I Won't Give Up Killing of Reporter and Activist Spurs Amazon Defenders

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.

- Tom Phillips

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, Damé 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 today, on 5 June 2022.

To mark that anniversary the Guardian - which is today launching an 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 that 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.