RIO DE JANEIRO –
Brazilian police said on Wednesday they were questioning a suspect in the disappearance of a British journalist and an indigenous official who went missing in a remote part of the Amazon rainforest more than three days ago.
Civilian police in the state of Amazonas identified the suspect as 41-year-old Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, also known as “Pelado”, who was arrested for allegedly carrying a firearm without a license, a common practice in area. Police did not clarify why he was considered a suspect.
Authorities have questioned four other people since the investigation began, according to a separate statement from the state’s public security secretariat. It said no arrests related to the disappearance had yet to be made.
Dom Phillips, a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper, and Bruno Araujo Pereira, an employee of the Brazilian indigenous affairs agency with extensive experience in the region, were last seen early Sunday at the community. community of Sao Rafael, according to the Univaja association of people in the Vale do Javari Indigenous territory.
Two people were threatened on Saturday when a small group of men traveled by river to the boundary of Indigenous territory and branded guns at a Univaja patrol, the association’s president, Paulo Marubo, previously said. with the Associated Press. Phillips was photographing the men at the time, and the man known as Pelado was one of them, Marubo said.
The two men returned by boat to the nearby city of Atalaia do Norte on Sunday morning, but never arrived.
Indigenous leaders on the ground, family members and colleagues of Pereira and Phillips have expressed concern that authorities’ search efforts have begun slowly and are still insufficient.
“The Brazilian state says it has deployed a large task force in the region. This is not true,” Eliesio Marubo, Univaja’s legal counsel, said on Tuesday. “They promised that, today, they would send a helicopter over the area and that didn’t happen either. It’s 4 p.m., it should have been at 2 p.m., and it hasn’t been until now. still nothing. The truth is we. continue to search alone.”
A federal court on Wednesday ordered authorities to provide helicopters and more boats, after Univaja and the federal public defender’s office filed a request.
The military’s Amazon division said in a statement Tuesday night that it launched its first search and rescue operations Monday afternoon – a day and a half after the pair went missing – and 150 members of the military has since joined the operation. A helicopter is also on its way but has yet to reach the area.
Phillips, 57, has been reporting from Brazil for over a decade and is working on a book on Amazon conservation with support from the Alicia Patterson Foundation. His wife, Alessandra Sampaio, recorded a video begging the government and authorities to step up search efforts.
“We still have some hope of finding them. Even if I don’t find the love of my life, they still have to be found,” she said in a video posted on Twitter.
Pereira has long been active in the Javari Valley for the Brazilian indigenous affairs agency. He oversaw their regional office and coordination of the isolated Indigenous groups before going on vacation. For years, he received threats from illegal fishermen and poachers.
The Javari Valley region has experienced several gunfights between hunters, fishermen and official security officers in the area, which has the world’s largest concentration of unresponsive indigenous peoples. It is also a major route for cocaine produced on the Peruvian border, then smuggled into Brazil to supply local cities or shipped to Europe.
In September 2019, an employee of the indigenous affairs agency was shot dead in Tabatinga, the largest city in the region. Crime is never solved.
On Tuesday, President Jair Bolsonaro was criticized for describing the two men’s work as an “adventure.”
“Really, just two people on a boat in such a completely wild area is not an adventure recommended. Anything can happen. It could be an accident, maybe they were killed,” he said in an interview with the SBT television network. “We hope and pray to God that they will be found soon. The armed forces are working hard.”
