‘Leave or we’ll harpoon you’: green activists dare to defy Amazon’s illegal fishing mafia

A year after Indigenous activist Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips were killed, Tom Phillips reports from Atalaia do Norte on how others carry on their vital work

José Maria Batista Damasceno weeps as he describes his decades dodging death in the Brazilian Amazon.

There was the time, along the Japurá River, that an illegal fisherman threatened to butcher him if he didn’t get out of town. “You’d better leave or we’ll harpoon you,” Damasceno remembers being told.

A few years later he narrowly escaped being ambushed and killed in another remote corner of the rainforest – just as Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips were last year.

“It was really, really heavy,” Damasceno says, breaking down as he describes how the failure of his boat’s engine saved him from running into a group of heavily armed assassins who were lying in wait.

Damasceno isn’t an Indigenous activist or a journalist, like Pereira and Phillips, whose killings exposed the environmental battle raging deep in South America’s rainforests.

He is a fishing engineer who has dedicated his life to persuading small riverside communities that sustainable fishing programmes will benefit them more than the quick, short-term profits offered by the illegal fishing mafias that pillage the region’s rivers and Indigenous lands.

Those efforts to encourage green living have put Damasceno on the wrong side of environmental criminals. “I’ve always relied on God to protect me from evil – and here I am carrying on with my mission,” says the sustainable fishing evangelist, who recently travelled to the region where Pereira and Phillips were killed as they, too, hoped to promote sustainable fishing there.

The world in which Damasceno operates is one of hidden dangers, cut-throat rules and huge illegal profits, where gangs of poachers with suspected ties to international drug trafficking groups target endangered Amazon species such as the pirarucu.

In the wake of last year’s killings, members of Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government portrayed the crime as the fruit of a local conflict unconnected to the devastation inflicted by his antienvironmental policies and dismantling of Indigenous protections.

But the killings exposed a far uglier reality: the rampant and highly lucrative illegal trade in fish and wildlife that plagues Brazil’s isolated and lawless tri-border area with Colombia and Peru. At the centre of that trade is Atalaia do Norte, the shabby, povertystricken river town where Pereira and Phillips began their final journey on 2 June last year.

As the nearest town to the entrance of the Javari Valley territory, Brazil’s second largest Indigenous reserve, Atalaia serves as a base for the Indigenous activists on whose work Phillips was reporting. Its potholed streets offer an astonishing snapshot of the cultural and linguistic diversity of a region that is home to six Indigenous peoples, including the Matis and the Marubo, as well as 16 groups with little or no contact with the outside world.

But in recent years Atalaia has also become a key part of a transnational poaching network with suspected links to the drug factions who move vast quantities of Peruvian cocaine through what police now consider Brazil’s second most important drug smuggling route.

After visiting the town last year, congressional investigators concluded that “heavily armed and wealthy criminal associations” and “highly dangerous criminals” had set up camp in the region, bankrolling groups of illegal fishers who plunder the protected waters and forests of the Indigenous reserve where wildlife is more abundant.

“We are certain that illegal fishing in the Javari Valley region isn’t about river-dwellers trying to make a living but actually much larger organisations, making sizeable investments and outrageous profits,” the investigators wrote.

Bruno Pereira’s attempts to fight that illegal trade by organi sing Indigenous patrol teams put him on a collision course with such criminals. “It’s because of this that Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed,” a friend and former colleague, Armando Soares, told Forbidden Stories, the Paris-based nonprofit organisation coordinating the Bruno and Dom project. Earlier this year, police named an alleged local illegal fishing boss as the mastermind behind the crime.

The Javari Valley’s most prized asset is the arapaima, a giant airbreathing fish that Brazilians call the pirarucu and Peruvians know as paiche. One of the world’s largest freshwater fish, the arapaima can grow up to three metres (10ft) in length and often weighs about 90kg (200lb). It is considered a delicacy in Latin American cities such as Lima, São Paulo and Bogotá.

Years of unregulated overfishing have decimated arapaima stocks outside the Javari’s protected Indigenous lands – which outsiders are forbidden from entering without permission and where commercial fishing is banned. Poachers have increasingly taken to invading the territory to extract huge boatfuls of the fish, as well as a river turtle called the tracajá.

“They travel in small groups,” said Orlando Possuelo, an Indigenous expert who is continuing Pereira’s work with the patrol groups battling to thwart such invaders. “They are specialists in the area. Many of them were born in there [before the territory was officially created in 2001] so it’s not easy to find them.”

After being smuggled out of the Indigenous territory in wooden barges packed with ice, the fish are sold in a constellation of border towns including Leticia in Colombia, Islandia in Peru and Benjamin Constant, an edgy river town near Atalaia.

A year-long investigation by Forbidden Stories found that the illegal trade continues to flourish in the tri-border region between Brazil, Colombia and Peru, despite government pledges to stamp out environmental crime after last year’s killings. None of the three countries have rigid controls over the origin of arapaima being sold.

Brazil has yet to reopen the offices of its environmental agency, Ibama, in Tabatinga, the city nearest to the Javari, after it was shut down in 2019. Peru’s regional production department has no fishing inspectors in Santa Rosa de Yavarí, the Peruvian town across the river from Tabatinga. And Colombian authorities do not control the quantity of fish being caught by the 40 companies registered to operate in Leticia.

Outside scrutiny is unwelcome. “There’s nothing here. You’re looking to fucking die,” one man warned a reporter from Peru’s OjoPúblico, one of 16 media outlets involved in the Bruno and Dom project, when he visited a riverside fishing warehouse in Leticia looking for illegal fish.

Activists say the almost complete lack of controls means the illegal fishing trade continues to thrive despite the international scandal caused by the killings of Pereira and Phillips.

“I don’t think anything has changed,” said Possuelo, remember

‘There’s nothing here. You’re looking to fucking die’ Warning given to an environmental journalist

how Indigenous activists received reports of illegal poachers operating within the Javari territory even in the days after the two men vanished on 5 June last year.

Despite the risks, Damasceno said he was determined to bring sustainable fishing to some of the most isolated and dangerous corners of the Brazilian Amazon, where he was born and raised.

Now 65, he plans to retire after what will be his last – and perhaps most difficult – assignment: implementing such projects in São Rafael, São Gabriel and Ladário, the three fishing communities from which the alleged killers of Pereira and Phillips came.

Doing so involves helping ping those communities set up three ee kinds of lakes to allow local pirarucu ucu stocks recover and, hopefully, stop op the invas: invasion of Indigenous lands: “permanent permahere protection lakes” where fishing is forbidden, “maintenance ance lakes” which local families can fish to feed themselves, and “management ment lakes” where up to 30% of adult fish can be legally extracted after their r numn numbers have reached certain levfi levels. “So if there are 100 fish, you can take 30, so stocks can recover,” Damasceno said.

He argued that sustainable fishing was the only way to avoid further violence along the Itaquaí River and help deprived local families resist the temptation to supply fish for organised crime. As proof that it was possible, he remembered how the fisherman who had once threatened to harpoon him had since embraced sustainable fishing and become a close friend.

“I always say that sustainable fishing is the way out of this kind of conflict. It unites people. It raises awareness. It opens the door to equality, rights and acceptance,” insisted Damasceno, who hopes to retire to write a book about the pirarucu once his mission is complete.

On a recent trip to the fishing villages lages near where whe Pereira and Phillips were killed, Damasceno D urged locals to embrace the idea of legal, longterm term survi survival rather than shortterm, term, illeg illegal gain. “Lift up your heads. You must carry on,” he told them. “Think Thin of your kids.”