Missing in the Amazon: the protector and the poacher – episode three

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 the 1st with a new Today in Focus, but in the meantime here is episode three.

0:40It was a warm afternoon at the end of the Javadi Valley's rainy season, April 2022, about two months before the disappearance of Dom and Bruno. Bruno was going along the river with his colleague Tataku, who was driving their boat.

0:58It was just the two of us, me and Bruno. As they approached one of the villages along the riverbank, Bruno asked Tatak would to get close to the shore and to cut the engine so he could take a photograph that he wanted to send to Dom. A photograph of the thick-set, dark-haired fisherman who was standing outside his house, looking right at them and holding a gun. As they neared the village, the man raised the gun and pulled the trigger. He just missed. The lead shot landed just near our bullet.

1:45Tatako revved the engine and they sped away.

1:51The shooter was no stranger, far from it. It was Pelado. A man they'd been investigating for months. A man who hated Bruno and everything he stood for. A man who Bruno considered so dangerous that he wanted Dom to know what he looked like before he arrived in the Javari.

2:16It was all getting so tense. He was not afraid of us, but we were not afraid of him either.

2:29It was like we were going into battle.

2:36This is the story of two men. Bruno and Pelado. two men moving into each other's orbit closer and closer until they collide in the most catastrophic way.

2:52I'm Tom Phillips, The Guardian's Latin America correspondent. This is Missing in the Amazon. Episode 3 The Protector and the Poacher

3:17Let's start with Bruno. He was 30 when he first arrived in the Javadi Valley in 2010. He was starting a new job at FUNAI, the government agency responsible for protecting Brazil's indigenous peoples. He'd passed an entrance exam to get the job, which had not been easy. But the real test began when he turned up for his first day at work. Bruno had to be approved by Funai's senior manager in the area, an indigenous leader called Beto Marubo. He was short but sturdy and had a warm, boyish smile that belied his ability to overcome difficult situations in the rainforest. Beto is from the Marubo people and was born and raised in a village deep in the jungles of the western Javari.

4:09When I met up with Beto, we spoke in Portuguese. So what you'll hear from now on is going to be spoken by an actor. Bruno wasn't from the rainforest. He'd mainly grown up in a city on the coast. But Beto was born here. And he was sent into the jungle by his village elders for two years at the age of ten. Ten.

4:33I learned the art of hunting. how to track, to understand smells, how to camouflage myself, knowing the terrain, every kilometer of it. By the time Bruno arrived in the Javari, Beto had 30-odd years of experience in the forest. And that was the guy that Bruno needed to impress. Beto was excited about the prospect of meeting the new recruits. But one of his colleagues said, Maybe don't get too excited.

5:10And I said, why? They're new, but they have some factory defects. When I got there, fuck. Beto was horrified. So, there was this one girl who was overweight, obese. There was Bruno, huge, really tall, and he was fat too. there was another guy who had a problem with his leg. I called to the headquarters in Brasilia and I said, man, I don't understand. You guys had a recruitment contest for the jungle and you sent me a huge guy who's almost two meters tall. You sent me a woman who can't fit in a canoe. I mean, fuck.

5:55Beto is thinking he can't work with this. one recruit who seems too big to fit into a canoe, and Bruno, a giant, around 6 '3", is far too tall. My father came to town and I told him about it. I said, look at this guy, Bruno. His head is going to get tangled up in the vines and he's not going on an expedition with me. And my dad said to me, hey, sit down. Look, as chief, I've learned to read people's souls. I'm 80 years old, so I know people. The big girl, she's stronger than you. And that tall guy, Bruno? Yes, he is tall. But look, he has a soul. And his soul is beautiful. So I had to call the headquarters again and I said, hang on a minute, let's see if these guys are really any good.

6:51I called to Brazil and said, let's see if they're going to pay. And my father went home. After he put the phone down, Beto came up with a plan. He was going to put Bruno through his paces. If Bruno failed, fine, they'd have to replace him with someone better. So, step one, the reading test. In the FUNAI library, you know, there were those doctoral theses by anthropologists. They're like this big, seriously. So I grabbed one of them and I said, Bruno, I want you to read this. If you're going to work in Dejavari, you're going to need to know this stuff. So Bruno goes off with one of these huge books and spends the next few weeks reading.

7:36And he comes back and says, yeah, read it. How interesting. And then he starts talking about all of these technical aspects of the paper. I'll admit that that did impress me.

7:52Step two, the jungle test. I said, look, I'm going to take you into the forest. My dad said you have a beautiful soul, but I want to see if you have a beautiful body too.

8:08We're going to go into the jungle for two months. He was like, but two months? I said, yes, to work with us, you have to go into the forest. Oh, and one more thing. you are going to carry the radio.

8:29He hands Bruno this huge old-school radio transmitter with a really heavy battery. And the other indigenous guys were like, what are you doing? This guy is going to die. I said, let's see. So Bruno marches into the forest and, according to Beto, just does not stop.

8:54It was like he had a lithium battery in his belly. He didn't have the physical ability, but he adapted his physique with his intelligence. He was so amazing walking in the forest that the other indigenous guys in the group couldn't quite believe it. We got back to my village and the elders were asking, did he make it? And the other guys were like, yes, he made it. He's strong, very strong. That's where our friendship was born. That same year that Bruno began his friendship with Beto, he meets his future wife, Beatriz, too. She's an anthropologist and was working in the region. I remember a lot of his image.

9:40He was sitting in a bar with a car, smoking. It was 2010. I remember it very well. It was some bar in Tabatinga. There was a football game on TV. He was sitting there in flip-flops, smoking. Beatriz got to know Bruno, this serious, sentimental guy who'd read poetry and listen to old folk music and cry a lot, but who was also just brimming with life.

10:19He'd cook at our house He would take a huge pan filled with oil Frying fish, drinking beer all day Eating shrimp, talking loudly Laughing loudly But Beatriz also noticed that Bruno was changing As he learned more and more about the Javari He had this deep connection with the forest He just loved being with the indigenous people, doing what they did. He learned to speak multiple indigenous languages and became so respected that he was given a name in three different indigenous cultures, the Mayoruna, Marubu, and the Canamari. He was particularly close with the Canamari people, who called Bruno Tuyu, the name of a revered Canamari chief who was known for enduring ayahuasca well.

11:16In July 2018, our first son Pedro was born. He used to sing to Pedro a lot.

11:29He sang Pedro to Sleep. Pedro remembers it well.

11:37Yes, that song, it's really special for me. It comes from Kanamari Ayahuasca Rituals. It's about a macaw feeding her young, taking care of her baby.

12:03As Bruno approaches his 40s, it feels as though everything is coming together. He's found a woman he loves and a job he loves. But that job was complicated and dangerous. Bruno's role was to try to protect the Javadi, not just from fishermen and poachers, but loggers, drug traffickers and gold miners too, intercepting boats, seizing tons of illegal fish and meat. He would find mining barges hidden deep in the jungle and set fire to them. And that was costing the criminals a lot of money, tens of thousands of dollars at a time. It pissed them off. Bruno and Beto were like a double act.

12:49We shared the same soul for the same cause. We had a guiding principle to ensure that isolated indigenous peoples remained as they were, as was their right, and that under no circumstances would we allow the outside world to destroy that. As well as fending off criminal gangs, they'd lead expeditions deep into the jungle. to track the uncontacted indigenous groups, figuring out precisely where they were living and making sure nobody else could get near them. And it was on one of these missions that Bruno first met Dom, back in 2018. It was Beto's idea to invite Dom to the Javadi. By now, it was Bruno who was skeptical of outsiders, worried that they'd slow him down.

13:35I said to Bruno, from Dom, and... I actually told Bruno about them. I remember he was like, no, no, no, no, no, no gringos. I don't want to be a gringo's babysitter. But I said, Bruno, I need you to go with him. He's going to tell the world about all the issues we have here. And he was like, no, man, gringos are very weak. They can't handle it. But anyway, they did go on this expedition together. The expedition, deep into the indigenous territory, lasted weeks. Don was fit as a fiddle, a hiking enthusiast, famed among friends for his chiseled pecs. But in videos from the expedition, it's almost comical how much he's struggling to keep up with Bruno and the indigenous team from Fonai.

14:29In one of them, recorded by his friend and photographer Gary Carlton, it's absolutely pouring down. and Bruno and the indigenous guys elegantly tiptoe across this fallen tree trunk, spanning a scarily fast flowing river. And Dom tries to follow them and to do the same, and he almost falls in.

14:51Eventually he decides to admit defeat and sort of shuffles along the tree trunk, on his bum instead, to the great amusement of the indigenous kids there with.

15:06Dom, as always, takes it in good spirit and just looks at the kids and beams a huge smile at them. He doesn't give up. He makes it across the river and on they go.

15:24After the expedition, Bruno said to me, oh, I like Dom. And I said, really? Is that right? And he was like, yes, he's a good partner for us. And his wife, Ale, she told me that they start talking almost every day after that. They became friends. It was obvious from talking to Dom later that he'd come to kind of idolize Bruno. And he was far from the only one.

15:54He became the great indigenous protector of his generation. In his speeches, Bruno would say, this is my job, to protect this land and its isolated people. And I want to do it well. And if necessary, yes, I will give my own life.

16:19One of the people Bruno was risking his life to fend off was a man called Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira. better known by his nickname pelado which in portuguese means baldy baldy he told me was his nickname because that he was born without hair on his head that's journalist scott wallace who actually met pelado on a reporting trip to the javari in the early 2000s for the national geographic we were together for like two and a half months pelado is a big time poacher The word poacher might make you think of a guy in a boat with his rod dangling into the water trying to catch the odd fish. But that's not what we're talking about.

17:00This is a whole criminal operation. A crew of men armed with shotguns and willing to use them.

17:10You cannot understand Pelado and how he ended up doing that without understanding the history of the Javari. So I'm just going to give you an incredibly short, potted version of that. This area of pristine rainforest has seen many cycles of invasion and indigenous resistance over hundreds of years. It began in the late 1800s when the Brazilian government launched its first expeditions into the region, gunning down indigenous warriors as they tried to fight back. After that, the government encouraged an influx of rubber tappers, ancestors of people like Pelado, some of whom abducted indigenous women and children.

17:50Then came the loggers, who destroyed millions of trees. And in the 1960s, things accelerated as a military dictatorship took power. The works of the various points of the big roadway continue in a speed of speed. The machines became constant elements of the landscape. Its generals were paranoid about the foreign invasion of the resource-rich Amazon and wanted it to be occupied with even more people. They persuaded thousands more to move from all over Brazil. Most had never even stepped foot in the rainforest before. The slogan was, a land without men for men without land.

18:39Obviously a lie. This was never a land without men.

18:48When the dictatorship ended in the 1980s, this policy began to change. A campaign started for the indigenous to have their land back. Eventually, it became illegal for anyone else to even be there. The first thing the government did was to evict anyone who wasn't indigenous, which is where, for Pelado's family, the trouble started. Pelado and the others who were part of his community were non-indigenous people who had been forcibly removed from the Javerie Valley when the indigenous area was officially recognized and demarcated in the mid-1990s. And the way many of those people saw it, they'd never known anything different.

19:35Many families had lived in settlements within the rainforest for decades by this point. For them, this was home. And suddenly, the government, the very same government who had told them to come here, was clearing them out. The closer you get to the frontier, the greater the sense of injustice that permeates this settler community along the frontiers. Pilado and the people that he associated with kind of mirror more broadly this seething resentment toward indigenous people, toward the federal government, toward the institutions that seek to protect the environment. After being evicted from the territory, Pilado and his family resettled just outside its boundary line, in Ladario, a village of a few dozen precarious wooden houses on stilts on the banks of the Atakwai River.