bruno's wife. Because he was so very beloved. He was very beloved. He was very beloved. This is also an incredible. This was also unprecedented. Bruno's dear friend and colleague, Beto Marubo. The Maioruna performed a ritual they hadn't done for decades. They cut off their hair. This is something they only do when a great Maioruna leader dies. But the Maioruna did it for Bruno. Never in their history have they done this for a non-indigenous person.

5:35At Bruno's funeral, his coffin was draped with the flag of his football team, Sporch, and speakers played a recording of Bruno singing a traditional Kanamari song.

5:50Afterwards, Beatriz were sitting there with their family. and with Beto, when her phone rang. Her aunt answered for her, and she turned to Beatriz and said, It's President Lula on the phone, and he wants to talk to you. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the left-wing former president of Brazil, the man who, already by then, had announced his intention to take on Bolsonaro in the elections being held later that year.

6:25I picked up the phone and he says, look, I want to pay my respects, to say how sorry we are and how much we respect your husband's work. You know, and of course I said, thank you, president. And, you know, we still call him that even though he wasn't president anymore then. I said, you have to protect indigenous lands. You have to rebuild indigenous policy in this country. And I was lobbying the president on the day of my husband's funeral. That's exactly what Bruno would have done to. I was inspired by him. And then Lula says, you can rest assured, Beatriz. I'm going to win and there will be no more gold miners.

7:09There will be no more loggers. And there will be no more invasions of indigenous land in this country.

7:20The hope was that people like Dom and Bruno's killers would be stopped and that Pelado and Jefferson would actually face justice. If only it were that simple. I'm Tom Phillips, The Guardian's Latin America correspondent. This is Missing in the Amazon. Episode 5, The Fight Back.

7:56That's the first helicopters just taken off here from the airport in Karawari and helicopter number two is now taking off to follow them. So that's two teams of the Obama Special Forces and they're going to fly about 45 minutes west towards the Hillboya where they are planning on destroying scores of mining dredges that that are moving towards the Javadi Valley indigenous territory, where Bruno and Don were killed. So there's real emotion in these guys' eyes today as they head off, trying to carry on the work of their dead friends. Lula won the election. He defeated Jair Bolsonaro by a whisker in one of the closest presidential races in Brazilian history.

8:39And he set about trying to halt deforestation with mixed results. In his first year, he managed to bring it down by 50%. But that still meant that huge areas of rainforest were being destroyed each day. And he also began the fight back against the environmental criminals themselves, who had been given the green light in the Bolsonaro years. Lula had been in office for about a year and a half. For all that time, Pelado and Jefferson had been in jail, but they still hadn't gone on trial. And while they might not have been able to continue their criminal activities, there were plenty of others who were.

9:20We're in the helicopter now. We're about to take off. And apparently it's about one hour's flight west-northwest of here to reach the point where they've discovered the boats.

9:32Part of Lula's strategy was launching these huge special forces raids on illegal activities like logging and gold mining. some of the most destructive industries for the rainforest. And I'd been invited to the first major offensive in the region around the Javari. I was with an elite squad of troops from Brazil's Environmental Protection Agency. The group's commander, a guy called Felipe Finger, an athletic and fearless forest engineer turned rifle-toting warrior, described it to me as their version of D-Day. The objective of the mission was to destroy 100 mining barges around the Javari Valley area.

10:15After about an hour of flying and seeing not a single soul, all of a sudden, on one of the waterways beneath us, a huge gold mining dredger came into view. Look at the size of the boat, the pilot says. Yeah, there's no one in it. There are a couple of miners and one of them is running up the stairs now.

10:36We landed on a small strip of sand along the side of the river and boarded the dredger using a smaller boat that one of the other teams had already commandeered. As the troops started rounding up the people on board, I had a look around. There was this huge metal drill right in the middle of the vessel which excavates the earth from the riverbed. And there's a filter covered in carpets. and that's where the gold is separated using mercury which is then dumped back into the river. Poisons the river, poisons the fish, poisons the indigenous lands around here. Big filthy metal disaster in the middle of the jungle.

11:21Grim. Then I went upstairs where things got grimmer. So just walking around this barge now, there are one two three bedrooms there's a kitchen with a cooker there's some pretty old looking chocolate cake there's a lot of dirty plates in the sink and then the rooms are just full of sheets and clothes and dominoes and chocolate and just you know medicine there are condoms all over the floor um and the uh the troops are telling us that they think often these boats also serve as brothels. It was a pretty depressing scene. 17 people just sat there on the edge of the dredger, being interrogated, one by one, by the Special Forces operatives.

12:15As they waited, some of them spoke to me.

12:21One grimy-fingered miner, a father of four, called Sales Gias Costa, said he had come hoping to buy his family a house. But it hasn't worked out, he says. I know we're destroying nature, but this is the only way we have to earn a living, he says.

12:45One of the three sex workers, a 20-year-old woman, described being recruited nearly 600 miles away in the state capital, Manaus. She looked visibly shaken. I've got a son, and this was the only opportunity I could find, she says.

13:08It's a really, really sad scene because, as well as an environmental catastrophe, it's also a social catastrophe. These people are from the lowest rung of Brazilian society. A lot of them are very young, they look very scared. And they're really struggling to eke out a living. Of course illegally, but here in the jungle. God knows what's going to happen to these people tonight once we leave. Shortly this boat's going to be destroyed. The helicopters aren't big enough to transport these people, so they won't be arrested. They're going to be left to their own devices here in the rainforest. miles and miles and miles, days from any kind of village or town.

14:02The 17 people were kicked off the boat, and from there, over the coming hours and days, I watched as Finger and his team basically repeated the process. You can see that now they've got torches. They're inside the boat. And then, they're mad. Oh my god, they need to get out of there. It's going up in flames.

14:33By the time I was preparing to leave, the Special Forces unit had destroyed or identified half a dozen barges. and by the end of their mission, they would have taken out scores more. Finger said that Operation Waki was the Javari's D-Day, so as his men were dousing the final dredger with diesel, I asked him if this was a war he felt they could win. And I've got to say, the bluntness of his answer shocked me.

15:05He said, Now, with the resources we currently have, the war is already lost. All we're doing is delaying the catastrophe.

15:21The reasons for the lack of optimism from Finger, and actually from many people on the ground in the Javari, who I've spoken to since the killing of Dom and Bruno, are of course extremely complex. The first and most obvious thing is the scale of the problem. Operation Wacky covered a huge and massively inaccessible area. And in that area were all of these dredgers, each doing huge environmental damage. But those hundreds of miles are just one fraction of one part of one region of a rainforest that is about the size of the continental United States. Then there's the social complexity of what's going on.

16:03In the absence of other job opportunities in the Amazon, what else would they do? Finally, and maybe scariest of all, is a relatively new thing. Something that, until recently, only existed in the shadows, in a few specific corners of the Amazon, but which now has established its roots throughout the entire region. something that acts as this overwhelming counterforce to any effort to protect the forest organized crime we always had crime in the Amazon Bolsonaro area in four years they enabled the scale up of crime in the Amazon at levels that were not imaginable before this is Sonia Brigi an investigative reporter from Brazil who specializes in the Amazon.

16:56Sonia is one of the people who has gone deepest into the shadowy forces behind Dom and Bruno's killings. Environmental crimes in Brazil have very low sentences and it's terribly profitable. So it's the perfect crime. During Operation Wacky, Finger told me that many of the barges they were exploding were worth at least one million pounds. The people working on board certainly didn't have that kind of money. So who was paying for them? The answer is multi-millionaire business people and even sometimes massive criminal organizations.

17:4270 or 80 % of the profit goes to the people who are providing the logistics. So the lion's share goes to the criminal underworld.

17:55This is Eliezo Marubu, an indigenous activist and criminal attorney, and also Beto Marubu's brother. He's the one who received the threatening letter shortly before Dom and Bruno disappeared, which ended with the words, you have been warned.

18:15You can launch an operation in the Javeri Valley and blow up like 50 mining barges and say, look how we're fighting organized crime. But the very next day, the criminals will just replace it with another vessel. This is true of gold mining, but it's equally true of pretty much any environmental crime in the Amazon, whether that's logging or illegal fishing and poaching. And whilst at first it seemed that the killing of Dom and Bruno was the rage-driven personal vendetta of a single man, Pelado, as the investigation deepened, some people began to suspect that it was actually much, much more complex than that.

18:59In fact, it appeared to be a perfect distillation of this much bigger and utterly terrifying story that is playing out in the Amazon.

19:16As we know, for a time, Pelado had tried to make an honest living as a fisherman. and, like most people in the area, struggled in poverty. But at some point, looking for work, he decided to move to one of the nearest towns called Benjamin Constant, a place just on the Brazilian side of the three-way border between Peru, Colombia and Brazil. And whilst he was there, we don't know exactly when, he met someone who would set his life on a new course, A man whose name seems to genuinely terrify people across the region. A man called Colombia, or at least that's how everyone knows him. Who is this Colombia guy, who to me is still, three years after the crime, a very mysterious figure?

20:08Exactly. Who is he? What was he doing? Where is he from? Is he Brazilian? Is he Peruvian? Is he Colombian? Nobody really knows. He has a house on the Brazilian side, another house on the Peruvian side. We still don't know if he's Brazilian, Peruvian or Colombian. He has three different identity documents from all three of those nationalities, featuring slightly different names, as well as a fourth which describes him as an indigenous citizen of Brazil. One police investigator told me he spoke Brazilian Portuguese with a thick Colombian accent. He has this murky past that nobody was able as yet to put a finger on where he was born, in which kind of environment, but he's probably the product of that region.

21:02He's a man of the Amazon, of deep West Amazonian part. I mean, you've spent several years investigating this now too. And you said, we don't know if he's Brazilian or Peruvian or Colombian. I don't know either. The only thing I do know about him really is that every time I go to that region, people are scared of him and nobody wants to talk about him. It scares people. Just being asked about him. What is known, or at least what's alleged, is that Colombia controls the illegal poaching industry for that whole area. Police sources believe that Colombia has operatives who supply him with illegal fish and river turtles from the Javari.

21:53And his organization then moves that cargo just across the border to the Colombian city of Leticia. So a boat docks in Leticia. And there are several frigorificos, how do you call that? It's fish factories. Like fish factories, yeah, like it would be Aventuara if it was meat. There are several fish factories and they buy fish. No questions asked. And there's one thing that is very important to understand. In Brazil, it's forbidden to fish pirarucu, for instance, at all. You have to have documents to sell pirarucu. On the other side, there's no law against it. So you cannot sell the illegal fish in Brazil, but you deliver them in Colombia very easily.