In short
The episode traces how Dom Phillips—former Mixmag editor and later an Amazon investigative journalist—moved from covering UK dance culture to exposing environmental destruction in Brazil, culminating in his disappearance in the Javari region. It also recounts his confrontation with President Jair Bolsonaro over Amazon protection, and how that moment made him a target.
Guests and backgrounds
Tom Phillips, The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent and host. Andy Pemberton, Frank Broughton, Bill Bruster—former Mixmag writers/editors who describe Dom’s Mixmag era. Sian Phillips—Dom’s sister. John Watts—Guardian colleague and Rio-based correspondent. Andrew Fishman—editor of The Intercept Brazil and Dom’s friend in Rio. Dom’s wife, Alessa Ampailu.
Key claims
Bolsonaro’s nationalist rhetoric and policies accelerated Amazon destruction; Dom’s viral “stupid foreigners” moment increased his visibility and risk; Dom funded and pursued a book project, “How to Save the Amazon, Ask the People Who Know.”
Notable examples
Mixmag’s coverage of jungle/drum and bass and “progressive house,” investigations into racist door policies and drug-driving; Dom’s “Sasha, Son of God” cover controversy; Dom’s JBS supply-chain reporting (illegal cattle from deforested land); Bolsonaro’s breakfast confrontation in Brasilia; Dom’s final planned trip to the Javari to meet Bruno.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Rise of Rave Culture
0:32 to 2:57
Exploration of the rave culture's emergence in the UK during the 90s.
“That's essentially the two combustible ingredients in the story.”
Inside Mixmag: The Pirate Ship
2:57 to 6:00
A look at Mixmag magazine's chaotic yet vibrant culture under Dom's leadership.
“more pronounced than when he's in conversation with someone interesting.”
Dom's Transition to Brazil
6:00 to 7:27
Discussion on Dom's life changes and his move to Brazil for a new perspective.
“Not so much the brashness and the belligerence, I think he'd mellowed a bit by then.”
Embracing Brazilian Life
7:27 to 8:20
How Dom reinvented himself and became part of the Brazilian culture.
“And so to write the book, he thought, well, I could do that anywhere.”
Friendship and First Impressions
8:20 to 10:49
Personal anecdotes from friends about their first encounters with Dom.
“the new people, the new spirit of those people, you know, really transformed him in lots of ways, I think.”
The Dance of Life
10:49 to 14:00
Reflections on Dom's love for music, dancing, and living in Brazil.
“and laughed about that that's just who he is I met Dom in 2013.”
Dom's Unique Journey into Journalism
14:00 to 14:43
Explore how Dom's journalism career evolved in Brazil.
“Horrible, but when you looked at him doing it, what did you think?”
The Impact of Mining on the Amazon
14:43 to 18:08
Learn about the environmental and social consequences of mining in the Amazon.
“Dom's journalism career followed quite a strange path.”
Bolsonaro's Election and Its Ramifications
18:08 to 20:07
Understand the political shift in Brazil with Bolsonaro's presidency.
“and begins to change into a different kind of ecosystem, a savanna, possibly even a desert if things go really badly.”
Dom Confronts Bolsonaro
20:07 to 21:56
Discover Dom's bold encounter with Bolsonaro on environmental issues.
“of Bolsonaro's term, everything that we had feared started to come to pass.”
Show all 15 chapters
Public Reaction and Its Consequences
21:56 to 24:38
Examine how Dom's confrontation affected his public perception and safety.
“He put on his suit and sat down at this rectangular table in the presidential palace.”
Dom's Ambitious Book Project
24:38 to 26:43
Learn about Dom's endeavor to write a book on the Amazon.
“that uh that bolsonaro um told off right and he'd be in the middle of the amazon doing a reporting trip like in a place that doesn't really have even consistent internet access and the people but I know you.”
The Final Reporting Journey
26:43 to 28:00
Follow Dom's last crucial trip to the Javari region for his book.
“And by 2022, he'd done most of the reporting he needed to, but there was one more trip he thought he couldn't write the book without.”
The Journalist's Perspective on Danger
28:00 to 28:56
Discover the real dangers journalists face in the Amazon and the misconceptions about safety.
“was talking about the target on his back because of Bolsonaro, and I was trying to assuage those concerns and sort of downplay them.”
Investigating JBS and Environmental Concerns
28:56 to 29:57
Learn about the collaboration in reporting on JBS and their environmental policies.
“At the time, JBS said that the facts in the report did not correspond to the standards and processes adopted by the company.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Bruno Pereira:Hi, 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.
0:23Dom Phillips:We'll see you on September 1st with the new Today in Focus, but in the meantime, here is episode two.
0:31Bruno Pereira:The rave explosion was really about house music and techno meeting ecstasy. That's essentially the two combustible ingredients in the story.
0:41Kate Proctor:It's the early 90s and dance music is taking over the UK. It started in illegal raves in fields and abandoned warehouses.
0:50Bruno Pereira:Most of them have 5 ,000 plus people going to them. And they advertise turbo sound. That sort of got shut down by the police because they got wise to what was going on.
1:00Kate Proctor:In the short term, if we don't act effectively enough, then what will happen is that the people of Kent in the neighbourhood will have a disturbed night's sleep.
1:08Bruno Pereira:The energy from the raves had been kind of squashed a little bit and was coming indoors. And then the whole thing went back into clubs. And Mixmag grew to be a very powerful magazine because it had listings of every club in the country. long pre-internet this was an essential thing that you had to have so as this dance culture swept the uk mix mag was literally at the heart of it
1:44Bruno Pereira:i'm andy pemberton i'm frank broughton i'm bill bruster all old friends of don phillips
1:50Kate Proctor:and back then all writers for a dance music magazine that dom edited called mixmag
1:58Bruno Pereira:he was quite skinny and sinewy and he had a sort of i hate to say a leathery face but he
2:04Dom Phillips:was he was well worn leathery such a weirdly apt description don't you know i mean that sort of
2:12Bruno Pereira:like kind of well-worn kind of seen a lot kind of face it was really obvious that he'd already lived a life even though he wasn't particularly old i mean the thing about dom he was one of those people with a really broad smile that kind of cheshire cat smile and i think one of my abiding memories of dom is how when he got when he was talking to someone especially if he was asking a lot of questions he'd start bobbing up and down and i do remember him putting his hand on his heart when he's sort of hearing important answers to things was a sort of there was such a passion to him when he was doing this information seeking.
2:53Bruno Pereira:I don't know if that sounds so romantic, sort of like over-romanticised, but there was a sort of nervous energy to him that was never more pronounced than when he's in conversation with someone interesting. Mixmag was, I would describe it as a pirate ship. Rules were sort of there to be broken and people were sort of pulling in all different directions. It was pandemonium, really. He was a sort of steady captain, as much as you could be.
3:22Kate Proctor:Under Dom's leadership, Mixmag covered the emergence of new genres. Jungle, drummer bass, and progressive house. A term he actually came up with.
3:37Bruno Pereira:He didn't invent the music, but he invented the genre, if you like.
3:42Kate Proctor:He ran investigations into racist door policies, gang activity and nightclubs, and even one into how drugs affect your driving, which was tested, believe it or not, on a disused airfield with real-life volunteers. Stopping distances, you know, while on E. He also documented the birth of a new industry.
4:03Bruno Pereira:This was the beginning of a professionalisation of it all. There was this new cast of DJs who were making a lot more money and doing a lot more traveling. And there's a brilliant story where Dom put Sasha on the cover.
4:19Kate Proctor:Sasha, arguably the very first superstar DJ. A guy who came to be known for jet-setting around the world and being paid huge fees for his sets.
4:29Bruno Pereira:There was all these stories like guys would want their girlfriends to go and kiss Sasha, and Sasha would have these girls kissing him with the permission of their boyfriends to get closer to the DJ. So there was this real stardom that some of these DJs were getting, but Mixmag kind of picked up on that and realised that this was something that they could run with. They interviewed Sasha and put his picture on the front cover
4:50Kate Proctor:with the headline, Sasha, Son of God.
4:56Bruno Pereira:There was this kind of mythologising of DJs. So they put Sasha on the cover and said, Son of God, and Sasha was actually really pissed off about this. I think he went berserk, actually. I think he was really, really angry about it. He didn't really want to be separated out into this kind of stardom thing. And there's a famous story where Sasha and Dom were queuing up for the Ministry of Sound and got in a fight. Because Dom never backed down. They ended up having a wrestling match outside the Ministry of Sound. Not an organised wrestling match. I mean, like a, you know, sort of shit fight. But Dom was a sort of certain belligerence with Dom.
5:36Bruno Pereira:but I think it gave energy to what he was doing and what he was writing about. And, you know, if you're trying to carve out a niche with a new magazine, you've got to stand your ground. You know, you can't just keep backing down.
5:59Kate Proctor:As I listened to that, I really recognised the Dom I met 20 years later in Rio. Not so much the brashness and the belligerence, I think he'd mellowed a bit by then. But the backbone, the commitment to his ideas. When Dom decided he cared about something, or that it really mattered, he went all in. And in the end, that was what set him on the path to the Amazon. I'm Tom Phillips, The Guardian's Latin America correspondent. And this is Missing in the Amazon. Episode 2, The Correspondent and the President.
6:50Kate Proctor:Dom was a victim of his own success. By the late 90s, he tripled the readership at Mixmag, and it was bought out by a huge international company. And that wasn't Dom's vibe.
7:00Bruno Pereira:He didn't want to become a sort of an executive businessman in a suit.
7:05Kate Proctor:This is Dom's sister, Sian. Around the same time Dom left Mixmag, his parents died and he and his first wife got divorced.
7:14Bruno Pereira:So that was a very difficult time for him. And I think during that period, he reflected on his life and he thought he wanted to do something bigger, you know, explore, travel again. And he decided to write a book about his experiences in the world of DJs and clubs and the very hedonistic lifestyle that he'd been living, or at least observing up until that point.
7:41Kate Proctor:My guardian colleague John Watts again.
7:44Bruno Pereira:And so to write the book, he thought, well, I could do that anywhere. So why not Brazil? Why not this place that I've always felt was full of all the things I like most in life? Great music, great football, great beaches.
7:59Kate Proctor:He realized, like, oh, this place is really nice. This place is awesome. This is Andrew Fishman, the editor of The Intercept Brazil. I'm one of Dom's best mates in Rio. There's so much here that I love and the culture and the music and, you know, Just the vibes are different. Dom finished writing his book about DJs, and then he just kind of stayed.
8:19Bruno Pereira:The new home, the new country, the new language, the new people, the new spirit of those people, you know, really transformed him in lots of ways, I think. In his new home, Dom reinvented himself.
8:32Kate Proctor:He moved from music journalism to hard news, and immediately he became this big social organiser for the foreign correspondent community. He started a legendary monthly get-together called Hack's Happy Hour, where stressed-out journalists would blow off steam, and which often finished in the early hours, a time of night Dom knew well. Whenever someone new came to town, Dom would be the one to welcome them.
8:57Bruno Pereira:We first met in 2012. I was the new Latin America correspondent for The Guardian, and I'd just arrived in Rio de Janeiro. and he reached out to me and said, look, why don't we meet? And we shared a cold beer or two close to the Lagoa, a very beautiful spot in Rio de Janeiro.
9:23Kate Proctor:What time did you get home that night?
9:28Bruno Pereira:Very late, I would imagine. One thing I remember was how extremely cool I thought Don was. But the other thing I remember very strongly was that if you got into a conversation with Dom, he would pepper you with questions. And particularly if he found one subject of interest, he would just lock his eyes on you, like piercing blue eyes that he had, and then just grill you on this subject so that he could learn everything he could about it. so that's actually kind of funny because when i first met dom i really didn't like him i really didn't like him because i was here working on the snowden revelations and he was a you know a daily journalist that was that was in rio and so obviously he had to do a lot of coverage of it whether he wanted to or not and he was very curious and there was lots of questions and there's stuff going on and so the first time that i ran into him at some journalist uh event he just cornered me and started questioning me and drilling me and it was like an interrogation and I was like who is this guy and who does he think he is like why is we're supposed to be hanging out and chilling and and he's you know I got my beer in my hand and he's just you know raking me over the coals here and then years later we ended up becoming very very good friends and laughed about that that's just who he is
10:59Dom Phillips:I met Dom in 2013. In the first moment, it was just a nice guy in a party.
11:08Kate Proctor:Dom's wife, Alessa Ampailu.
11:11Dom Phillips:I think a curious guy asked me about my life, my, well, what I'm working and what my passions, what I think about the music, what I think about people in the party. It was a strange party with strange people and bad music. And just this. And the magical thing is the next day we met on the beach. By coincidence. Yeah, coincidence. dance and it was actually amazing wow how interesting guy wow actually nice guys yeah he's a handsome wow and he said to me then that he thought the same wow interesting girl and that's it we we met every day we talk every day many times a day it's it was so strong this connection and it's difficult to put in words because it's something like it's a very special symphony about everything about plans of life about opinions about art about music about everything and music was a music absolutely Absolutely, absolutely.
12:47Dom Phillips:Absolutely, because he was in love about music. We were all the time at home, dancing together and singing. He was cooking and drinking some beer and dancing. We were dancing all the time.
13:08Kate Proctor:I didn't know he was a dancer. That's a rare quality for an English man. Yeah.
Read the full transcript
13:18Kate Proctor:And where did you live here in Rio?
13:20Dom Phillips:In Santa Teresa.
13:22Kate Proctor:They chose, or Dom chose, as they said, to live in Santa Teresa, which is the bohemian, you can see it, it starts at that hill and covers the mountaintops moving towards the city center and it's the bohemian district. The carnival there is fantastic.
13:41Dom Phillips:And samba. Samba. Yeah. Even if it's not carnival. Samba all the time.
13:49Kate Proctor:Could Dom dance samba?
13:51Dom Phillips:Yeah.
13:52Kate Proctor:Really?
13:53Dom Phillips:Yeah. But, yeah. But he dancing quite bad. And no shame. That is amazing. He didn't care. He just cared, oh, I'm enjoying a lot.
14:11Kate Proctor:He did the arms. Dancing samba.
14:13Dom Phillips:Yeah, something like this. Horrible.
14:16Kate Proctor:Horrible, but when you looked at him doing it, what did you think?
14:19Dom Phillips:No, horrible in any culture, I think, because he had no idea about how to dance samba. But it doesn't matter.
14:28Kate Proctor:And that's beautiful, right? Yeah. Despite being horrible.
14:33Dom Phillips:Yeah.
14:43Kate Proctor:Dom's journalism career followed quite a strange path. When he first moved to Rio, he was constantly scratching around for stories. He wrote for all kinds of publications, football magazines, newspapers. The gig that paid best and that kept a roof over his head was for Platts, the trade magazine for the oil industry, which is pretty weird to think about when you know where Dom ended up. gradually his work became more political and more investigative but there was one reporting trip he did that changed everything it was a piece for the washington post about the world's biggest iron ore
15:20Bruno Pereira:mine a place in the amazon called carajas and it's just spectacular just spectacular not in a good way. Dom described it as a scar of red earth in the green hills. And he saw, for the first time,
15:40Kate Proctor:the horrific damage that mining was doing to the land, but also to the people who lived there. And it made this profound impression on him.
15:48Dom Phillips:It was a huge impact for him, especially the impact of the villagers and the indigenous communities around the mining.
15:58Kate Proctor:And afterwards, he was obsessed and really threw himself into reporting on the Amazon.
16:05Bruno Pereira:Dom wrote stories about land speculation, illegal land grabbing, cattle ranching, illegal mining, illegal logging.
16:14Kate Proctor:His reporting often took him to incredibly edgy, dangerous places, like San Felix de Shingu, a cattle town which is a real wild west. This is a place where, just to give you an idea, there are so many land conflicts leading to violence and murder that the local mayor had to ban motorcycle helmets because there were so many incidents of gunmen on motorbikes assassinating people, and they were using their helmets to hide their faces. And Dom travelled there for The Guardian to investigate the supply chain of a company called JBS,
16:48Bruno Pereira:which in theory is always making promises about removing deforestation from its supply chain.
16:57Kate Proctor:If you eat meat pretty much anywhere in the world, there's a very good chance you have eaten JBS meat at some point. They slaughter 13 million animals a day. And Dom's reporting showed that whilst JBS was promising to clean up its act, the company was actually still receiving and slaughtering cattle that was being illegally raised on deforested land.
17:22Bruno Pereira:And if that seems a little technical and obscure, consider this, the livestock industry in Brazil and land clearance in Brazil alone produces more carbon emissions and methane emissions than all of Japan.
17:43Kate Proctor:And so as Dom did all of this reporting in all of these different parts of this absolutely huge region, bigger than Europe, he started to see the bigger picture. How we were hurtling ever closer to something called the tipping point.
18:00Bruno Pereira:That's the stage when the Amazon is so degraded that it stops being a rainforest. It stops being able to produce its own moisture, its own rainfall. and begins to change into a different kind of ecosystem, a savanna, possibly even a desert if things go really badly.
18:22Kate Proctor:And honestly, that absolutely terrified him, as did what happened next.
18:47Bruno Pereira:Jair Bolsonaro took a call of congratulations from Donald Trump and promised to make Brazil great again with this Bible as his guide.
18:58Kate Proctor:I think as happened in the United States in 2016 with Trump's election, a lot of voters felt disillusioned, fed up, and they felt like electing someone they thought was an outsider, even if, frankly, Bolsonaro wasn't, who could blow up the political establishment, who could do something new. And that for the environment was extraordinarily concerning because he was a man who had served during the dictatorship in the army. I think that period imbued in him this philosophy, dictatorship era philosophy, that the Amazon was a resource that needed exploiting whatever the cost. so one of the things he did as a congressman was campaign publicly for brazil's biggest indigenous territory the anabami territory to be gotten rid of on one particularly outrageous occasion he said that it was a shame that brazil had not treated its indigenous populations like the us where the cavalry had been sent in to wipe them out so when he's elected for somebody like Dom, it was a horrifying prospect.
20:06Kate Proctor:And as the days, weeks and months passed at the beginning of Bolsonaro's term, everything that we had feared started to come to pass. Environmental criminals who had been laying waste to the Amazon region suddenly felt they had the green light from the president of Brazil to speed up their activities. And the destruction accelerated. Two billion trees were chopped down during Bolsonaro's four years in office. Two billion trees. It's amazing, isn't it? Two billion trees. And I think beyond the environment, even in the first few months of 2019, we felt the mood in the country start to shift. And there was this very unnerving, intolerant, belligerent, violent mood.
21:03And he was the great maestro, the conductor, kind of organizing this big orchestra of hostility.
21:35Bruno Pereira:He had this incident that was very scary for him and really changed the way that he thought about things.
21:44Kate Proctor:I remember a few months into Bolsonaro's presidency, Dom sent us an email saying that Bolsonaro was going to host foreign journalists for a breakfast in Brasilia, and he'd been invited. And off he went. He put on his suit and sat down at this rectangular table in the presidential palace. It was on the record. They were recording.
22:06Bruno Pereira:And he was two seats away from Bolsonaro. He thought afterwards that this was some sort of clear setup, that they had planned this. I think they gave him the first question or one of the very first questions.
22:19Kate Proctor:And Dom decided to confront him about the damage that was being done to the environment. Brave soul.
22:31Kate Proctor:So Dom says, very politely, how do you hope to convince the international community that you are serious about protecting the environment? And as he speaks, too, I think looking at the images now there are two things. One is that Dom doesn't look at Bolsonaro once as he delivers the question. And the other is just the complete look of disdain on Bolsonaro's face as he listens to this question and prepares to respond. Puts his hand on his nose.
23:05Bruno Pereira:And then when Dom's finished, he turns. And Bolsonaro seemed completely prepared for this question, and he immediately just leaned into him and said,
23:23Bruno Pereira:You stupid foreigners need to understand that the Amazon is Brazilian. It's not yours.
23:30Kate Proctor:He says no one in the world has got the right to talk about the Amazon. No country protects more than Brazil protects.
23:39Bruno Pereira:Bolsonaro's media team clipped this and put a headline on it. It said something like, Bolsonaro owns foreign journalists.
23:51Kate Proctor:And those images quickly went viral on social media. And I think progressives cheered Dom on and thought, well done for challenging him over the damage that's being done to the environment. But the far right also latched onto those images as proof that Bolsonaro was this great, charismatic nationalist who was sticking it to the world and would damn well protect the Brazilian Amazon because it was no one else's business what was going on. And goodness knows how many people saw those images, but it turned Dom, for better or worse, into kind of an overnight celebrity here. And depending on which side of the political divide you were on, you either cheered him or you cheered at him.
24:27Kate Proctor:And I remember he was very unsettled.
24:30Bruno Pereira:the most random people knew who he was uh people that were in that that information ecosystem so one of the guys at the bar and like right outside of his house in in rio said hey you're that guy that uh that bolsonaro um told off right and he'd be in the middle of the amazon doing a reporting trip like in a place that doesn't really have even consistent internet access and the people but I know you. You're that journalist. You're that journalist that Bolsonaro destroyed. Yeah, you're the one that was talking about taking the Amazon from us. And you just see how the whole thing was being twisted.
25:10And when you are a journalist
25:12Bruno Pereira:that's going into places that don't have very strong rule of law, where you know that there's land conflict and violence, and you're going there to talk about the most powerful people in town committing crimes, you don't want to be recognizable.
25:36Kate Proctor:I think he was spooked. I think he was worried. I think he was determined that it wouldn't stop him doing his work and that his way as a journalist of responding to this moment was just to get out there and report on it. And I think it was around that time that he started having this idea that he wanted to do something more ambitious. bigger pieces of writing, and perhaps even write a book about the things he was cataloguing in his immense collection of notebooks. The working title was How to Save the Amazon, Ask the People Who Know. He went away, put together a proposal, managed to secure a grant, and stepped back from daily news journalism to concentrate on the book, and set off on this very ambitious sequence of trips.
26:23He went all over the Amazon, exposing the people threatening the forest
26:28Kate Proctor:and meeting the people who were trying to resist. He gave everything to get it finished. Once he'd spent the grant money, he borrowed more, took out loans, and that's how important this was to him. And by 2022, he'd done most of the reporting he needed to, but there was one more trip he thought he couldn't write the book without. The trip to the Javari. The place where pretty much every threat against the Amazon was present in a single place. He had a call from Bruno, who he'd met on a previous reporting trip back in 2018, when they'd spent the best part of a month together in the depths of the Javari jungle.
27:11Kate Proctor:Now Bruno was inviting him to see how bad things had gotten since then, and what they were trying to do about it. So I suspect he I suspect he would have seen the trip as kind of the crescendo of five or six years of really intense reporting on the region. If the idea of the book was how to save the Amazon and ask the people who know without a shadow of a doubt one of the people he felt did know was Bruno.
27:48Kate Proctor:Often, before Dom set off on these long Amazon trips, he and Andrew would discuss the risks that might be involved.
27:54Bruno Pereira:I remember very distinctly having this conversation with Dom, again, on a paddleboard, where he was talking about the target on his back because of Bolsonaro, and I was trying to assuage those concerns and sort of downplay them. It's like, but, man, you're a gringo, you've got blue eyes, people look at you and they know that like if I'm gonna mess with this guy I'm it's probably gonna cause more trouble than it's worth so I'm not gonna do that and he said no that's not true when you go out into the middle of you know the Amazon deep deep into the forest those people they just know that you're there and either you're you know a threat or you're not and so you can't depend on that you know you're you being a gringo protecting you.
28:46Bruno Pereira:Turns out that he was right and I was wrong.
28:55Kate Proctor:Dom's reporting into JBS was a collaboration between The Guardian, Reporter Brazil, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It was published in 2019. At the time, JBS said that the facts in the report did not correspond to the standards and processes adopted by the company. A spokesperson said, JBS has a responsible purchase policy for raw materials and does not purchase animals from farms involved in deforestation of native forests, invasion of indigenous reserves or environmental conservation areas or that are embargoed by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources.
29:39Kate Proctor:Ibarma.
29:47Bruno Pereira:On the next episode, I said, look, this place is dangerous. There is risk. When you're on the river, you keep moving. I said, you do not stop.
