Brazilian Amazon: A Black Hole for Journalists

While traveling via cargo boat down the Amazon in Brazil last year, I felt a sinister vibe as we passed a massive riverbank factory, billowing its plumes of yellow smoke into the jungle night sky. 

It looked menacingly efficient in its job to harvest raw materials and the type of place you just wouldn’t want to approach with a camera and recorder, asking tough questions.

In June, a British journalist named Dom Phillips was boating further west through Brazil’s Javari Valley, researching illegal deforestation for his upcoming book, How to Save the Amazon. The valley is reported to be a lawless region, pervaded by violent criminals intent on extracting resources from the jungle.

Phillips, 57, a former Guardian reporter, was traveling with indigenous expert Bruno Pereira onboard their small metal craft. The pair had just crossed a threshold into the world’s largest repository of uncontacted peoples. 

Then they vanished. 

According to the Guardian’s reporting, Phillips and Pereira were ambushed by criminal fishermen, shot, dismembered, and buried in a nearby patch of jungle. Ten days later, their remains were recovered in a makeshift grave. 

“Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira have been killed in an undeclared global war against nature and the people who defend it,” wrote Phillips’s friend and fellow journalist Jonathan Watts. “To my mind, this made him a 21st-century war correspondent as well as a witness to a crime that probably led to his death.” 

Phillips is not the first journalist to meet such a fate. Reporters Without Borders has tallied at least thirty killings of media workers in Brazil between 2010 and 2020. That’s a fraction of the more than three hundred environmental workers killed in the country during a similar period. 

These death tolls make the Brazilian Amazon one of the world's deadliest areas for environmental defenders, a virtual black hole. At a time when saving the planet is more urgent than ever, shining a light on ecological crimes is also more dangerous than ever. 

Of course, large-scale deforestation in the Amazon is no new trend.

The gritty port city of Manaus serves as the capital of the Amazonas. It became famous for its rubber boom in the late 1800s as European colonists began harvesting rubber trees, enslaving and eradicating indigenous tribes in the process. 

The boom was so successful that a massive Parisian-styled opera house was erected in 1896, ominously named The Amazon Theatre. A Belle Époque opera house, replete with 198 chandeliers, may be the last thing you expect to find in the Amazon. But it’s there, it’s massive, and the Fat Lady still sings during performances of Il tabarro, aka ‘The Cloak’ by Giacomo Puccini at the Amazon Opera Festival.

A century after the rubber boom, Chanel, the French luxury fashion house, decimated the Rosewood Tree from the jungle to extract oils for its “Chanel N°5” fragrance. By the late 1980s, thanks to Chanel and various upscale soap manufacturers, the Rosewood was on the endangered species list.

Now, amidst a climate of impunity created by President Jair Bolsonaro, new frontiers of iIllegal deforestation have emerged. Bolsonaro has promised and delivered lower corporate taxes, fewer regulations, and less interference in the Amazon. The remote Javari Valley, where Phillips and Pereira were traveling, has been a prime target.

"Two people in a boat, in a region like that, completely wild – it's an unadvisable adventure," said President Bolsonaro when asked about Phillips' disappearance. "Anything can happen."

Bolsonaro’s statement is a clear warning for journalists and environmentalists who want to continue Phillips’ legacy: “Keep out.”

While there has been no official announcement for the posthumous publication of Phillips’ book, Rebecca Carter, his literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit, said: “I feel hopeful that some of his book can be salvaged and published, and I know that there are many excellent and skilled people who want to help make that happen, to make sure that all the work that Dom did, and the risks he took, have not been in vain.”

The timing and need of such a book is critical. A report released in July showed deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest reaching a record high, as an area five times the size of New York City was destroyed in the first half of 2022 alone.

“Those who control the Amazon don’t want it preserved,” Ane Alencar, science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, told the Associated Press.  “The standing forest has no value in today’s Amazon.