Ambushed in the Amazon: The inside story of a British journalist's brutal murder

Telegraph

24-05-2025

In a clearing in the Javari Valley, near a tiny fishing village called São Gabriel in a remote area of the Amazon rainforest, stand two roughly hewn wooden crosses. They bear the names of Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, an expert on Brazil's Indigenous people, and mark the spot where on 5 June 2022 Phillips and Pereira were ambushed and murdered while investigating illegal fishing in the area.
The Javari Valley Indigenous Reservation, 21 million acres of primary rainforest, is located on Brazil's borders with Peru and Colombia. It is home to about 7,000 Indigenous people, 2,000 of which are ' uncontacted ' – a higher concentration than anywhere else in Brazil. It is an area of ongoing, and often violent, conflict between Indigenous people and illegal loggers, poachers and fishers, a conflict made worse by traffickers, taking advantage of the lack of state enforcement to use the region's waterways as a route for smuggling drugs and guns.
It is a hazardous place, but Phillips was used to hazardous places. For seven years he had been travelling throughout the Amazon, reporting on the devastating impact of illegal deforestation, mining and fishing, talking with those exploiting the Amazon's natural resources – ranchers, landowners, speculators, politicians – and the Indigenous people, environmental activists, farmers and growers who are attempting to protect and preserve the land.
It was a place that Phillips had come to love – 'wild and serene in a thousand shades of green', he wrote, somewhere it 'felt like the future and past existed in the same place', its 'overwhelming sense of vastness both calming and a little unsettling' – while also reflecting in sorrow and anger on the ravages inflicted on the land and its Indigenous people. 'Its magnificence chills the stomach,' he wrote. 'Why would anyone want to destroy this? What could possibly justify such a monstrous act?'
At the time of his death Phillips was writing a book that would have been the culmination of his research, provisionally titled How To Save the Amazon: Ask the People Who Know. After he died, a group of friends and fellow journalists gathered together to honour his legacy and ensure his work would not be in vain, by completing that book.
It is published next week under the title How To Save the Amazon: A Journalist's Deadly Quest for Answers, and looks back on Phillips' work and the tragic and violent circumstances of his death.
Phillips grew up as far away from the Amazon as can be imagined. He was born in 1964 in Bebington, Cheshire, the son of a schoolteacher mother and an accountant father. After dropping out of higher education, he travelled around the Mediterranean and lived for several years in Denmark. Returning to England, he took up music journalism, writing for and becoming editor-in-chief of the dance music magazine Mixmag.
His work took him around the world covering the music scene in different countries, including Brazil. He fell in love with the country, and in 2007 he settled in São Paulo, freelancing for British newspapers and magazines and for a local wire service.
Tom Hennigan, the South America correspondent for The Irish Times, became a close friend after meeting Phillips at a monthly journalists' get-together. 'We just connected straight away,' he remembers. 'He was a quietly charismatic guy who made a lot of friends. Within a year of him being here in São Paulo everyone seemed to know him.'
Phillips loved the outdoors, and would organise weekend excursions with friends to hike in the rugged mountains behind the seaside town of Paraty. Hennigan went on a number of trips. 'And several people who went on one never went on another. They were pretty challenging. You really had to rough it.'
In 2012 Phillips moved to Rio de Janeiro. Brazil had been awarded the 2014 Fifa World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, and there would be an appetite for newspaper stories explaining life in the country to readers in the UK and US. In 2013, at a party, he was introduced to Alessandra Sampaio – Alê – a fashion designer.
'He called me the next day and invited me for a drink,' she tells me, on a video-call from Brazil. 'I said, no, I'm going to the beach, if you want you can come. And he said, absolutely. This charming guy. It was amazing – a magical meeting, very informal and very nice.' They married in 2015.
Phillips had travelled to the Amazon for the first time in 2004 as a tourist, but in 2015 he was sent on assignment by The Washington Post to the western state of Maranhão, to report on a team of forest guardians set up by the Guajajara, an Indigenous group, to protect their land from an invasion of loggers and ranchers, driving the Guajajara into ever smaller areas of virgin forest.
For Phillips it was the beginning of an obsession with the Amazon, and the threats that the destruction and exploitation of its natural resources posed to the land and its Indigenous people. When he came back, Sampaio says, he was 'absolutely in love. He was very impressed by their way of life and their culture. For Indigenous people it's not just a piece of land, it's your territory, where you have your ancestors, and the contact with nature, and nature for them is not just as we see it – it is family, you understand? You can fall in love with these people very easily. And Dom wanted more and more to know about them.'
'Dom was not the kind of person who did anything lightly,' says Jonathan Watts, who first met Phillips in 2012 when Watts was posted to Rio as The Guardian 's Latin America correspondent, and became a close friend. 'When he moved to Brazil, it was heart and soul in Brazil, and once he'd set his mind on doing something about the Amazon that was it.
'Dom was a real pen and notebook guy. When you look at all the photographs of him, sitting beside Indigenous people, there he is with a ring-binder notebook, listening intently to the person he was interviewing. He would pepper you with questions, and once he'd found an interesting subject you would be grilled on that, those really blue eyes on you – question, question, question.'
In 2020 his reporting on illegal deforestation was nominated for the Gabo Award for Journalistic Coverage – the most prestigious award in Brazilian journalism – and he was a finalist for the Vladimir Herzog Prize, named in honour of the Brazilian journalist and university professor, who was tortured to death by the military police in 1975.
That year, as Brazil went into lockdown, he began work on his book. He and Sampaio moved from Rio de Janeiro to Salvador in the northern state of Bahia, where life was more affordable. He'd received a grant from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, and an advance from a British publisher, but that was quickly exhausted, obliging him to borrow money from his family to tide him over.
'We didn't have much money, but he said, I have to do this,' Sampaio says. 'He was very committed to the Amazon cause, and most of all he connected with the people. I think he saw that he could be an ally in some way.'
An ally perhaps, but not an activist. 'He met a lot of activists and spent a lot of time with them,' Hennigan says, 'but he also wanted to speak to the people who have no option but to work in illegal activity in order to scrape a living.' Nearly half of the Amazon's 29 million residents are surviving on only $66 per month. 'That's the huge dilemma for any government trying to do something about the Amazon and deforestation. It is very difficult, while protecting the forest, to provide a sustainable living for the millions of people living there.'
'Dom had this ethical way of wanting to talk with everyone,' Sampaio says. 'He would say, Alê, who am I to judge someone for illegal activity if there is no other option to feed their family? The people who work in this illegal system know it's not good, but they have no choice.'
It was precisely this determination to listen to every side of the story that, tragically, led to his death.
The environmental effects on the rainforests of logging, cattle farming and mining have been catastrophic. Climate scientists talk of the 'tipping point' beyond which the Amazon region no longer produces enough moisture to maintain itself, and 'dies back' to become semi-arid savannah. By 2019, 17 per cent of the entire Amazon basin and nearly 20 per cent of the Brazilian Amazon was already deforested, bringing the tipping point to within 15 to 30 years or even less.
In 2019, the Right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, who had made climate change denial a central plank of his policies, was elected President of Brazil. His election effectively gave licence to the loggers, cattle ranchers and illegal miners and fishers to carry on their activities.
'Bolsonaro openly said that the Amazon was there to be exploited,' Hennigan says. 'He gutted all the agencies committed to protecting the environment, particularly in the Amazon. And there was an absolute boom in deforestation, mining, all of these things, and a significant uptick of violence in the region against Indigenous activists, environmentalists, and local people. So there was a feeling of impunity at that time in the Amazon.'
Phillips wrote to a friend that Bolsonaro's election presaged 'a very dark and worrying period, and it's only going to get worse. My sense is that it is also going to become more dangerous for journalists.'
According to the Vladimir Herzog Institute, nine reporters have been murdered and there have been 230 cases of violence against journalists in the Amazon since 2013, and incidents of violence more than doubled from 20 to 45 between 2021 and 2022, years when Bolsonaro was in office.
But while violence against journalists declined in 2023, the report noted that 'The Amazon is a territory increasingly controlled by criminal organisations.'
'Brazil is a country where there are always risks,' Tom Hennigan says. 'People kill for very little. And when you go into the Amazon that risk increases, for sure. It's so vast and remote, and in many parts the state doesn't have a very strong presence. So it almost incentivises crime because people feel it's unlikely they're going to be caught.'
Phillips knew the risks, 'but at the same time he was extremely cautious and meticulous about his security planning', says Andrew Fishman, another close friend, and the co-founder and president of the investigative website The Intercept Brasil.
'He knew all the tricks of the trade. If you stay at a guest house, people are going to be curious about this foreign guy with the blue eyes and a foreign accent, so never tell them what you're doing or where you're going, because that could put you in danger.
'Check in every day with your contacts to tell them your movements and what time you'll check in again. If you say at 6am, and 7am rolls around, you might be out of cell range. But if 9am rolls around and there's no word, they should sound the alarm, and this is who to call. In that town maybe the police are friends with the illegal ranchers, so calling them might make the situation worse, so you find a public prosecutor in the region who you can trust.'
Phillips intended his expedition to the Javari Valley to be one of his last field trips before stopping to concentrate on finishing his book. He was travelling with Bruno Pereira, an official for the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI), the government body responsible for the welfare and protection of Brazil's native population, but who had taken leave to join forces with a local organisation, the Javari Valley Indigenous Association's Patrol Team, monitoring illegal activity in the region.
The two men first met in 2018, when Pereira led Phillips on his first trip to the region. Pereira was powerfully built, knowledgeable, tough and resourceful; nobody knew the terrain, and the possible dangers, better than he did.
In September 2019, Maxciel Pereira dos Santos, a uniformed officer for FUNAI, was murdered in cold blood on the streets of the town of Tabatinga, where Phillips and Pereira would set out on their journey. Pereira himself had long been the target of numerous threats from illegal loggers and miners, and had previously been shot at by an illegal fisherman.
'Dom would have known that Bruno's work helping the Indigenous community to better protect their territory would have upset some people – that's why he was going there, to write about that,' Hennigan says.
On 30 May, Phillips made his last post on social media, a video clip of the lush rainforest river bank, taken from a speedboat carrying him closer to the Javari Valley, with the words 'Amazonia, sua linda ' – Amazon, you beauty.
On 2 June he had what would be his last conversation with Sampaio, and a few hours later recorded a voice message, including his schedule and contacts, and promised that he would call her when he was next in cellphone range 'on the 5th or 6th at the latest'. He signed off: 'Love you, miss you.'
The last picture of Phillips was taken by Pereira on 5 June, in the fishing village of São Gabriel, home to a dozen or so poor families who were illegally fishing in the area. It shows him sitting on a boat, interviewing a man named Janio Freitas. It was Freitas, police later believed, who betrayed Phillips and Pereira by radioing ahead to the next village to alert them to the fact that the men were on their way. Their ambushers were waiting for them.
The pair were supposed to be making their way downriver to the municipality of Atalaia do Norte, where Pereira was scheduled to meet a local community leader. When they failed to arrive, a search team set out to find them, but when there was no sign, they were reported missing.
In testimony to the police, Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira and Jefferson da Silva Lima, the men who were subsequently charged for the murders, described how Phillips and Pereira met their deaths. Following in a high-speed boat, their attackers ambushed the two men on the river, shooting Pereira three times in the back. As their boat careered into the riverbank they aimed at Phillips who put up his hands and implored 'no' before he too was shot dead.
It was da Costa de Oliveira who had fired the shot at Pereira a month earlier.
'Like any journalist, Dom's job was to bear witness,' Jonathan Watts says, 'and if you bear witness to a crime that puts you at risk. Dom was killed because he was with Bruno.'
It took 12 days to find the bodies in an area of flooded forest. They had been burned and buried in a shallow grave in a clumsy attempt to hide them. Months later activists from the Indigenous Association's Patrol Team returned to the scene and recovered several items belonging to the pair, including Pereira's phone, and Phillips' UK press card and two spiral notebooks. Immersion in water had rendered his last notes illegible.
Phillips' body was flown to Rio, where his funeral took place. 'It was a very emotional event,' Fishman recalls. He had left instructions in his will for the music he wanted to be played: Preta Pretinha, a Brazilian song by Novos Baianos about taking the ferry to visit a pretty girl from Niterói – Sampaio is from Niterói; Lazy Eye by the indie band Silversun Pickups; and, in a nod to his Mixmag days, Good Times by Chic. 'When that last song played,' Fishman remembers, 'it turned into a joyful and tearful dance party.'
After the pair went missing, a social media campaign was started by Phillips' friends to notify the world of their disappearance. The demand for government action was quickly spread, by the Brazilian footballer Richarlison, the Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo, members of the American Congress and British Parliament.
When the bodies were finally found, the murders became a cause of mourning and outrage in Brazil and beyond, intensifying the focus on the plight of the Amazon rainforest, and the dangers faced by journalists and environmental activists.
'It was extraordinary,' says Jonathan Watts. 'There was the Dom who I and all of his friends knew – lovely, kind, generous with his ideas, a really diligent journalist that we could go drinking or hiking with. And then suddenly there was the Dom that became an icon after his death – this steely-eyed figure that stares down at you from posters in remote Amazon meetings, on wall murals in São Paulo and on protest banners and carnival floats in Rio; the Dom who was the symbol of these really big, important causes, carrying on the work that he'd started in life.'
A year after Phillips' death, Watts travelled to the remote area of Anapu, in Pará state – a site of massive forest clearance, where the liberation theology Catholic nun and environmental campaigner Dorothy Stang was murdered in 2005, and where Phillips had visited in August 2021.
Each year a ceremony is held there to commemorate Stang's life. 'And there on the wall was a picture of Dom and Bruno,' Watts says. 'They now have joined the ranks of the Amazonian forest martyrs – and that's very much how people see it.'
Among Phillips' journalist friends and colleagues there was shock and disbelief at his murder, but also a collective determination, as Watts says, to complete the book that he had started but would never finish. 'We needed to continue Dom's legacy and to amplify the messages that he was exploring and cared about.'
When Sampaio flew from her home in Bahia for her husband's funeral, she brought a suitcase containing 30 of his notebooks, his computers, cell phones and hard drives and handed it to Andrew Fishman.
'There were various drafts of chapters, and notes on subjects that he'd intended to shape into chapters, all of varying levels of complexity and completion,' he remembers. Dividing the subjects between them, the contributors started what Fishman calls 'ghost whispering', picking up the threads of where Phillips left off, exploring the role of international financing in perpetuating the exploitation of the rainforests, positing the solutions that might be found in agroforestry and the need to pay heed to the wisdom and traditional practices of the Indigenous peoples.
In May 2024, Sampaio travelled for the first time to the place in the Javari Valley where her husband and Pereira died, to launch the Dom Phillips Institute, which she founded, along with a group of environmentalists and educators.
'I'm not an expert, I'm not a journalist,' she says. 'But I think it's really important for me now to do my part in preserving Dom's legacy, to save the Amazon. To do that you need to learn more and more about it, and that's what I'm doing.
'We need stricter laws and national and international agreements, to protect the rainforests and the people who live there. We need to look to the knowledge of the Indigenous people, and to research more about the ecosystem and what nature provides. But instead we destroy. No! This is insane.'
She talks of being with a threatened Indigenous community in the state of Bahia. 'I asked the chief, how can you live with this threat to your life? And he said, it's simple – we are struggling to protect nature, and nature is life, and we don't have the option to give up on protecting life.
'My friends say, 'You're crazy, all you talk about is the Amazon' – and it's true.' She falls silent for a moment. 'I'm like Dom now.'
How To Save the Amazon, by Dom Phillips & Contributors (Bonnier, £22), is out on 27 May