Over some of the most tumultuous years in Brazil, Dom Phillips bore witness to the politics of his adopted home and to the fate of the Amazon rainforest. Travelling into the forest is a slow and laborious process, yet Phillips returned again and again.
Phillips wrote regularly for the Guardian and other publications. Here, we have collected some of his most outstanding pieces of journalism.
Tribes in deep water: gold, guns and the Amazon’s last frontier
Phillips met indigenous expert Bruno Pereira for the first time in 2018 when they travelled to the Javari valley where armed poachers were plundering the rivers.
For more than a decade after the reserve was set up in 1998, its 16 uncontacted Indigenous tribes were among the best protected in Brazil. Yet today it is invaded on multiple fronts, leaving its isolated groups – who hunt with bows and arrows or blow-pipes, and avoid contact with modern society – at risk. Contact with outsiders can be deadly for these groups, who lack immunity to diseases like flu.
“The vulnerability of these peoples is growing,” Beto Marubo, a Javari Indigenous leader, told the United Nations permanent forum on indigenous issues in New York in April. “There is no effective protection.”
Another huge and open iron mine is carved out of Brazil’s rain forest
The gigantic Amazon and the Indigenous tribes that live there were a focus for Phillips from early on, as this piece for the Washington Post also shows.
The S11D seam alone is over five miles long. “It is the biggest seam, the biggest reserve that Vale has. In the future it is a platform for growth for the company,” Sebe said.
But it will also consume a part of Brazil’s past. Archaeologists say that caves in the area hold clues to Amazon habitations that were unknown until the 1980s.
Evidence from those caves suggests that nomadic peoples lived in the Amazon up to 9,000 years ago, cultivating manioc and the acai fruit.
“They managed to cultivate the forest without knocking it down,” said Marcos Magalhães, an archaeologist from the Emílio Goeldi museum in Para’s state capital, Belem, who has studied caves in the area. “The Amazon was the Garden of Eden.”
Bolsonaro backers wage war on the rainforest
Meanwhile, as the prospect of the election of Jair Bolsonaro to the Brazilian presidency grew more realistic, Phillips tracked the anxieties of environmentalists.
Polls show that Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right former army captain, has 78% support in Rondônia, leaving his leftist rival Fernando Haddad in the dust.
In the Amazon, Bolsonaro has promised progress instead of protection.
And his radical proposals – to neuter federal environment agencies, give the green light to destructive hydroelectric dams, freeze the demarcation of new indigenous reserves and open up existing ones to mining – chime with voters here, including those breaking environmental laws.
Brazil’s right on the rise as anger grows over scandal and corruption
In an April interview with Brazil’s Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, Bolsonaro said Brazil should clear more forest land to produce food for a growing world population.
Environmentalists, he said, “hope that I don’t become president”.
‘We are fighting’: Brazil’s Indigenous groups unite to protect their land
Once Bolsonaro came into power in January 2019, Phillips carried on reporting as everything environmentalists had feared came to pass.
The Indigenous people at the assembly already felt threatened by Bolsonaro’s rhetoric. Some communities remember the devastation caused by artisanal gold miners called garimpeiros, others the domination by powerful rice farmers. Then in January, a sudden, ill-explained visit by regional Bolsonaro allies raised suspicions that plans were already afoot.
“We are not fighting the farmer, a little garimpeiro. We are fighting the government,” Edinho de Souza, the CIR’s vice-coordinator from the Macuxi tribe, told the meeting. “We won’t let this land be destroyed.”
Brazil: fears for isolated Amazon tribes as fires erupt on protected reserves
In the summer of 2019, fires scorched the Amazon rainforest, shocking the world.
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has been widely criticised for failing to respond quickly to the crisis, issued a decree on Thursday banning fires in the Amazon for 60 days – a move environmentalists described as largely symbolic.
The fires are often used to clear pasture and deforested areas in the Amazon during dry winter months, but there have been 28,000 this month – more than any August since 2010.
‘That’s going to burst’: Brazilian dam workers say they warned of disaster
In 2019 Phillips covered the collapse of the Brumadinho dam, one of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters.
Fernando Coelho, who was working at a nearby ore treatment unit, was asked to find sand and gravel for the repair. He then followed the night’s events on his radio.
“The supervisor found the mud leaking,” he said. “They called for my father, because he had worked his whole life with dams and mines.”
By 4pm the following day, workers had been brought in to fix it and the area had been sealed off. “They did the repair and said there was no problem,” he said.
Coelho broke into tears as he remembered his father warning him to steer clear of the dam. “That’s going to burst at any time,” he recalled him saying.
‘Like a bomb going off’: why Brazil’s largest reserve is facing destruction
At the same time, Phillips was digging deep into the power of different sectors in Brazil and the effect they were having on the fate of the rainforest – keeping the Guardian’s legal team busy. He wrote about the gold industry.
“I know it is illegal,” says Bernardo Gomes, 59, sitting by the frame of a bar. Formerly a worker at mining giant Vale, Gomes says his time at the company taught him how to protect the environment. “Today, unfortunately, I am helping to destroy it,” he says, explaining that a nearby patch of dead trees was suffocated by mud sucked out of the nearby mining pit.
Some of his companions decline to talk, including a young woman who arrives carrying a bottle of whiskey and a speaker playing pop music. “Want a photo? Naked?” she jokes.
Forest fire season is coming. How can we stop the Amazon burning?
Phillips travelled in and out of the Amazon to investigate the impact of the vast Brazilian meat industry on the forest.
First, landgrabbers and loggers remove the most valuable trees, leaving some cover to make it harder for satellites to spot the damage. The remaining trees are then felled, left to dry and burned – hence the fires. Later grass is sown, and cattle put on the deforested land to consolidate possession.
This is “the classic cycle we have seen in recent years”, said Greenpeace Brazil’s senior forest campaigner, Adriana Charoux. If the farmer feels confident enough about his ownership of the land, the next stage is soya, she added.
Revealed: new evidence links Brazil meat giant JBS to Amazon deforestation
In collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Repórter Brasil, Phillips exposed links to illegal deforestation in the supply chains of the world’s largest meat company, JBS. The company went on to reorganise its monitoring systems and make a pledge to net zero.
This time, the apparent link between an indirect supplier and JBS was inadvertently revealed by one of its own employees. In July last year, a truck driver took photographs of himself in his JBS uniform, and of his JBS truck, by a sign marked “Fazenda Estrela do Aripuanã – 15km” at the southern end of the Amazon rainforest. Fazenda Estrela do Aripuanã is a farm near the town of Aripuanã, in the north-west of Mato Grosso state, operated by Ronaldo Venceslau Rodrigues da Cunha. His company, according to its website, currently breeds and fattens 102,000 cattle across 16 sites spanning some 72,000 hectares of pasture.
In 2021, Phillips stepped back from freelance journalism to concentrate on writing a book about his beloved Amazon. The book would focus on Amazonian development and study, attempting to work out which projects worked over the long term, and which make the rainforest and the people who live there poorer. It was during his last reporting trip for the book that he and Pereira disappeared.
