Brazil: Murders of Dom Phillips & Bruno Pereira Tied to Bolsonaro Dismantling Indigenous Protections

We look at the recent murders of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous researcher Bruno Pereira in Brazil's Amazon rainforest and what it says about Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who once vowed, "There won't be one more inch of Indigenous reserve." Phillips and Pereira went missing in June, and their remains were found dismembered about two weeks later. This week, a Brazilian Senate commission investigating the murders recommended a military operation in the Javari Valley to address the rise in organized crime there. Police have arrested five people linked to the murders and identified a suspect arrested earlier as the leader of an illegal fishing organized crime group in the Amazon region. "When the president dismantles public policies and public institutions that should serve Indigenous rights, when the government persecutes its civil servants whose mandate it should be to protect the Indigenous peoples and the policies applied to them, we become more vulnerable," says Indigenous lawyer Eliésio Marubo, who led a search and rescue mission for Phillips and Pereira and recently returned to Brasília after visiting with U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to call for an independent investigation into the murders.

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