Forest fight Pereira's legacy kept alive in the Amazon

Rainforest defenders defy threats to fulfil the murdered activist's planned mission of Indigenous exchange

- Tom Phillips

Twigs clawed at the truck’s wing mirrors as the activists raced through the backlands of the Amazon on a mission that their fallen comrade, Bruno Pereira, had been planning until the day of his murder.

“When you lose someone who has an ideal, a cause, it only strengthens that struggle,” said Carlos Travassos, the Indigenous specialist piloting one of five pickup trucks in a convoy sweeping eastwards under the cover of night. Bringing up the rear was a police vehicle carrying commandos whose job was to ensure the men reached their destination alive.

Travassos was a friend and colleague of Pereira, the celebrated Brazilian indigenista killed in the Javari Valley with the British journalist Dom Phillips while trying to highlight the threats facing Brazil’s Indigenous peoples.

Before the men were murdered, which further exposed the environmental catastrophe unfolding under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, Pereira had been preparing for his next rainforest expedition.

His idea was to lead a delegation of Indigenous activists from the Javari 2,500km across the Amazon to learn from a group of veteran rainforest defenders called the Guardiões da Floresta (Forest Guardians). “He’d already bought his plane ticket. He was excited,” said Travassos, a former official at Brazil’s Indigenous agency, Funai, who works with the Guardians in Maranhão state’s Araribóia Indigenous territory.

Pereira’s assassination threw the exchange – which he intended to be the first of many – into doubt. But if his killers hoped his death would thwart efforts to protect the Amazon and its inhabitants, the Javari activists were determined to show they had failed.