'We'll continue to fight'

A year on from the killings of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips in the Amazon, Indigenous activists are defending their land with new resolve

-  Tom Phillips

Three assassins walked into a bar deep in the Brazilian Amazon one night last October. Beers flowed, tongues loosened and the men were overheard bragging about their latest job. “We’re looking for this Orlando bloke. We’ve come to kill him,” one of the inebriated hitmen apparently said, according to a tipoff conveyed to their target.

The Orlando in question was Orlando Possuelo, one of the Indigenous defenders who has been seeking to carry on the work of his colleague Bruno Pereira since Pereira was murdered along with the British journalist Dom Phillips near the Javari valley Indigenous territory last June.

The planned killing did not take place. Who ordered it is unclear. But Possuelo, who has had two close associates murdered in four years, admitted the warning had shaken him. “Normally, I’m fairly relaxed about the threats … but there are days you wake up feeling a bit haunted,” he said.

One year after the killings of Pereira and Phillips – which laid bare the environmental devastation inflicted under Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro - Indigenous leaders and non-Indigenous allies such as Possuelo are intensifying their battle to protect the world's greatest rainforest and the Indigenous peoples who have lived there since long before European explorers arrived in the 16th century.

The activists are defiant in the face of the many dangers of confronting the environmental criminals and organised crime groups who have tightened their grip on the Amazon region.

"If they kill me, I'll go to heaven, because I'm defending my territory," said Daman Matis, 27, who helps to police one of the waterways that illegal goldminers use to invade protected Indigenous lands.