It was supposed to be one of Dom Phillips ’last trips to the Amazon, the starting point of a book that would reveal all the lush complexity of the world’s largest rainforest.
Instead, it seems to have been a final chapter for both Phillips and his friend Bruno Pereira, an expert on indigenous peoples and a guide.
The couple was last seen on June 5, sailing across the brown waters of the Itaquai to the western Amazon. They never reached their final destination.
Phillips was a 57-year-old Merseyside journalist in the UK, Pereira, 41, the father of a two- and three-year-old boy from northeastern Brazil. They were united by a shared love for the Amazon, that epic expanse of green that dominates much of western and northern Brazil.
For almost two years, they traveled together, with Pereira accompanying Phillips on his reportage trips. Phillips was writing a book on sustainable development in the rainforest and the younger man was an impatient companion.
Pereira believed in Phillips’ project and opened the doors to the jungle and its people.
On a series of trips over the past four years, they got together in canoes and lined up their hammocks side by side among centuries-old trees. They shared meals with cans, shook hands with the silent passage of a monkey or a crocodile, and when one of them fell in the face of the murky waters of a river or swamp, the other he was there to take it out.
Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were filmed on the Amazon expedition in 2018: video
For many people, insects, rain, days without showers or proper food would be hell. For Phillips, it was heaven. He saw the wonder in the wet.
“I had a deep love, a respect, a fascination and a need to understand [the Amazon’s] complexity, “his wife, Alessandra Sampaio, told O Globo.
He could not have been further from his previous life. A former Independent on Sunday style columnist and editor of the music magazine Mixmag, Phillips came to Brazil in 2007 to find some peace to finish writing a book on radish culture.
But after clicking “send” to the manuscript of Superstar DJs Here We Go !, he never returned to the UK. Brazil had seized him and, in a short time, he had made a new career as a respectable foreign correspondent.
Much of his work was for the Guardian and the Washington Post, but when interest in Brazil waned in the late 2010s, he turned his hand to one of his true loves: the environment.
Phillips had always been an outdoor man, an avid hiker and paddleboarder, whose tense, drunken physique belied his 57 years. He loved the jungle and wanted to leave his mark with another book.
He chose to focus on the development and study of the Amazon, which projects work in the long run and which make the rainforest and the people who live there poorer.
“He said I want to be neutral there, I want to hear what people have to say,” Sampaio said. “He interviewed a miner, talked to people from the river, indigenous people, environmentalists. His proposal was to give voice to those voices that are not heard.
In Pereira he found someone who had been listening to those voices for years.
The couple became linked during a 2018 expedition to the region, when Pereira worked for Funai, the indigenous foundation of the Brazilian government. In an article on the trip, Phillips described how the team traveled 600 miles (950 km) by boat and walked more than 40 miles.
Pereira described, “wearing only shorts and flip-flops while crouching in the mud … he opens the boiled skull of a monkey with a spoon and eats his brain for breakfast while discussing politics.”
Funai is responsible for protecting Brazil’s 235 indigenous tribes, many of which have had little or no contact with the outside world.
For decades, the task has been to ensure that those people remain isolated, protected from the diseases, threats and burdens of external society.
The land they occupy, however, is coveted by loggers, hunters, miners and fishermen, and is valuable to drug traffickers and animals who see their remote waterways and hidden paths as ways to move the product.
As head of Funai’s division for isolated indigenous peoples, Pereira helped turn these areas into protected reserves where residents felt most secure.
But the job became much more difficult in 2019, when Jair Bolsonaro took over as president of Brazil. The former captain of the far-right army never hid his contempt for the natives; he once said it was a pity that the Brazilian cavalry was not as efficient as its genocidal American counterparts.
Bolsonaro’s support for the region’s miners and farmers was the antithesis of all that Pereira represented. When his team destroyed an illegal mining base on a Yanomami reservation in September 2019, it was the drop that placed the joy for the pro-trade camp, he said. He was forced to leave.
In order not to be defeated, Pereira found a new vocation soon after, working with Univaja, an indigenous rights organization in the area near the Brazilian border with Peru. That’s where he disappeared last week.