My search for the truth about the men murdered for trying to save the Amazon

Was it the thick Amazonian lianas swinging wildly towards our canoe that dragged me into the snake-infested waters of the River Jordan? Or, in the split second before those creepers came crashing down from the riverside, did I decide to abandon ship to avoid being yanked off the boat and impaled on a branch we were hurtling towards?

Looking back, I’m not sure. What I do know is that one Friday morning last month, I found myself battling to stay afloat after being launched headfirst into the river.

Beneath the water, I felt some kind of aquatic foliage wrap itself around my legs as I tried to kick my way out of trouble. As the vegetation pulled me back under, I panicked. “Stay calm! Stay calm!” shouted our skipper, a veteran Indigenous activist known as Tataco, whom I first met three years earlier during the search for my friend and colleague, the British journalist Dom Phillips, in the same corner of the jungle.

I kicked again and the underwater vegetation fell away. As I swam back towards our aluminium boat my thoughts turned to my work. “My phone! Take my phone!” I shouted to João Laet, the photographer accompanying me, reaching into my pocket below the water in an attempt to save my photos and recordings from the trip. João grabbed the device and I hauled myself back onboard, rattled but safe. Miraculously, the phone was still working.

The drama took place in late May, on the fourth day of a punishing week-long expedition into one of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon I have ever set foot in.

We had travelled to the deep south of Brazil’s Amazonas state to record the final episode of Missing in the Amazon, a new six-part Guardian podcast series investigating the disappearance of Dom and his Indigenous activist friend Bruno Pereira, in June 2022. It debuts today.

I’ve written this week’s Down to Earth to tell you all about it, and why finding out the truth about what really happened to Dom and Bruno matters. But first, this week’s most important reads.

Three years after Dom and Bruno were murdered, I wanted to know what – if anything – had changed in the region since the two vanished on the Itaquaí River, near the entrance to Brazil’s second-biggest Indigenous territory, the Javari valley.

How were the Indigenous activists, who Dom was reporting on when they were ambushed, faring in their quest to defend their rainforest home? Were their lives still threatened by the same criminal forces responsible for the disappearance of our friends?

What was Brazil’s new government – led by the leftwing politician Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – doing to rescue the Amazon and the Indigenous people who live there after four years of death and destruction under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro?

And what did the future hold for the world’s great tropical rainforest? What more could be done to protect this globally crucial ecosystem, almost 20% of which has been lost over the past half century? How, as Dom asks in his recently published book, could the Amazon be saved?

Since Dom and Bruno were murdered, we have made more than half a dozen trips to the Amazon, travelling thousands of miles by plane, helicopter, canoe and on foot in search of answers to those questions and – crucially – to find out what happened to them and why.

We have visited the place where they disappeared while they were travelling by river to Atalaia do Norte, and we have tracked the work of EVU, the Indigenous patrol group Bruno helped create.

We have spoken to the people closest to both men, charting how the lives of two men with very different backgrounds – a former Mixmag editor from England’s drizzly north-west and a nature enthusiast from Brazil’s sun-kissed north-east – converged in the Amazon rainforest three years ago. Among those who appear in the podcast are Dom and Bruno’s wives, Alessandra Sampaio and Beatriz Matos, speaking for the first time at length about their husbands and their legacy, as well as Dom’s brother and sister, Gareth and Sian.

Telling the story of Dom and Bruno has been physically draining and, at times, dangerous. During our final trip, we trekked about 60 miles through farmland and dense jungle to reach a snake-infested camp on the south-eastern border of the Javari valley. One day we hiked for more than eight hours, in torrential rain and searing heat, before slinging our hammocks in a deserted hacienda. The following day, I limped back to town with the help of strong painkillers and a crutch improvised from a fallen branch. On another occasion, we fled Atalaia do Norte in a taxi after being intimidated by a menacing man in a restaurant beside the port where Dom and Bruno had begun their final trip.

It has also been emotionally painful. I worked with Dom for four years before his murder – reporting together for the Guardian about the Bolsonaro-era assault on human rights and the environment – and we spent many hours discussing our passion for Brazil and the Amazon. Witnessing the search effort to find him and Bruno was the hardest mission I have ever faced. When we said goodbye after sharing our last ice-cold beer together one night in Rio, neither of us could have predicted what the future held.

But remembering and celebrating the lives of Dom and Bruno – and the causes they held dear – has also been an immense privilege. The courage, dignity and determination their families and friends and their Indigenous comrades have shown in the face of such terrible circumstances has been awe-inspiring and profoundly humbling.

In 20 years of reporting on natural disasters, humanitarian crises, urban violence and authoritarian regimes, rarely have I seen people respond to such tragedy with such decency and resolve. I am certain Dom and Bruno, wherever they are now, would be proud of them.

Missing in the Amazon debuts with episode one and two today, with new episodes every Monday.

Read more:

The good news

The bad news

Profiling an inspiring individual, suggested by Down to Earth readers

After the murders of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, their families and friends were insistent their work would continue. Their wives, Alessandra Sampaio and Beatriz Matos, respectively, have been the strongest advocates for their legacy. (They are pictured above with Weibe Tapeba, Brazil’s secretary of Indigenous health.)

Last June, Sampaio visited the site of her husband’s death two years on, to announce the Dom Phillips Institute, which will “honour the journalist’s legacy through educational initiatives raising awareness of the complexities and magnificence of the Amazon and its original inhabitants”.

Matos, an anthropologist, now works “to safeguard the lives and lands of isolated and recently contacted Indigenous groups” in the Amazon and beyond.

If you’d like to nominate a climate hero, email [email protected]

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Credit: Jamie Holte/The University of Edinburgh/PA

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For more Guardian coverage of tipping points, click here

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Credit: Jean-Christophe Bott/AP

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