RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian police have concluded their investigation into the 2022 killing of a former Washington Post contributor and his Brazilian colleague, officials announced Monday, alleging the homicides were ordered by the leader of a criminal organization that oversaw illegal poaching and fishing in a particularly remote and wild part of the Amazon forest.
Two years after the remains of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous rights activist Bruno Pereira were discovered deep in forest, police said they have concluded that their killings were an act of retaliation targeting Pereira.
“The investigation has confirmed that the killings were due to investigative work done by Bruno Pereira in the region,” the Brazilian federal police said in a statement. “The victim was acting in the defense of the environment and to guarantee the rights of Indigenous people.”
Pereira, who was on leave from his post with the government Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, had been leading an Indigenous scout team in an investigation of illegal poaching and hunting inside and around the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, the world’s largest repository of isolated peoples, which in recent years has been the target of illegal resource extraction.
The work had made him enemies among illegal fishermen and poachers. One was Ruben Dario Villar, police say, who led a local poaching cabal. Police say he provided munitions and financial resources to a crew of poachers along the Itaquaí River who resented the work by Pereira and his Indigenous scout team. After the illegal fishermen killed Pereira and Phillips — who’d been reporting on Pereira’s work — Villar allegedly “coordinated how to hide the bodies,” police said.
The police account added fresh details to a pair of killings that shocked Brazil and brought to international attention the ongoing criminal dismantling of the world’s largest tropical rainforest. It also underscored the risks that environmentalists, Indigenous advocates and journalists face in a forest that has long suffered from criminal impunity and absent law enforcement.
Brazil’s federal public ministry must now decide whether to file charges against Villar.
In June of 2022, Phillips, who stopped regularly contributing to the Post in 2016, traveled to the remote city of Atalaia do Norte as he reported a book on solutions to save the Amazon forest. His mission was to accompany Pereira, whom he’d met during a previous reporting trip for the British newspaper, the Guardian. The Brazilian activist was then directing a team of Indigenous river scouts collecting intelligence on illegal poaching inside the Javari Valley to pass it along to the authorities.
One of the criminal organizations that had come to Pereira’s attention was run by Villar.
“The action of the criminal organization resulted in socioenvironmental impacts, resulting in threats against environmental agents and Indigenous populations,” the police said in the statement.
In early June 2022, the men journeyed down the Itaquaí to spend several days with Pereira’s team. They were supposed to return to Atalaia do Norte on June 5, but they never did. Police and Indigenous peoples led a massive search for days, finding clues that ultimately led back to three fishermen who lived along the river in the isolated enclave of São Gabriel.
One of the fishermen, Amarildo da Costa Oliveira, led police to the bodies. He confessed that he and another fisherman, Jefferson da Silva Lima, had shot and killed Pereira and Phillips as the pair journeyed by boat to Atalaia do Norte. The poachers then burned, dismembered and hid their bodies deep in the forest, along with the help of other community members.
Oliveira and Lima have both been charged with murder. Their trial date has still not been set.
Villar has previously denied the allegations that he ordered the killings. Defense attorney Américo Leal, who is representing the fishermen, assailed the police allegations in a statement Tuesday to The Washington Post as “absurd.”
“This allegation by the police is old, and it’s still being mulled by the public ministry,” Leal wrote. He said the “conclusions” of the federal police had no “credibility.”
Phillip’s widow, Alessandra Sampaio, said she has been following the case, but declined an interview request.
“We want to know what will be the opinion of the federal prosecutor’s office,” she said.