One suspect admitted killing Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira in Brazilian Amazon, authorities say

Veteran correspondent Dom Phillips and Brazilian researcher Bruno Araújo Pereira vanished on June 5, during a trip in the Javari Valley, in the far western part of Amazonas state. They were last seen in the Sao Rafael community, a two-hour boat ride from Atalaia do Norte city, after accompanying an indigenous patrol in the Itaquaí river organized to prevent invasions from illegal fisherman and hunters on the Javari Valley Indigenous Land.

On Tuesday, police arrested a second suspect in connection with the missing men, according to a press release from the Federal Police. The first suspect was arrested last week.

Phillips and Pereira disappeared while conducting research for a book project on conservation efforts in the region, which authorities have described as “complicated” and “dangerous,” and known to harbor illegal miners, loggers, and international drug dealers.

They had reportedly received death threats just days prior to their disappearance.

Between 2009 and 2019, more than 300 people were killed in Brazil amid land and resource conflicts in the Amazon, according to Human Rights Watch, citing figures from the Pastoral Land Commission, a non-profit affiliated with the Catholic Church.

And in 2020, Global Witness ranked Brazil the fourth most-dangerous country for environmental activism, based on documented killings of environmental defenders. Nearly three quarters of such attacks in Brazil took place in the Amazon region, it said.

Phillips had reported extensively on Brazil’s most marginalized groups and on the destruction that criminal actors are wreaking on the Amazon.