The Robber Baron Mafias of the Lawless Amazon Rainforest
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It's June 2nd, 2022 and British reporter Dom Phillips is nearing the end of a mammoth book project to record environmental destruction in the bowels of Brazil's Amazon rainforest.

Phillips has joined, as he often has been, by Bruno Pereira, an activist and passionate defender of indigenous rights in the Javali Valley, a supposedly protected tract of forest almost as far from the mega cities of Rio and Sao Paulo as those cities are from Africa. It's been a grueling trip, zigzagging along tributaries to meet some of the remotest villages on earth. But it's not over.

Phillips needs one last set of interviews before he can head to his home in the city of Salvador. And they're a long boat ride away. He and Pereira pack up their stuff and they check out of a browbeaten hotel in Alataya do Norte, a tiny town on the Peruvian border. They hop in a motorboat and they head south along the winding Itacai River, stopping to grab paddles Pereira has promised to indigenous groups upstream.

They'll be back for a shower and a celebratory beer in three days, Philip tells the hotelier. By June 5th, the pair arrive at a stop-off point called Lago de Jaburu, and they grill indigenous people about the dangers facing their communities, namely fish and ranching mafias that are draining the area of their natural wealth. Not to mention a lack of state protection that's opened the door to drug cartels and Rio gangs like the deadly PCC.

It's a perfect storm that's terrified the locals and for very good reason. Brazil's westernmost states, Amazonas, Acre and Rondonia now have higher murder rates than the country's most desperate urban favelas. Job done, Phillips and Pereira hop back in their boat and they head back towards Aletaia. But just minutes after stopping at a fisherman's shack, they're ambushed and dragged into the bush. Indigenous groups send out search teams but they find nothing.

Two days later, as protesters gather in major Brazilian cities, military cops raid the home of a fisherman and drug dealer named Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, aka Pelado, and they find drugs and ammunition. There's blood in Pelado's speedboat too. The cops think they've found their man. But days pass, and nobody can find Phillips or Pereira.

Brazilian state agencies kick the can, refusing to speak to the media or sanction the use of helicopters and other heavy equipment. Critics claim the state is covering its back, something Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro, whose gutted admins and predictions during his right-wing rule, does little to dissuade.

Two people in a boat in a completely wild region like this is an adventure that isn't recommendable for one to do, he says. Anything could happen. An accident can happen. They could have been executed. Anything. It will be another week before the world gets clarity over the disappearances, by which time Brazilian streets are roiling with demos demanding to know where are Dom and Bruno.

The details of their deaths will devastate media in indigenous rights circles and they'll shed a light on a violent gang fuel region that's become one of the most perilous and lawless on the planet. Cut right through his heart by something activists have called, without a shred of irony, the road to chaos. This is the Underworld Podcast. Underworld Podcast

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. This is the weekly show that takes a deep dive into the guts of global organized crime with more trigger-happy villains than a Michael Bay wet dream. I'm your host in an OTL in New Zealand, Sean Williams, and I'm joined by roving documentarian and podcaster Danny Gold in New York. How's it going out there? You doing much fun at the moment? You know, work is work, my friend. What's the old, like, the Drew Carey line, right? Where he's like, oh, you don't like your job? There's a support group for that. They're called Everyone and they meet at the bar.

No, I actually, I am working on some cool stuff. I think the press release went out last week. Uh, there's a company I've been making some podcasts with called entropy media that just launched, uh,

The two ones I'm working on are about the Milwaukee Mafia and the Chicago outfit. Some personal stories there. So it's very cool. And the company just launched the trailer for its first podcast. So you guys should go subscribe to that. It's called Brokers, Bag Men, and Moles. It's all about this crazy FBI investigation into Chicago's Wall Street that happened about 30 years ago. So definitely go subscribe and look that up. But yeah, what was I going to say? It's the only other podcast you should listen to besides this one.

Cool, man. I'm working on some slightly less interesting productions, namely those of my own son, which people might know if they listened to the show last week. My own makeshift recording room is now a nappy changing station. So there's even more crap coming out of it. Terrible. Just terrible. You haven't you haven't lost your sense of humor despite the lack of sleep.

No, no, I haven't. I never, ever will. As always, guys, help the Patreon for bonuses, notes, reading lists, scripts, the whole lot. Danny just put out a cool bonus show with Matthew Rohde about the Hong Kong protests and triads. I'm doing one on Chinese ghost companies like shell companies in London. It's really interesting at the end of this week. And I've got another one about organized crime in the Marshall Islands of all places. So it's worth listening to just to find out what the Marshall Islands are.

There's merch, but you guys know that. And of course, get in touch if you're a pedant for facts or a narco who wants to tell their story. The Underworld podcast at gmail.com. We read everything.

So the deaths of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, of course, I mean, you'd have to be living under a rock not to know that there were big news last year. And details about the deaths, they're still spilling out today, but they're just the tip of this gigantic iceberg of organized crime that's been plaguing the Amazon for decades. That goes all the way back to the rubber boom of the 1930s, you know, that crazy rush, Fitzcarraldo and all that. Yeah, and also that movie with The Rock and Stifler.

about the mining what's it called dude that movie Christopher Walken who's like the best villain ever he's the guy who controls the mines oh it's incredible man like it's I think it came out like 20 years ago it's honestly it's awesome the rundown go watch it like it'll change your life

Oh, damn. Now my research is really lacking. I'm going to go and watch that now. In recent years in that region, the environmental destruction by ranchers and loggers and gold miners and fish mafias and other deforesters, I mean, this is on the news all the time, right? And it's been joined

by the incursions of South American drug cartels from Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and they cultivate coca in the jungle hinterlands, and then they traffic it via road and river through the Amazon to Brazilian cities including Manaus, Belém, Rio, and Sao Paulo. And these aren't just transshipment points, right? Brazil is now the world's second largest consumer of powder cocaine and its largest consumer of crack, which I didn't know before I... Congratulations all around.

Yeah, exactly. It's coming up. That black market has in turn dragged gangs from those cities into the Amazon, like Danny's old favorites, the PCC, the Red Command and the family of the North. Which if you go back and listen to that show, I think it's one of our most listened to. And yeah, people still get in touch with us about it. You're going to know that that is very much not good news for people in the Amazon.

Yeah, I think we did an episode on the Red Command as well, not just the PCC. So those are back. I think the Red Command was a couple years ago and the PCC as well. But yeah, you know, listening to you talk about this episode on the Amazon and how it is, and then also Toby Muse, who has been on the show a bit, a reporter who was based in Columbia for a long time, used to tell me about the trips he took out there and just how insane it is. But it's just like...

There really still are these wild places. I mean, they're few and far between, but I think the Burmese borderlands is another one, right? The Amazon is just like this type of...

Kind of fucked up, like outlaw evil shit that you thought went away at the turn of last century or even the turn of the century before, you know, but it's like, there's still, you know, mining barons, robber barons, warlords, like insane militia groups, junk, like insane jungle fighting. I think, you know, I spent time in the central African Republic. There's areas like that too, where it's just, I don't know. It's stuff you don't think still exists in the modern world, but it does in these really remote locations. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm going to get into some of those remote, crazy, crazy distant places a bit further down. I mean, like...

It's no surprise that essentially this stuff is happening in this area because I'll try and do some like, you know, classic feature writing nut graph. This is the size of this and so on later down the face. But an annual report by the Brazilian Public Security Forum in 2021 that found that the homicide rate in Brazil's northern region and that encompasses those Amazon states I mentioned in the cold open. They rose by 62 percent. Well, the country's overall rate fell by almost 10. So that's

When we say that this is one of the most lawless places on earth, like, we really do mean it. For example, the murder rate in Manaus, which is the capital of Amazonas state, is four times higher than Sao Paulo, which is like hardly Copenhagen. Writes John Lee Anderson in a New Yorker story a couple years back, quote, the sublime Amazonian wilderness has become instead a stage for a contemporary human dystopia.

This has all been accelerated by state forces gutted by the former administration in the capital, Brasilia. That's hard right Jair Bolsonaro again, one of our pod stars, whose government was stacked with anti-indigenous campaigners and even one former member of a KKK-like manifest destiny, Rancher Society, which we'll get into in a bit. What is it with ranchers, dude? Just fucking Yellowstone headass ranchers, you know? They're all about, like,

Like, what is it about raising cows that makes people do such evil and outrageous things? Is it the me thing? Is it the farts? Maybe. I don't know. But some of these guys are, like, absolutely depraved, as we're going to find out shortly. So in case you haven't already noticed, guys, this is going to be one of the slightly more hard-nosed episodes. I don't know. I might try and fit in another fart joke or something later on, but...

Yeah, you guys will probably be getting your funnies from Danny here. I know, it's a shocker. First, some quick Amazon facts because facts are fun, of course. The Amazon rainforest is the biggest on Earth, but the scale is pretty insane, right? It's bigger than the next two largest rainforests in the Congo and Indonesia combined, and it's about the same size as the 48 contiguous US states.

The Amazon river is by a country mile, the biggest on the planet by volume. And it carries 12 times that of the Mississippi. It's also home to an estimated 390 billion trees, 2.5 million species of insects. And almost half of those live in the canopy, right? Which means they get a fall on you if you're walking around, which is just the most horrifying thing I can actually imagine. I feel like there's a lot of environments I could tough it out in. If it just get rid of the bugs, you know, like I don't even like dealing with ticks, man, but like,

Like, fuck the ecosystem. Just do away with all of them. What's that old South Park episode where they go into the jungle and that giant bug lands on the guy's back? That's all I could think about when I was researching this show. But yeah, deforestation in the Amazon did actually fall from 2004 to 2012. But it's been back on an upward trend since then, mostly due to these cattle ranchers. And they account for about 70% of it.

And it's mostly criminal. And by the way, a quick one, the Amazon rainforest does not produce 20% of the world's breathable oxygen. Almost all of that comes from the ocean. It does now produce more carbon dioxide than it eats up. So your good news was just canceled out immediately. And that's very bad news for climate change, as you might have guessed. Wait, hold on. So all the oxygen comes from the ocean? Yeah.

Yeah, from plankton. It's like by far the biggest provider. Yeah, this stuff like the lungs of the earth is a little bit overblown. But it's, I mean, it's not good. Cutting down the ends of the earth is not good. No, that's scary. I mean, I'm scared about the ocean, man. You ever walk to the supermarket and just see all that tuna and then be like, damn, every supermarket in the world has this much tuna? Like, we're just eating too much tuna. Like, what's going to happen to all the tuna? How are they going to replenish their stocks? And that's like happening to the entire ocean. I'm worried, dude. Leonardo DiCaprio has the right idea. Yeah.

I'm finally a campaign we can stand behind. Less tuna? No, save the oceans. Save the oceans. Okay, yeah, I'm behind that one. But aren't they getting bigger anyway? So maybe climate change is going to reverse? I don't know. I don't know, man. Yeah.

There are nine Amazonian countries in all. Moving on. So you've got Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. But around two thirds of the rainforest is in Brazil, which makes everything that goes on there just like gigantic importance to the health of the forest. And Brazil's Amazonian states...

They're like unfathomably remote and sparsely populated. Amazonas, for example, is the ninth largest country subdivision on Earth. And it's on a two hour time difference from Brasilia. And it's home to just 3.5 million people, over 2.6 of which live in Manaus.

This is a place that's been home to just about every stripe of rubber barra going. Rubber kingpins, gold prospectors, drug cartels, leftist revolutionarios, fascist guerrillas, isolated tribes, and of course, fanatical eco-warriors.

The borders don't really mean zip. There's a cop about every couple hundred miles. And the entire place is stuffed to the gills with lucrative wood, rubber, gold, hides, fish, and pretty much everything else you can think of. It's a wild, wild place.

Sounds like a good bachelor party destination. Yeah, so Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, they fell foul of a fish cartel working in the Javari Valley. And we'll get into that a bit more further down. But high profile crimes have actually been a fixture of the Amazon going back well over a century.

and one in particular in the late 80s changed the rainforest like nothing before or since. And this is the killing of rubber tapper and trade unionist Francisco Alves Mendez Filo, or Chico Mendez.

Now, latex has always been one of the Amazon's most prized commodities. And for centuries, it's been tapped on small scales by indigenous communities who slice a groove into trees and collect the latex in little buckets or pots attached to the trunk. And this is a sustainable process, right? That means that the trees can recover and continue producing for years and years without harming the rainforest's fragile ecosystem. And then, in the 1800s, Europeans arrive. And there's a massive rubber boom.

Settlers begin extracting latex in huge quantities, denuding whole swathes of the canopy and migrating huge waves of people from cities on the Atlantic coast to work on rubber plantations. And these rubber barons redraw state lines and they build entire cities in the middle of nowhere like Manaus and Rio Branco.

British industrial mandarins even flood the Amazon at one point, sending thousands of latex seas to plant in their Southeast Asian colonies. And everyone, of course, is displacing or enslaving indigenous Americans to work these new giant plantations.

Rubber prices bottom out in the 1930s, but during the Second World War, with Malaya occupied by Japanese troops and US demand soaring, the Brazilian state moves around 50,000 people in a so-called rubber army from the poor northeast of the country into the Amazon to work a second rubber boom.

When the bomb drops on Hiroshima and prices die back down though, the government backs down on compensation and relocation packages for these poor tappers and they're basically just stuck up a jungle creek without a paddle, bereft of income, dying of disease or wild animal attacks in places that become near ghost towns almost overnight.

It's near one of these towns, which I think you're supposed to call Chapuri, that Chico Mendez is born in 1944, the son of one of these rubber army soldiers who soon turns to indigenous compatriots to return to ancestral and artisanal tapping techniques to make a meager living. And this is fine at first, but in the 60s and 70s three major industries skyrocket and that is going to bring a crime wave bordering on war rattling right into the heart of the Amazon.

First, there's wood. In the aftermath of the war, there's a global construction boom and loggers begin to iron up the Amazon to cater to it. The prices of local woods like mahogany and ipe, or Brazilian hardwood, they shoot up. And Brazilian loggers flock to get their pick.

At the same time, meat and dairy products become a vital part of the country's economy, as does the mining of gold and other materials. Brazil is helmed at the time by a fascist military dictatorship, and it encourages people to go on a land grab in the far north and west of the country to tame the forest and make cash via mining and agriculture.

They offer tax breaks, concessions, cheap loans, the whole package. Goes the state phrase, the Amazon is, quote, a land without men for men without land, which is pretty amazing PR. These Amazonian Sooners then venture out and cause havoc.

Good reference to your Oklahoma roots right there. Oh, yeah, I'm actually wearing my OU t-shirt at the moment as well. Reppin'. Soon, there are roads linking villages in these states and leaders calling for the removal of indigenous tribes, similar to what has happened back in the early 1800s with Native Americans. And of course, because the border barely exists out here, you've got Peruvian and Bolivian campesinos flooding in to get their thousand acres too.

It's a crazy free-for-all accelerated by a liberal squatter's law that allows anybody who lives on and cultivates land for a year and a day to be declared a posse or possessor. Sorry, I'm just going to fuck up the... fuck up the... what is the language? Portuguese? God.

Yeah, maybe the baby is doing something to my head. Anyway, there's also this radical right-wing ranchers group called the Rural Democratic Union or UDR that is rumored to have its hand in hundreds of killings in the region.

These guys are like a libertarian KKK. They vehemently oppose land reform and indigenous rights and they hedge the Cold War game by denouncing all union leaders and tappers as simultaneously communist agitators and tools of western imperialism.

These guys have hitmen agencies posing as real estate developers in Amazonian cities. So for 60% of a fee, you can walk into one and give a name to a so-called real estate agent who then plans out a hit and contacts a pistol idol or a shooter. A union leader, for example, costs 500 bucks to 1200 bucks. A

A councilman or lawyer will set you back $1,500, a priest $3,500 to $4,000, and it goes all the way up to a judge, politician, or bishop, and they cost $25,000. And not inconsequentially, the UDR also owns the biggest newspaper in Rio Branco, the capital of Accra, and its journalists often show up suspiciously quickly to political murders.

And these guys' public enemy number one is Chico Mendes. Wait, so who are these ranchers? Are they like the descendants of like Spanish or Spain gentry? Like, are they just, you know, kind of like pirate style people who just set up shop and got rich doing this? Like, where do they come from?

From what I understand, it's like a mix of the people who were just like dumped there in the 40s and just kind of tried to build an existence out of whatever they could find. And then people from the sort of major cities on the Atlantic coast. Yeah, they would have been white descendants. It's pretty much white ranchers all the way through.

And there's a great Vanity Fair piece by Alex Shumatov. I'm cribbing a bunch for this part of the show. Remember when Vanity Fair was always pumping out awesome reports like this? I mean, I swear they do like one or two big stories I enjoy these days and the rest is all like intellectual dark web bullshit. About a year ago, they published my Ukraine piece, which if there was any justice in the world would, you know...

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win every award out there but anyway yeah yeah

Anyway, this story is on the reading list for subscribers. Give it a go. It's great. It really digs deep into Chico's life, times and death. It's said that in his early years, Chico becomes close friends with a leftist wannabe coup instigator in the jungle. And it's this early mentor who teaches him the basics of politics and class warfare. And they're going to be the linchpin of his worldview going forward. He's also influenced by priests of the liberation theology movement, which holds great sway over South America.

Yeah, we went into that a bit, I think, in one of the El Salvador episodes because the prelude to the war there in the 80s was the assassination of Oscar Romero, who was a big proponent of liberation theology. Yeah, I think I went into it a lot in the Philippine drug war stuff as well. The priests play a huge role in that. Not killing people. Well, I don't know. Then in one day in 1965, this leftist heads into town for supplies and he never comes back.

Chico just assumes he's one of the 434 people even confirmed killed or disappeared by the fascist hunter, which tortured or persecuted over 20,000 more during its 21-year rule from 1964 to 1985.

By 1975 though, Chico is a high-profile ecological activist. He holds wealthy ranches back from Acre's forests, but more importantly he sets up a Tapa's Union, putting him directly in the crosshairs of Western Brazil's settler ranches and of course the UDR.

He's the constant target of threats called Anuncios, and in 1979, four hooded men bundle Chico into a car in Rio Branco, beat him almost to death, and they leave him on a back road. Writes Schumethoff, quote,

You have been, in the Portuguese term, "anunciado". The "anuncio", a Brazilian friend explained to me, is a form of torture. You increase the pleasure of killing your victim by first destroying him psychologically. So when Chico Mendes, who had organized the rubber tappers of Acre into a union and who was emerging as a major player in the fight to save the Amazon, was "anunciado", he knew it was no idle threat.

Scary stuff then, and the war between the tappers and the ranchers reaches boiling point. Teamsters organize things called 'impaches', which are basically non-violent sittings to stop ranchers taking land. And it works. It works really, really well. It does, however, mean that the ranchers who are left are the ones most prone to violence. Later that year, a union leader in the next town over is shot dead on the steps of its town hall.

Tappers respond by killing a local rancher believed to have ordered the hit. Federal agents even mark out Chico as a communist agent and police narc, which is just about as close to a state annuncio as it gets without actually being a state annuncio. Chico, who is of course terrified, spends the next 90 days in hiding, sleeping in different Tappers' union's home each night. But there's an even more bloody radical force now on the hunt for him. They're the Alves family.

Now, these guys could have been lifted straight from a horror movie, seriously. The Alves brothers, Dali and Alvarino, have wrangled a 6,000 acre ranch outside of Shapuri. The family has left a trail of bodies since leaving their home state of Minas Gerais in the late 50s, where three of the patriarch Sebastiao's sons had killed a drover, his son, and his horse in a fight over a woman.

They flee to Paraná and they shoot a neighbor dead over a land dispute. Then they lure another neighbor to their local red light district and murder him. A court says in quote, "Perversity." In a deposition, one of Sebastiao's girlfriends says quote, "The Alvarez is killed because they found it was good to kill." Some of that depravity we were talking about. Then they move to Chapuri.

During all these years, Dali Alves manages to father around 30 children and persuades a 16 year old girl to run away to the Amazon with him. And the violence just gets more and more gruesome. The family keeps indentured laborers around the ranch, shooting dead anybody who tries to run. One person testifies they've seen two of Dali's sons, Darcy and Olesy, shoot a person who's been sleeping off a hangover.

others are ambushed in the forest having asked for pay two bolivian brothers who are suspected of running drugs for the family are discovered on the ranch their bodies laying on top of each other in the form of a cross in 1977 the alvarez massacre an entire family of tappers cops arrest 12 of their hitmen but they don't even bother to register dali's own crimes he's basically a cartel leader at this point

As the 80s wear on, the power of the Alvarez's and Chico both grow. Writes the Guardian, quote, American environmentalists took Chico to Washington to persuade the World Bank, the Inter-American Bank, and Congress that cattle projects in the Amazon, which covers an area bigger than Western Europe, should not be funded.

As an alternative, he proposed the creation of extractive reserves, protected areas that would allow public land to be managed by local communities with rights to harvest forest products. It marked an important step forward for the conservation community. It goes on. In 1987, Mendez won the UN's Global 500 Award in recognition of his environmental achievements, although he saw himself primarily as a campaigner for a fairer society.

"At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees. Then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest," he says. "Now I realize I am fighting for humanity." By this point, ranches have torn down 300,000 square kilometers of the rainforest. That's an area around the size of New Mexico or Italy. So this thing is spiraling way out of control. But Chico's position as a global eco-defender, it pushes them back.

He convinces western corporations to cancel contracts with Brazilian suppliers and in 1988 the newly democratic Brazilian government carves out an indigenous reservation purely for the tapas. And this is when war breaks out. Branchers kill 89 environmental activists that year alone. By that year Chico claims to have survived five attempts on his life and he's under round-the-clock police protection.

But in the second half of the year, Chico is under surveillance by gunmen hired by Dali Alves II. They stake out a square across from his Shapuri home and the Union Hall. On the evening of December 22, 1988, Chico's two cop guards are playing dominoes in his small wooden home while he steps outside to wash. Wright Schumatov, quote,

The shower was in an outbuilding in the backyard. He had opened the kitchen door about two-thirds of the way, was about to step outside when a blast from a long-barreled 20-gauge shotgun caught him on the right side of his chest and shoulder, riddling the towel with buckshot holes. Chico staggered back into the kitchen, slumped onto the table, reeled into the bedroom and collapsed on the floor. As soon as they heard the shot, the guards bolted out the front door and ran for their lives.

Chico dies moments later. He's the 90th Brazilian eco-activist to be killed in 1988. Wow, that is an insane number of activists. I mean, that's wild.

Yeah, it's like, it's a full-blown war. That's a war. Yeah, that's a war. It's crazy. I mean, and this family, the Alves, is like, they're just like warlords. They're full-blown warlords. Two days after Chico's slaying, Darcy, who's Dali's son, remember, who's 21, he turns himself into local cops. He claims he's done the deed alone, which is an obvious lie. Multiple witnesses have spotted two men with guns running from the scene, and two men had camped outside Mendes' home before the killing.

One of them smokes, say witnesses, and Darcy doesn't.

But he's the scapegoat, the so-called steer for the piranhas in local phraseology. Meanwhile, Darcy's dad and uncle Dali and Alvarino, they escape into the rainforest, chased by 60 federal cops, 60 military police and 30 civil cops. There's also a pack of bloodhounds and a state helicopter. Surely it will just be minutes before they're pulled in. Right.

There was widespread speculation that the murder of Chico Mendez was a complicated affair involving drugs and arms smuggling, clandestine airstrips, a radical right-wing ranchers organization called the Rural Democratic Union, that's the UDR of course, and a secret death squad within the Accra Department of Public Safety. But overshadowing all these wild, range-war aspects of the situation were the global residencies of the event.

Here, in this remote part of a vast, fragile land, the interest of environmental protection and social justice, of the oppressed rubber tappers, and the millions of other species that inhabit the Amazon rainforest coincided. A rare event in third world conservation. And Chico Mendes had joined the thin ranks of a new kind of saint, the eco-martyr. Greta Thunberg, eat your heart out.

Cuco's death prompts a global outcry and Brazil's government vastly extends the Tapa's reservation to two million acres and names it after him.

Wait, one thing I don't get, I mean, I guess you kind of talked about it, but are rubber tappers not bad for the environment? No. So the distinction is between like the tappers and industrial rubber extractors. So the tappers are just the guys who kind of score these lines into the trees and collect them artisanally. And they're kind of up against the big industry that just wants to tear down the forest and take all the latex and just kind of leave it bare. Yeah.

So the tapas are tapas, good industry, bad for the rainforest. Let's not get political. But anyway, today, the Chico Mendes extractive reserve is home to over 10,000 people. And there are more than a hundred other such places in Brazil, supposedly saved from destruction. If the truth is anything, but.

One activist tells a reporter, quote, I believe very much in science from God, and I think Chico died to usher in a new era of justice to make us think about these problems and act.

At the time, there's even a concert led by a police frontman sting called Rock for the Rainforest, which features Elton John and Billy Joel. I mean, you're this rubber tapper. You've been through this. And then Billy Joel comes up and sings Uptown Girl. I guess he probably should have left. Oh, come on. No insulting of Billy Joel on the podcast, man. I won't stand for that. Oh, wow. That is a hell of a hill.

The drama isn't over, of course. Dali and Darcy, they are found guilty of first-degree murder eventually, even while Dali is on the run. He's captured and serves time until 1993, and that's when he breaks out of prison and goes on the lam again, being a fugitive for another three years before being recaptured. I mean, if you've listened to Danny's shows about the PCC and the Red Command, you'll know that prison is...

It's not the same prison that you might think of in other nations. Anyway, both of them are now free. And I might be wrong about this, but I haven't found anything about Alvarino ever being caught at all. I think he actually died on the run. But if you've got any information, let us know about that. I couldn't really find anything.

Anyway, despite the creation of this huge reserve and the massive reaction to Chico's death, deforestation actually ramps up in the Amazon in the years following the murder. In 1995, a state agency says it's detected four times as many fires lit by ranchers than it had the previous year. So I should have done that before talking about the Billy Joel joke. That was bad. By and large, the

presence of government cops and federal agencies waxes and wanes depending on whether brazil is led by a left or right-wing administration and as anybody who's seen the last few years there will know it just swings wildly from left to right back again every other year in 2005 there's another high-profile death when 74 year old american nun dorothy stang is shot three times in the town of anapu on the eastern edge of the rainforest

And at that point, President Lula da Silva, who's actually back as its second stint as leader now, he sends troops into the area and he bans logging along the highway that cuts straight through Stang's home, which was the driving force, no pun intended, behind her death. As with Chico's killing, there's a lull in violence and for a while logging stops, but

as is always the case it just ramps right back up again and 2005 as i mentioned at the top of the show that's when that downward trend in deforestation in brazil's amazon reverses and that's because of a confluence of criminal groups and zealous farmers that have created this perfect storm alongside the previous bolsonaro regime's gutting of government resources to protect indigenous groups and before we get back to don phillips and bruno pereira

I want to give you a few snapshots of this stromash of criminal forces because I'm seeing the word count shoot up and let's face it, there's only so much you guys can listen to a stream of death, destruction and existential climate dread, especially if you're on your way to work.

What does Stramash mean? Stramash, like a mix. I think it's a Scottish word. I don't know. People use it, though. It's around. Yeah, I'm sure they do. Yeah, yeah. Next episode, I'm going to do my reporting on Joe Exotic, by the way, and gangsters with tigers, stuff that I did in the south of the States. So you get some funnies there, I promise.

Anyway, in this whole mix, Stramash, whatever you want to call it, Danny, it's no secret that Coca-Cola evasion in the Amazon has shifted a few gears to cope with global demand, not least in Brazil, like I said before, which now has one of the biggest domestic cocaine markets on earth.

peru's cultivation has increased 41 percent between 2016 and 2020 covid has pushed more people onto coca plantations and more police officers into unemployment and bumper harvests mean that there's never been more cocaine in the world a peruvian anti-narcotics officer told a guardian writer in 2022 quote the amazon is a cancer patient and we're just giving it a pill for the pain

This is just an acceleration of what's always been happening in the Amazon, of course. Only now it's creeping more and more into Brazil rather than Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. And this drug industry is finding that it can work pretty well alongside illegal minors and other underworlds with very few people to stop them. Says federal police officer Alexandre Sariva to a Guardian reporter, quote, this is not new or exclusive to Brazil.

Criminal organizations, mafias, they go where there is easy money. If a guy gets money in illegal gold, he invests in drugs and vice versa. It's a chain of illegal crime that feeds upon itself in the absence of the state. It's good for miners and cartels to work hand in hand, protect each other, or even steal from each other if the money's good.

writes insight crime quote criminal groups across the amazon expanded their seizures of gold coltan and protected timber the expansion of these criminal portfolios has gone hand in hand with the drug trade land cleared to build runways for drug planes has provided timber to be sold clandestine roads built through the forest can be used to move drugs minerals timber and contraband

The sad trend of previous years has only been accelerated. The battle against criminal deforestation in the Amazon is being lost. Interestingly, the demobilization of Colombia's left-wing paramilitary FARC has also contributed to this as they were kind of de facto custodians of the forest there. Brazilian state actors are often found to be in the pockets of criminals and actively encourage ranchers as did the hunter in the 70s and 80s.

I'm sure too now that like, you know, FARC has basically been disbanded and left without work or purpose. Like some of them have definitely gotten into the black market activity. Yeah, I mean, lots of South American countries are the worst hit by kind of COVID lockdowns and unemployment, right? So, you know, loads of these police that were on the dole, they're now getting involved in the black market as well. It's just like a crazy fold of huge populations straight into illegal markets.

In the incursion of the cartels eastward into Brazil, that has in turn pulled Brazil's own violent street gangs west from its own major cities. Here is a Thomson Reuters piece from 2022. Quote, No one knows exactly when the graffiti first appeared in the alleyways of Cruzeiro do Sul, a sleepy town of 90,000 people in the western Brazilian state of Acre.

Yet there was no mistake in the meaning of the black lettering: CV and PCC, spray-painted across the city's stucco building facades. CV is short for the Red Command, in Portuguese, and PCC for the First Command of the Capital, two of Brazil's most notorious drug trafficking factions. Their battles over turf have long bloodied the streets of the nation's wealthiest cities. Now they are exporting mayhem to the Amazon basin.

Yeah, I think we did touch on that. Maybe not in the Red Command episode. That was a while ago, but definitely in the PCC episode that was from, I think, a couple months back.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just like this really scary kind of pincer movement of drug cartels into the Amazon region. That prison, Manus, however you say it, has been the site of really horrific violence that they've been fighting over because it's kind of like the drug trade through the Amazon. I think that's a main way station. Everything goes through there. So I do remember talk of insane prison battles there and riots that killed literally dozens of people when they happened.

Yeah, and I think Manaus was one of these cities that got a massive injection of cash when Brazil hosted the World Cup. It was kind of a random bit of a left-field decision to have games out in the middle of the Amazon. And I'm sure like tons of those millions and millions of bucks, they were flooded straight into corruption and black markets too. So it's kind of...

Yeah, like I said, it's a perfect storm. Homicide rates in the states of Accra and Parra are now 32.9 per 100,000 and 32.5 respectively. Those are very, very high. And thin policing and a disconnect between agencies working on environmental and organized crime, for example, means that by and large, the perpetrators get away with it.

Of more than 300 killings reported by a major government commission since 2009, only 14 went to trial. And none from more than 40 cases of attacks or threats made it in front of a judge. This is... Yeah, this is not good.

Last year, The Guardian, I know I'm using it a lot, but they've produced a lot of the best stuff from Amazon recently. They sent their South American guy, Tom Phillips, out to the Amazon in a helicopter to see up close something called the Road to Chaos. And this is a clandestine 75 mile road carved out by illegal mining mafias in a Portugal sized indigenous region close to the border with Venezuela, home to the Yanomami tribe.

You should check out the pictures because they're pretty like incredible, grim, stark. But this giant road is just another example of how underworlds have decimated entire parts of the rainforest. Pretty much under the noses of the Brazilian government with little or no obstruction at all. Says one campaigner quote: "We believe there are at least four excavators in there and that takes mining in Yanamanami territory to the next level, to a colossal level of destruction."

And then of course there's the fish mafia. Which kind of sounds funny right? But the numbers are pretty crazy and they revolve around a thing called an arapaima. These fresh water monsters weigh up to 200 kilos or 440 pounds and they can reach a length of up to 3 meters or 10 feet. That's pretty mad. Not much like those paddle fish in Kansas we did a story on a year ago.

Yeah, I think those are the things always on River Monsters, right? Remember that show where they look like dinosaurs? Yeah, they are, I think. They're absolutely gigantic. Anyway, these things, they live in the Javari Valley, which is a protected indigenous reserve, and they're worth a lot. For each illegal incursion into the zone, a fisherman can expect to get a three grand haul of arapaima.

It's as lucrative as drug trafficking, right? Without the sentences or threats that come with holding coca.

A boat stuffed with another fish called the piraruku can fetch up to 50 grand. In one instance, cops intercepted an illegal boat carrying $100,000 worth of river turtles. But the fishermen themselves only make a couple hundred a pop. The kinpins, the guys who provide the boats and the tools, kind of like fishing pimps, they're in Colombia and they don't mind getting their hands dirty with anybody standing in their way.

Last year of course, that included Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira.

Pereira, born in the northeastern city of Rechife, was a long-standing leader in the FUNAI, which is the Brazilian government's indigenous protection agency, and is colloquially known as a "sertanista", in love with the forests and the communities that lived in them for hundreds of generations. But in 2019, as Jair Bolsonaro is appearing to throw his weight behind Amazonian industry, the state removes Pereira from his post, and he decides he'll just go it alone.

Spending months in the jungle, meeting people from every corner of the country's remotest regions. By 2022, he's working on his own agency named Univaca, whose stronghold is a small wooden shack on a tight bend of the Itakai River.

Don Phillips, meanwhile, was a freelance journalist from northwest England who first moved to Brazil to report on electronic music for Mixmag, which is just objectively cool. Soon he got into climate, poverty and politics journalism in the country for newspapers including the Washington Post and The Guardian, rang about tons of issues, including Brazil's run up to its 2014 FIFA World Cup, which, of course, could be a whole other show in its own right. But we've done enough on football so that can probably wait.

So last year, Phillips is wrapping up reporting his book called "How to Save the Amazon". It's a painstaking piece he hopes will bring work like Pereira's into the global mainstream. Then the pair takes that fateful journey down the Itakai and they disappear.

The cops arrest this fisherman named Pelado and they find blood spatters in his boat. Around the same time, indigenous leaders claim Pelado had aimed a rifle at them just days before the vanishing. But they don't think Pelado actually ordered a hit. The fisherman's financiers are Colombians, says Manuel Felipe, a local historian. Everybody was angry with Bruno. This is not a little game. It's possible they sent a gunman to kill him.

On June 12th, which is a week after locals have raised the alarm, Alataya del Norte firefighters find a backpack, a laptop and a pair of sandals near Pallado's home. Three days later, he confesses, showing cops where he'd shot them shortly after they'd been dragged into the jungle and where he buried the bodies. He also points out a spot in the river where their boat had sunk. Soon after, they find Phillips and Pereira's remains.

Do you know, has there been any discussion of whether they meant to kill the journalist? You know, because I feel like that...

Is usually a mistake. I mean, situations like that, obviously not always, but in a lot of situations like this, it's generally a mistake. And because it always backfires, right? Like you're going to get way more attention than if you just let them publish their article or podcast, you know, like no one's going to care. Not no one's going to care, but it gets a lot more attention when you kill somebody for those reasons. It just never works out. So I wonder if it was, it was deliberate or not that they were targeting a journalist. Yeah.

Given the outcry after Chico Mendes' death, maybe Bruno Pereira being killed would have been enough to prompt an international outcry, but I guess, as is often the case, it needs the Western journalists getting caught up in it as well. Unfortunately, I think it probably would have got one fiftieth of the headlines and a lot less attention if it was just a local activist being killed. That's just the unfortunate reality.

Yeah, you're probably right. I mean, there's nothing that I have seen recently, but I mean, stuff about this killing is kind of pouring out still now. So people are still sort of spilling the beans about who was involved in it. Anyway, police arrest Pallardo's brother, Osanay, and on June 18th, they arrest a third man, Jefferson de Silva Lima. The trio then had shot Phillips in the chest and Pereira in the head and gut with a hunting rifle.

The following month, in July, police arrest a man nicknamed "Colombia". He's a drug dealer and money launderer who's said to be behind the slayings. He remains in jail, albeit in other charges. Brazilian authorities couldn't make the murder charges stick, as is so often the case as we've spoken about here.

Bruno and Don Phillips were our great warriors. So Delcimar Tamakuri Kanamari. Jesus. Deepest apologies for the pronunciation, guys. He is an indigenous leader. They were part of our movement, he adds. This has got to be one of the most dangerous journalistic assignments you could take on anywhere in the world. I mean, there's just like unbelievable levels of peril every turn. Not to mention all the disgusting bugs and creatures out to get you in the rainforest. But...

I want to leave this pretty dark episode with a tiny slither of light. Bolsonaro, he's not in power anymore. Lula's back. And he's vowed to create a new ministry for native peoples, rebuild agencies gutted by his predecessor, and wipe out illegal mining and deforestation across the Amazon.

Talk is cheap, of course. We know that. But on February 6th this year, environmental state troopers destroyed a helicopter, plane and bulldozer belonging to illegal miners in the Yanomami protected area. And they erected a base along the area's main river, seizing generators, internet antennas, freezers and workers' food. I mean, it's hardly a revolution. But perhaps, perhaps, those who've died defending the Amazon won't have done so in vain. I guess we can only hope.

Yeah. Until next week, always remember, patreon.com, or on iTunes, you can subscribe as well with one click. And yeah, anything else, Sean? Nah, just reach out if you've got any good news after that show. Yeah. All right. Later.