Missing in the Amazon: the frontline – episode six

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 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 the 1st with the new Today in Focus, but in the meantime, here is episode six. Beto Marúbal first heard about Dom's idea to write a book when they bumped into each other at Brasilia Airport in 2021.

0:39They had some time to kill and sat down together.

0:47Dom said to me, Beto, I need your help with something. I've got this idea and I want to run by you. Don't you laugh at me. And I said, okay, go on then. I want to write this book that will be like a manual on how to save the Amazon. I said, Dom,

1:11And I said, Dom, you were a gringo. Fuck, man. No, no, no, no. I'm fucking sorry, but you are from England. And you want to come here and tell us how to save the Amazon? Fuck. And Dom said, no, no, no, no, no. It's not like that. Look, these are terrible years in Brazil. Deforestation is rising, land invasions. I've traveled around the Amazon and met environmental activists who are actually dead now. Indigenous people like you are dying like flies. There needs to be a record of what's happening. It cannot be erased from history. This must not be silenced. People around the world need to know this.

1:58But I need people like you to help me to tell this story. And I said, okay. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in.

2:13Four years later, in June 2025, Beto arrived in London on a drizzly summer's day. He walked into a packed bookshop to witness Dom's idea finally becoming a reality. Essentially what this book is about is not just how to save the Amazon, but also why. Thank you very much everybody for coming. Jonathan Watts read the final words of the introduction to the book that had just been published. How to Save the Amazon by Dom Phillips.

2:51Dom's book was left unfinished when he was killed. But now it had been completed by a committee of dozens of journalists from around the world. Dom's wife, Alê. The murders didn't silent Dom. Dom's legacy kept going, kept going ahead. That's the message.

3:15If that was Dom's legacy, to refuse to be silent, to continue drawing attention to what's happening in the Amazon, then it's more important now than ever. Because according to Beto, things are now just as dangerous.

3:33We've got a different government, but the situation is just as bad now. If they did the same expedition today, they could still die. They could still be murdered. And we are still living under that threat.

3:59It blows my mind, after all this time, and after all the global attention, that Beto thinks so little has changed that the same thing would happen to Dom and Bruno again.

4:14I'm Tom Phillips. From The Guardian, this is Missing in the Amazon, our sixth and final episode, The Frontline.

4:33As Dom's book was being celebrated in the UK, I was nearly 6 ,000 miles away in the Brazilian Amazon reporting on Bruno's legacy, which many people say is Ervo, the indigenous defence unit that he set up alongside Beto, Orlando and Tataco and a group of other indigenous leaders. The organization that took on illegal poachers in the Javari. The organization that enraged Pelado and Colombia. The organization that Bruno gave his life for.

5:07As Pelado and Colombia sit behind bars, countless other criminal networks are continuing to spread violence and destruction around the Amazon, including in the Javari. So three years after the killings, Tataku and Orlando, the two men who led the search for Dom and Bruno, were still out on the front lines, still fighting, still risking their lives. Although now, at least, they had more support. Yeah, the EVU has grown very much. When Bruno was killed in 2022, we had 14 people. Now we have 116. What's the attack? And this is Orlando.

6:16means the indigenous here, yeah, I mean, they're even more vulnerable. So the plan was to set up these six teams defending the major rivers in this immense Portugal-sized territory. And this week's mission was the final part of that process. The last team of new recruits, nine men from the Canemari people, were finishing their training. And I was shadowing Ervo for that week, just as Dom was in the last few days of his life. This time in a totally different part of the region, even more remote than the place where Dom and Bruno disappeared. Here, if anything went wrong, we were literally days from help.

7:01I've made dozens of trips to the Amazon since I first started reporting on it 20 years ago, and made many to the Javari, but I was not prepared for how stressful and grueling this trip would be. The mission was to deliver two huge metal canoes, each 22 feet long, to a brand new Airvous monitoring station being built on the edge of the Javari. The canoes would have to be carried through about 50 kilometres of muddy farmland and thick jungle, and then navigated up a final stretch of river, which the leaders of the expedition had only ever seen on a map.

7:43For the first couple of days of hiking, the path was clear enough for two incredibly muscular cows to help carry the load. One called Spearhead, the other, slightly faster animal, called Senna, named after the Brazilian Formula One driver. So this is the first problem of our journey, is that our cow apparently does not speak English. So no interviews.

8:11But as we entered the dense rainforest, those cows had to stay behind. And immediately, things got intense. Some of the men were carrying giant petrol canisters for the outboard motors that weighed 55 kilograms each. I could barely lift them, let alone carry them. Others carried the canoes on their shoulders for miles and miles. It's just unbelievable. It's insane. They're bringing two seven-meter aluminium canoes down these dirt tracks, up and down hills, into the middle of the jungle, and they're somehow hoping to get them to the river. And Calamarigas, they're not tall, but they are made of steel.

8:59My God, to carry that kind of weight. At night, after trekking for hours through the bush, we slung our hammocks in a jungle clearing. We used head torches to keep an eye out for the venomous snakes that kept creeping into our camp. Amazonian bushmasters, or red and black striped coral snakes.

9:23Oh my goodness, what is happening? Well, it's my birthday today, and as a special present, a brightly coloured red, black and white, very venomous snake has just crawled into our camp between the hammocks. If it bites someone, I think basically you're dead. There were other anxieties too. One you'll be familiar with, the impact from poaching and illegal mining.

9:57One village elder, called Tupiana Kanamari, told me gold miners were pushing further into the Javari region and feared they would poison its rivers and make his people sick. And that's why his son, Itzamba Kanamari, one of Evo's new recruits, said they needed to stop the invaders. I want to protect this land, he says. But there was something else that the Kanamari were worrying about too. Their complicated relationship with the uncontacted indigenous people who have lived in this part of the forest for thousands of years. The Flecheros, which means Aro people. No one knows what name they call themselves because rarely, if ever, has anyone spoken to them.

10:45No one even knows what language they speak. Evo was there to protect these groups. But many of the new recruits also feared them.

11:00A man called Davi Canemari is telling me here that one day he and some friends encountered a group of the Flecheiros on the river and the Aro people opened fire with their bows and arrows. They just managed to escape, he says.

11:22They killed our brothers in Coruina. But Tupiana says some of his family have been less fortunate. They were clubbed to death by a different group of isolated indigenous people, known as the caseteros, or headbashers, for the heavy wooden bludgeons they wield. At the same time, the Canamari and their uncontacted neighbors in the Javari share a similar history of suffering violence from non-indigenous invaders who have brought death, destruction and illness to their lands. So while the two groups fear each other, they are both in great danger from external forces.

12:04After four days hiking through the jungle, we finally reached the banks of the River Jordan. If we had started our trip in the back of beyond, we were now in the back of the back of beyond. My knee was injured and I was limping along with a stick I'd found in the jungle. and Orlando had started calling me Gandalf. So I was extremely relieved that the last leg of the journey would be sitting down in a boat. You are ready? Yeah, I'm ready, I'm excited, it's going to be great. That sense of relief didn't last long.

12:42You're good to know something, Pohar. So we're about 30 seconds out of our port and we've already run aground on a tree. Tataku and them are getting out to push us over it. Like I said, Orlando and Tataku had never taken this particular route before. Based on maps and conversations with some of the Kanemari guys, they were expecting a winding but passable river. Instead what we found was a narrow creek, utterly clogged with fallen trees, which formed these gigantic natural barricades that to me at least looked impossible to overcome. i kept looking up in case more came crashing down and crushed us to death and one false move could be absolutely fatal for our journey as a lander's team hacked its way through with machetes a chainsaw and an axe we repeatedly bounced off the banks of the creek so we're in an amazonian game of pinball just getting pushed from one side of the one obstacle to the next at one point a nest of ferocious Amazonian wasps landed in the boat, sending Orlando scrambling to hurl it into the river before anyone was stunned.

13:52Water snakes darted across the surface. You see the spider at the tree? No, what was it? A parrot? A spider, like a tarantula. Yes. I was too busy watching to make sure that one of those branches did not jam into my throat. Oh my god.

14:17Eventually I was catapulted into the river after our boat smashed into the river bank nearly impaling me on a branch. Reeds and vines wrapped themselves around my legs under the water and for a split second I thought I might drown. Tatako called out telling me to stay calm and I managed to swim back to the boat.

14:42Oh, fuck man. Oh my God. So I was really just banged into the side of the river. I tried to go around the branch and the two huge vines just came. Literally pulled me off the boat into the water. I felt the vines caught up in my legs under the water.

15:04Fucking God. That's it. We carried on like that for hours. And you have a feeling? Terrified. A little bit terrified. We are so far from anywhere now. We are so far off the map. It would take a very long time for us to be rescued.

15:33Finally, the following afternoon, after another terrifying day on the river, We came out onto a much wider waterway and the team breathed a collective sigh of relief An hour later we've reached our destination The campsite where the new monitoring station was being built the canoes were delivered in one piece

15:59Mission accomplished

16:06I I just couldn't believe the determination and the resilience I'd just seen in this group of men. And that resilience is not just physical, and it's not just on these missions. It's something they need to survive every single day in the Javari. And each time I say goodbye to Orlando and Tataku, men I now consider friends, I have the same terrible thought. Am I ever going to see you again? That might sound overdramatic, and I wish it was, but it's not. The same year Dom and Bruno were killed, Orlando heard some disturbing rumours.

16:49On two separate occasions, three gunmen had come here, looking to kill me. Somebody told me that, you know, they were going around, they're saying, where's Orlando? Where is Orlando? And, I mean, yeah, it really scared me. I reported it to the police. Nothing happened. A similar thing happened to him just this year. Orlando got wind of another plan to kill him while he was passing through Tabachinga, the city where Maxiel was assassinated. When he isn't out in the field with Ervo, Orlando lives in a simple two-story wooden house with the living quarters on the upper deck and the ground floor empty.

17:37And here my house has two stairs. One down and one that is free. And to go up to the second floor there are some ladders. They're quite steep and you have to open a kind of trap door to get in. Once you're inside, you can shut yourself in and there are bars on the window. All of this is what we do to try and feel a bit safer, at least at home.

18:09Tatako's life is similar. He's also been on the end of death threats. He lives in the same town as many of the fishermen accused of trying to cover up the killing of Dom and Bruno.

18:26The guys who helped to hide their bodies and bury them are still out there, free. It makes me so angry. One of them lives just down the road from me. He says he never goes out socializing anymore, because things like this happen. Someone will come along and say, you need to watch it. There is someone who is out to get you. You end up bumping into fishermen who don't like us. And you feel so on edge. Sometimes I'm at home and I think, what am I doing here? I need to get out of this place. I've come under a lot of pressure from my family who want me to stop. who think this work is too risky. But then I say, no.

19:23The reason Orlando and Tataku are determined to stay is that they believe they're making a difference. Little by little, I think we're changing the reality here.

19:37I'm never going to give up. I'm going to carry on until they kill me. As long as I'm alive, I'll be here working with Evo.

20:14The constant danger in the Javari has changed everyone's lives. Before the killings, Bruno and Beatriz, and Beto and his wife, were very close. In fact, Bruno and Beto were godfather to each other's children. And they had a plan for when their kids were older. Yes, we had so many plans. We wanted to take them to the Javari, teach them how to walk in the forest. That's Beatriz. And we also wanted to go to Maronao, Beto's village, you know, and travel all around the region. But after Dom and Bruno were murdered, both Beto and his brother Elieziu were warned that their lives were under imminent threat and they should immediately leave the Javari Valley for cities far away.

21:05And if they ever return now, it is with the presence of heavily armed security details from the police. So Bertrand now advocates for the Javari to politicians around the world. Beatriz's life has taken a new path too. When Lula won the last election, he created a new ministry for Indigenous affairs. And Beatriz earned a top job within it as the director for isolated Indigenous peoples. I tried to get a sense from Bertrand and Beatriz from their new vantage points, whether there was any reason for hope. They had different takes. Beto thinks that Lula has squandered a generational opportunity to make real change in the Amazon, and that not only would Dom and Bruno be killed again today, but that things could get even worse.