At the western end of Brazil lies an immense strip of rainforest and rugged terrain accessible only by meandering brown rivers. Nestled along the border with Peru, the Javari Valley is almost the size of Portugal and is the largest refuge of the indigenous tribes living isolated from the outside world.
“Javari is one of the last true bastions of the primitive nature of the Amazon and the world,” said Scott Wallace, author of The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Uncontacted Tribes.
But the region is also a lawless area where criminals act with impunity, said Wallace, now an associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut.
Located along Brazil’s Amazon border with Peru, the Javari Valley Indigenous Reserve is the second largest in the country, with 85,000 square kilometers (33,000 square miles), almost as large as Portugal.
Javari’s tropical generosity has made it a hot spot for poachers, fishermen and illegal loggers, sparking violent clashes between indigenous peoples and riparian communities who fiercely opposed the creation of the reserve in 2001. It is also a smuggling route for cocaine traffickers who have benefited from the lack of state presence and the struggle for control of smuggling routes between Brazil, Peru and Colombia.
This was the scene where British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous lawyer Bruno Araújo Pereira disappeared on Sunday. They traveled along the Itaquai River, the main river access to the Javari Valley. A suspect has been arrested in connection with his disappearance, although police say they have not yet found any evidence of a crime in the case.
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The last decade has seen an explosion in drug trafficking through Javari’s hidden waterways as coca cultivation, the plant used to make cocaine, increased across the border into Peru.
Coca cultivation increased by almost 20% between 2019 and 2020 to 61,777 hectares (152,654 acres) in Peru, the second largest producer after Colombia, according to UN figures.
In turn, the growing drug trade has triggered a bloodbath on the triple border between Brazil, Peru and Colombia, as Colombian and Brazilian cartels struggle to control access to the Amazon River to send their cocaine to the lucrative market European.
General Mauro Esposito, a former coordinator of special border operations for Brazil’s federal police, said the triple border had become the most dangerous part of the country’s 10,492-mile-long border due to the increase. “mass” of the coca crop of Peru.
“From the 2000s onwards, there has been a movement of coca fields to Peru’s border with Brazil,” he said.
Esposito oversaw the arrest in 2014 of the famous cartel leader Jair Ardela Michué, alias “Javier”, who was personally responsible for at least 50 murders, including a Peruvian police officer. But the capture of the Peruvian capo in a joint Peruvian-Brazilian police operation did not stifle the bleeding.
Amazonas, the state where the Javari Valley is located, is now the most violent per capita state in Brazil after a 54% increase in the number of murders last year, according to a study on the website G1 news, the Brazilian Public Security Forum and the non-profit University. of Sao Paulo (AP).
“The Amazon is a battleground for a war between powerful criminal organizations,” a Peruvian police source said.
For years, the local band Family of the North, the São Paulo-based First Capital Command and the Rio de Janeiro Red Command fought for control of the Amazon. Since 2020, the latter has become dominant, according to security experts.
Colombian criminal factions, including militias made up of former dissident rebels, are also involved in the conflict, the police source said. “It’s a war with a lot of violence, a lot of cruelty.”
But the remote region is also a kind of refuge for uncontacted tribes. It is home to about 6,000 indigenous people belonging to 26 ethnic groups, 19 of whom live in isolation.
It was the pristine beauty of the Javari Valley that brought Wallace to the region two decades ago, when he accompanied legendary Brazilian explorer and indigenous advocate Sydney Possuelo on an expedition to track uncontacted tribes.
Many are descendants of survivors who “escaped slave raids and massacres in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” Wallace said. They fled to the “most inaccessible strongholds” of the desert shelter where the headwaters of many tributaries of the Amazon are located.
“Twenty years ago there were indications of an incipient penetration of drug traffickers in the region and especially in the areas surrounding the reserve,” he added. Today, he lamented that it was much worse, as the current Brazilian government showed much less interest in “exercising the rule of law.”
Jair Bolsonaro and his government “appear to be in favor of extractive activities that end up plundering the forest,” Wallace said, adding that the right-wing president’s position gave “ample leeway for criminal gangs to function.”
“They have ceded these territories to criminal operations.”
Environmental and indigenous rights groups have long argued that Bolsonaro’s public stance on indigenous territories has encouraged land invaders and criminal gangs to act with impunity.
“Bolsonaro’s narrative facilitates for many illegal mining and any use of the territory [extractive] activities, ”said Antenor Vaz, the former leader of the National Foundation of India of Brazil, Funai, in the area where the couple is missing.
Meanwhile, the Brazilian Congress is considering legislation that would open up indigenous lands to extractive industries, such as mining and logging, Vaz said.
“There is organized crime in the Javari Valley. State institutions do not fight it and do not do justice “, he added. “Criminals feel very empowered by the president’s speech.”