Jon Lee Anderson on the murder of the British environmental journalist Dom Phillips and the Brazilian Indigenous-affairs expert Bruno Araújo Pereira, and the crisis created by Jair Bolsonaro’s politics.
. Within a couple of months, the dry-season burning of the southern Amazonian rain forest, caused mostly by land clearing for agriculture and cattle grazing, had raised a global alarm about the future of the vital area. Bolsonaro had fired the director of Brazil’s Institute for Space Research, which is responsible for charting the spread of forest fires, and defanged the Federal Police units tasked with going after illegal loggers and prospectors in the Amazon.
Bolsonaro’s actions have proved devastating for the Indigenous people in the Amazonian reservations, provoking a surge of invasions of their lands and a wave of killings of community leaders. A gold rush in the Yanomami reserve, on Brazil’s northern frontier with Venezuela, has seen as many as twenty thousandflood into the reserve.
Phillips and Pereira’s disappearance coincided with the Summit of the Americas, a conclave of hemispheric leaders, convened this year in Los Angeles and presided over by President. A number of leaders, including President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of Mexico, refused to attend, because Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua were not invited, but Bolsonaro showed up.
This past week, Carol Pires, a Brazilian journalist and a friend of Phillips’s, was grieving over the news of his and Pereira’s deaths, and what they meant for Brazil. She told me, “Bolsonaro has dismantled the laws on environmental protection, weakened the ability of prosecutors to work in the Amazon, and has stimulated illegal mining in Indigenous areas.
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