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🚷 Remote Amazon remains lawless
The Lula government promised security improvements in the Javari Valley indigenous land, where organized crime runs rampant and Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were murdered three years ago. But local leaders say the situation is just as bad as it was in 2022
Euan Marshall
June 05, 2025
INDIGENOUS LANDS
Dom and Bruno murders could happen again, say Javari Valley leaders
Sunset at the Javari River, the tributary of the Amazon River. Photo: Nowaczyk/Shutterstock
On this day in 2022, British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were brutally murdered on the outskirts of the remote Javari Valley indigenous land, on the northwestern edge of Brazil, adjacent to its triple border with Colombia and Peru. The case shocked the world and shone a light on lawlessness and organized crime in the most inhospitable ends of the Amazon.
The Javari Valley is Brazil’s second-largest indigenous territory, equal to the size of Austria, and is also home to the world’s highest concentration of uncontacted or recently contacted indigenous communities — 19 of which have been identified and named.
At the time Phillips and Pereira were murdered, the Javari Valley was one of the few places in Brazil to face a combination of almost all of the threats that plague the country’s protected indigenous lands — encroaching deforestation, illegal gold mining, logging, drug trafficking, arms dealing, poaching, organized crime and armed violence.
Three years later, indigenous leaders in the Javari Valley complain that the Brazilian government has done close to nothing to improve security and fight crime in the region — and that were Phillips and Pereira to embark on their research trip today, they would be murdered just the same.
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