He was killed in the Amazon, but they didn't silence him: friends and colleagues finish journalist Dom Philips' book

Barcelona"As soon as we heard Dom was dead, there was no doubt in our minds that we would finish his book." Jonathan Watts, Amazonian environmental correspondent for the The Guardian, He remembers his colleague and friend Dom Phillips, who was killed three years ago on a jungle expedition while researching his book. How to save the AmazonOn June 5, 2022, Phillips disappeared while traveling with Brazilian indigenist Bruno Pereira along the Itaguaí River through the Javarín Valley, one of the largest indigenous areas in Brazil. Police began searching for him, and a campaign led by the journalist's wife, friends, and colleagues added pressure, but it wasn't until June 12 that they finally succeeded. the confession of the guilty parties, which would lead to the location of the bodies of the two men.

They had been killed the same day they disappeared. But they hadn't succeeded in silencing them. the book has been able to be published Thanks to the efforts of his friends and colleagues, in a project coordinated by Watts and four other journalists with contributions from around 500 donors, who have made it possible to publish it in English and Portuguese, he had left three and a half chapters written, and a pile of notes and interviews conducted by the writers, Brazilian Amazon specialist Eliane Brum, who picks up the pen where Phillips left it and writes the fifth chapter, and closing with the indigenous leader Beto Morubo, from the Javarí Valley, author of the last chapter. A photograph of two wooden crosses, one with the name Dom Phillips and the other with that of Bruno Pereira, nailed to the place where they were murdered on June 5, 2022, separates the pages written by the journalist and those completed by his colleagues. interviewing a fisherman carrying a child in his arms. The police believe it was that man who betrayed them, and that after that interview, he reported the presence of the two investigators in the area. "The image is a consolation," Watts writes in the introduction to the posthumous book, "because it confirms that Dom was doing what he most enjoys: paying attention, caught in the moment, trying to understand an important and complex conflict, asking questions of those who know it best." The conflict was between the fishermen who fish illegally in the protected area as indigenous people and the people of the Javarí Valley.

And it was those illegal fishermen who killed him. The real target was Bruno Pereira, an indigenist hated for his tireless fight on behalf of Indigenous peoples, and Dom's murder was simply intended to eliminate an inconvenient witness. A witness who, until just a few minutes before, had been trying to understand his point of view. "He always spoke to both sides. The day before, he had spoken to the Indigenous people, and today he was speaking to the invaders. He wanted to have all sides of the story because he knew it was a complicated issue," Watts explains. "The Amazon is like that. Sometimes it seems there must be good and bad: the farmer (landowner farmer) rich and white against the poor indigenous, that's the cliché. But the reality is much more confusing. Sometimes, people who start on one side cross over to the other. In this case, many of the fishermen who enter the indigenous territory of the Javarín Valley do so because they had been fishing there for more than 50 years, but the demarcation of that area as indigenous territory left them without that source of income, "and the government didn't give them any compensation," he explains. The murder of the two men, he says, was led by a Peruvian who calls himself "El Colombiano" (The Colombian), who has made so much money from his business that he bought a much more powerful boat than the one Dom and Bruno were driving. "Buy_SLT_LNA" "There are two people in custody, but almost the entire town helped move the c.

"It was very painful to visit those places and imagine what Dom went through, how that hostile boat with armed men had chased them, in a race they couldn't win," says Watts, who visited the Javari Valley to write chapter 10 of his friend's book. The two killers—arrested and still awaiting trial—explained that they had shot Pereira three times and then shot Phillips in the chest, who raised his hands and screamed. No.

"There are two people in custody, but almost the entire village helped move the bodies. That night, some of the villagers were celebrating Bruno's murder, the police told me," Watts recounts. But the killers didn't count on the huge media attention the murders garnered. "Unfortunately, most of the attention was because Dom was a foreign journalist. In the Amazon, dozens of people are killed to defend the rainforest and their villages, and most cases aren't made public," Watts admits. He also acknowledges that all this backlash, despite having achieved legal proceedings, hasn't improved the situation in the Javari Valley. The conflict remains entrenched. "Perhaps the message that has remained is that if you kill a journalist, other journalists will make sure the story gets out anyway," he notes.

Watts assures that they have tried to be as faithful to Phillips's original idea as they could. The title was also the one he had chosen. How to save the Amazon, but Watts highlights the subtitle: Ask who knowsThat is, "to the indigenous people, to the farmers, to the fishermen, to everyone," he notes, creating a book aimed at providing solutions. "Each chapter is a solution," he argues, from government policies to ecotourism or indigenous self-defense processes, including international finance. "I would say this book is unique because it is very comprehensive and written in a very accessible way, like travel literature," he summarizes. Watts makes no secret of his desire to translate it into more languages, "perhaps Catalan?"