‘This is my mission, my destiny': a treacherous Amazon journey in the footsteps of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira

The Guardian

2 days ago

Tataco grimaces and braces for impact as his canoe hurtles towards the banks of Brazil's Jordan River into a blizzard of branches, vines and leaves. In the bow of the boat, his Indigenous comrade, Damë Matis, shields his face with his arms as he is swallowed by the vegetation, twigs gouging his muscular shoulders.
'Get down! Get down!' Tataco yells, battling to control the vessel before its occupants are skewered by the lance-like boughs jutting out from the shore.
Ripping thick vines from his neck, the boat's 51-year-old skipper hauls the outboard motor from the murky waters, takes a deep breath, and prepares to continue the perilous voyage along a serpentine waterway so clogged with fallen trees it is virtually unnavigable.
'We'll get there,' Tataco says with his trademark bonhomie, despite the countless natural obstacles blocking the way. 'It's just going to take us a little while.'
The group's destination is the south-eastern tip of Brazil's second-largest Indigenous territory – the Javari valley – a colossal wilderness the size of Scotland, where the British journalist Dom Phillips and the Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira vanished three years ago this week, on 5 June 2022.
To mark that anniversary the Guardian – which is today launching a major investigative podcast series about the men called Missing in the Amazon – joined a gruelling week-long expedition with the activists Phillips was reporting on for his book when he and Pereira were ambushed and killed.
Tataco – whose full name is Cristóvão Negreiros – and Matis are key members of Evu, an Indigenous patrol group Pereira helped found with his colleague Orlando Possuelo in the hope of protecting the estimated 6,000 Indigenous people who live in the Javari territory, alongside the world's greatest concentration of uncontacted tribes.
Since Pereira's death, his collaborators have dramatically stepped up Evu's activities, working tirelessly to train Indigenous activists to protect the Javari's rainforests and rivers from illegal poachers, fishers, miners and drug traffickers.
The number of Evu members has risen from just over a dozen in 2021 to nearly 120 today, with the creation of six mobile teams, which use boats to roam each of the region's main river systems: the Javari, the Itaquaí, the Ituí, the Curuçá, the Jaquirana and the Jutaí.
In late May, Tataco, Matis and Possuelo journeyed deep into the jungles just south of the territory to recruit and train the last of those units: nine Indigenous men from the Kanamari people, a group with whom Pereira had spent countless nights singing and consuming the psychedelic brew ayahuasca.
'I want to protect my land so nobody can invade it,' says Hitsambá Kanamari, a jovial 39-year-old from a village called Jarinal, who is one of Evu's newest members.
Hitsambá says poachers have been pillaging anteaters, deer, wild boar and river turtles from his supposedly protected Indigenous home. 'There will be nothing left for our kids,' he complains, as Evu's recruits gather in a clearing beside the Jordan River one morning.
Many of the Kanamari recruits knew Pereira and recalled roving the jungle with him in search of clues about mysterious isolated Indigenous groups such as the Flecheiros – or Arrow People – who use poisoned darts to kill those they consider a threat.
'Bruno was our leader – a good leader and a good man,' says Hitsambá's father, a 60-year-old village chief called Tupiana Kanamari. Whenever Pereira visited his community, they would stay up late 'drinking the vine' and chanting. 'Snakes and jaguars [would] appear before you,' Tupiana says.
Evu's expedition began early one Tuesday in Eirunepé, a deprived and isolated river town weeks by boat from the state capital, Manaus. From there, the group hiked north through farmland towards the Javari, with support from two cows, which dragged their equipment – including two 7ft aluminium canoes – into the bush. One of the mud-caked animals was called Pontinha, which roughly translates as Spearhead; the other Senna – a playful reference to the Formula One star Ayrton Senna.
Spearhead and the faster-moving Senna grunted and strained as they trudged towards one of the frontlines of the efforts to save the Amazon, stopping occasionally to rest and feast on succulent rose apples littering the ground.
By Thursday the boats had reached the edge of the rainforest. In groups of six, the Indigenous men and their non-Indigenous allies heaved them on to their shoulders and carried them for hours up and down steep, muddy ravines cluttered with decomposing trees towards their camp by the Jordan River, a peanut-coloured backwater that meanders north towards the edge of the Javari territory. Night had fallen by the time they completed their back-breaking, Fitzcarraldo-style mission. Many of the sweat-drenched activists were so drained they struggled to stand.
Heat exhaustion was far from the only danger the Evu activists faced. One night, a South American bushmaster – one of the world's longest venomous snakes – entered their encampment before one of the men subdued it with a wooden club. Another morning, a venomous coral snake crawled into their open-air kitchen, its spectacular red, black and white bands contrasting with the leaf-strewn forest floor.
Over breakfast, one of the camp's cooks, José Gomes da Silva, recalled once being attacked by a puma while hunting nearby. 'She pounced and sunk her claws right into me … I was covered in blood, cut to shreds,' he said, showing his scars. As a group of Indigenous children arrived in the camp with a dead porcupine for their dinner, Silva warned: 'There are loads of jaguars in the forests around here.'
Unbeknown to the group, the most treacherous part of Evu's mission still lay ahead: piloting its two new canoes down the Jordan to the mouth of the Jutaizinho where the vessels would be stationed at a new base the activists were building to keep outsiders out of the protected Indigenous area.
Kanamari villagers, who travel the creek in traditional wooden rafts known as cochos, had told Possuelo they believed the waterway to be relatively free of debris and could be navigated easily. The opposite was true. Within minutes of casting off, Tataco and his team had run into their first obstacle: an immense snarl of fallen trees and branches that formed a seemingly impenetrable barrier.
Tataco's brother-in-law, Valdeci da Silva Castilho, sprang into action, using a chainsaw and machete to shear and slice his way through scores of natural barricades, sawdust flying into the air as he pushed downriver.
When the boats were able to advance, they repeatedly ricocheted off the banks of the narrow creek, plunging the crew into spiky thickets filled with ants, spiders and venomous caterpillars. At one point this reporter was thrown head-first into the lukewarm water as two creepers crashed down from the riverside. At other moments the crew was forced to duck for cover or hurl themselves on to the deck to avoid trunks that had fallen across the river. A nest of ferocious Amazonian wasps called cabas landed in Possuelo's boat as he cut his way through one fallen tree, sending him scrambling to hurl it into the river before anyone was stung. Water snakes darted across the surface.
For two punishing, tense days the group crept forwards, guided by hand-sized blue morpho butterflies that drifted over the boats' bows.
Finally, on day six of the expedition, the much broader Jutaizinho River came into view and the team breathed a collective sigh of relief. Matis, who wears traditional face-piercings made from a palm called the patauá, waved his hands towards a cloud-filled sky to ward off rain and the two-boat convoy cruised along the jungle-flanked channel marking the start of the Javari's Indigenous lands.
Evu's operations have expanded hugely since its activists spearheaded the 2022 hunt for Phillips and Pereira. But the dangers and death threats facing its members remain, despite the government's efforts to slash deforestation and defend Indigenous communities under the leftwing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after four years of devastation under the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro.
Possuelo says he believes the threat level is, if anything, increasing, as Evu's activities have earned it a growing number of enemies among criminal gangs, furious that the group's work means it is becoming harder to plunder natural resources such as gold and giant pirarucu fish.
In January, Possuelo got wind of a plan to kill him in Tabatinga, a notoriously violent town on the border with Colombia. 'As if the risks of the rainforest weren't enough,' he sighs.
'But little by little I think we're changing the reality here,' he says.
Tataco, a hardened rainforest veteran who helped lead the 10-day search for Phillips and Pereira, sheds tears as he describes his personal quest to protect the Amazon and its Indigenous inhabitants. Relatives have begged him to step back from the battlefront and seek safer work but he refuses.
'I won't give up … I'm going to carry on until they kill me. As long as I am alive I'll be part of Evu,' Tataco vows. 'This is my mission. This is my destiny.'