A British reporter missing in the Amazon rainforest appears to have got caught up in a fight over illegal fishing in one of the planet’s last great wildernesses.
Dom Phillips, a veteran freelancer, went missing Sunday while on a trip to the Javari Valley, a huge forested corner of the Amazon near the border with Peru that is home to some of Brazil's last uncontacted Indigenous tribes as well as drug-smugglers and other outsiders.
Phillips, who is working on a book project about conservation, was traveling with Bruno Pereira, the former head of a regional government agency for Indigenous rights who has clashed in the past with miners, loggers, and illegal fishermen in the resource-rich area.
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The men’s disappearance was immediately reported by a local Indigenous group, but it took a series of emotional appeals from Phillips’ Brazilian wife, Alessandra Sampaio—“Even if I don’t find the love of my life alive, they have to be found, please,” she said in a TV interview—before the authorities lumbered into action and military and police units were sent to the remote jungle region.
Reuters reported Wednesday that police had quizzed a group of illegal fishermen, who were known to have clashed with Pereira in the past about fishing rights. One, identified as Amarildo da Costa, had been brought to the police station in handcuffs.
Guilherme Torres, civil police chief in Amazonas state, told the news agency that it was not known what had happened or whether the two men had definitely been attacked, but said Pereira was known to have recently received a threatening letter from a fisherman.
According to The Washington Post, Phillips and Pereira had been in contact during their trip with Orlando Possuelo, an activist who has trained Indigenous people on how to physically defend themselves against outsiders trying to plunder their land. Possuelo told the Post that they had encountered an illegal fisherman who had brandished a gun—an encounter Pereira was said to have filmed as evidence for the authorities.
Possuelo said he last heard from Pereira at 6 a.m. Sunday and had arranged to meet him and Phillips two hours later, but the pair didn’t show. Retracing their steps to their last location, he was told that the fishermen’s boat had been seen following the watercraft being used by the two men on the Javari river.
As a reporter, Phillips, 57, has covered a wide variety of subjects ranging from energy policy to football to electronic dance music, with his byline appearing in many of the world’s biggest newspapers.
More recently he has focused on the environment, chronicling the destruction of the Amazon rainforest in regular articles for The Guardian and subjecting the country's populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, to tough questions at official news conferences about his weakening of environmental protections in the Amazon basin.
In his own public comments about the men’s disappearance, Bolsonaro said he was praying they would be found, but made his view clear: that they should never been there in the first place. “Two people in a boat, in a completely wild region like this, is an adventure that isn’t recommendable for one to do,” he said. “Anything could happen—an accident could happen, they could have been executed—anything.”
