Why is the Amazon rainforest so dangerous?
Jair Bolsonaro, on June 15th. Hours later police announced that they had found human remains later confirmed to be those of Dom Phillips, a British journalist who was working on a book called “How to Save the Amazon". Other remains, still being examined, are likely to be those of Bruno Pereira, an expert on indigenous peoples.
A fisherman has confessed to the crime, and his brother has also been detained, but authorities expect further arrests. Mr Phillips and Mr Pereira went missing on June 5th during a reporting trip, and were last seen in Javari Valley, a Brazilian region of the Amazon near Colombia and Peru (see map). As well as having the highest concentration of uncontacted indigenous people in the world, the Amazon is home to arms- and drug-trafficking, and illegal hunting, logging and mining.
Although data are scant, Brazil is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be an environmental activist, according to Global Witness, a NGO. Some 20 people were killed there last year. Nearly all of those murders happened in the Amazon.
The murder rate in Amazonian cities is 40% higher than in other Brazilian municipalities. Why is the rainforest so dangerous? Violence is nothing new for the region. In the 1970s Brazil’s military regime built highways and hydroelectric dams on indigenous lands, and killed thousands of indigenous people in the process.
The government’s motto at that time was “to occupy not to surrender", and some migrants invited by the government to transform forest into pasture took this to heart. Environmentalists such as Chico Mendes and Dorothy Stang were murdered, in 1988 and 2005, respectively, after confronting farmers. Those responsible were not always caught—and when they were, justice came
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