Park Predators - The Amazon

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

A devoted conservationist and a journalist set off into the depths of the Amazon to report on corrupt and criminal activity but were never seen alive again. The murders of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira rocked the international community and revealed dark secrets hiding in one of the world's most beautiful and dangerous ecosystems.Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit parkpredators.com Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the case I'm going to tell you about today is one that hits especially close to home for me because I'm a working journalist. And even though this show isn't one where I feature my own original reporting, I know all too well from producing another show I host called Counter Clock that sometimes being the person who's examining and uncovering controversial issues comes with a certain level of danger. Today's story is about two men, an indigenous and a British journalist, who were determined to expose illegal natural resource extraction happening in the Amazon, but ultimately paid the price of their righteous endeavor with their lives. Bruna Pereira and Dom Phillips' case

unfolded in the summer of 2022 in one of the most beautiful and dangerous landscapes in the world, South America's Javari Valley in the Amazon. This region is one of the most remote places on the planet, and it's situated where the borders of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia meet.

It's made up of tens of thousands of square miles of thick jungle and waterways, and it's not somewhere you want to be on your own. According to the news source France 24, for decades this region has been plagued with violent crime, drug trafficking, and illegal fishing and logging on protected lands. The natural camouflage the Amazon provides is the main reason why criminals conducting these illegal activities operate there. Depending on which source material you read,

there are anywhere from 20 to 26 different indigenous groups living in the valley, a dozen or so of which are categorized as uncontacted people, meaning they live in isolation from the rest of the world. No technology, no modern infrastructure, completely indigenous. They live off the land and speak languages unique to their tribes. Many of these folks live in the Javari Valley Indigenous Reservation, which was established by the government in 2001. the Javari Valley Indigenous Reservation, which was established by the government in 2001. This vast protected land converges near the Itui and Itagwai rivers. Sometimes I heard British journalists pronounce the name of that second river as Itaki River, but Portuguese sources pronounced it Itagwai, so I'm going to go with Itagwi. In June of 2022, Dom and Bruno set out on that river for an expedition to visit an uncontacted people group.

But during a short two-hour boat ride, they disappeared. The saga of events that unraveled after they vanished is one of the most heartbreaking and infuriating stories I've researched for this show. And it's only reinforced my belief that sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. This is Park Predators. Around 9 o'clock in the morning on Sunday, June 5th, 2022, a man named Orlando Posuelo, who worked for the organization named the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley, also known by the acronym UNIVAJA, which I believe is pronounced Univaza, noticed something odd. Two men he was expecting to arrive via motorboat at his outpost in the town of Adelaide du Nord

were late, really late. A few days earlier, longtime Univasa associate Bruna Pereira had called Orlando from a region of the Javari Valley near Peru to tell Orlando that he and his passenger, 57-year-old British journalist Dom Phillips, would be arriving by 8 a.m. on Sunday morning. But 8 a.m. had come and gone, and then 9 a.m., and there was still no sign of the two men. The city of Adelaide du Nord was where most everyone entered or exited the Javari Valley, so Orlando knew that Bruno and Dom not showing up wasn't a good sign. The men's absence indicated they'd either made last-minute plans to stay

longer inside the valley without telling anyone, or something had happened to them while they'd been boating on the Atui or Itzhaquahee rivers. Those were the bodies of water they would have had to have taken to get back to Adelaide du Nord. The Washington Post reported that by 10 a.m., Orlando couldn't bear waiting around for Dom and Bruno any longer without doing something, so he went out on the river with another staffer to look for them, but had no luck. Other source material says that a few hours later, around 2 p.m., more people joined to help and went out in boats to go on a longer stretch of the Atacway River near Atalaya de Norte. The goal was to search for the men, but after scouring a few miles of shoreline,

treeline, and open water, no sign of the men or their boat turned up. Another search party of Univaza volunteers went out around four o'clock, this time in a slightly bigger vessel, but just like the groups before them, they couldn't find a trace of Dom or Bruno. The source material isn't clear on when exactly government agencies were made aware of the situation and responded, but the best I could gather was that on Monday morning, the Brazilian Navy and the federal police were alerted about what was going on, and those agencies dispatched additional personnel to help look for Dom and Bruno. According to BBC News, the Navy promised to supply more resources,

including a helicopter, two larger boats, and another kind of watercraft, on Tuesday morning. But the Amazon Military Command, a branch of the Brazilian Army, wasn't so quick to mobilize its resources. The Guardian reported that a spokesperson for the Army said he had to wait for government officials to order military personnel to get involved. And until that happened, the Army's hands were tied. Still, the additional beefed-up resources

that did come in during those first 24 hours were a huge relief for the local indigenous leaders with Univaza, whose search parties were already stretched thin. It was clear from the outset, though, that the folks with Univaza didn't think the Brazilian government was acting fast enough to help find the men. Many workers like Orlando Pozuelo thought Brazil's military resources should have been sent out as soon as Dom and Bruno were reported missing instead of being caught in political limbo. But military or no military, the Brazilian federal police did get investigators into the valley the day after Dom and Bruno vanished. And when those detectives arrived,

right away they started conducting interviews with the Univaza staff in Adelaide du Nord. After speaking with some of those folks, police determined that Bruno and Dom had actually entered the Javare region the week before they disappeared. The Guardian reported that Dom's family had last heard from him on Wednesday, June 1st,

while he'd been flying from his home in Salvador, Brazil, to meet Bruno. Authorities learned that after the men connected in Adelaide du Nord, they'd gotten into a boat on Friday, June 3rd, and traveled to a remote village along the western side of the valley near Peru's border to meet with a group of uncontacted people. side of the valley near Peru's border to meet with a group of uncontacted people. Witnesses who knew the details of the men's travel itinerary told investigators that Dom had planned to interview several natives from that tribe on Friday and Saturday, and then the duo was expected to journey back to Atalaya de Norte on Sunday morning.

On their way back, they were supposed to pit stop in Riberia São Rafael, a small indigenous community on the Atacuai River. When authorities spoke with people in that village, everyone there said they'd last seen Dom and Bruno around 6 a.m. on Sunday, June 5th. And data that Univaza staff provided tracing the men's satellite phone communications, confirmed that. According to witnesses at Sao Rafael, before leaving, Dom and Bruno had spoken with the wife of a guy who was in charge of that community. Agência Brasil reported that Bruno had prearranged a meeting with this community leader to discuss how the village could improve combating intruders who were conducting illegal activities. But when he and Dom had arrived, the leader wasn't there, so the men spoke with the guy's wife instead and then left shortly after that. News outlets reported that sometime after 6 a.m. but before 9 a.m., more witnesses in a small community between Sao Rafael and Adelaide du Norte had reported seeing a boat matching Dom and Bruno's pass by. But the articles don't say

what specific time in the morning this sighting happened. After that, the men's trail went cold. Just nothing. The Brazilian Indigenous National Foundation, or FUNAI, who Bruno had been associated with for years, told several news outlets that the men's journey wasn't supposed to be complicated. Their two-hour boat ride to the entry and exit point of the valley was a routine trip Bruno had made many times. For several years prior to this, Bruno had worked as a regional coordinator for the Indigenous National Foundation's outpost in Adelaide du Nord. So him getting lost just wasn't something anyone thought was likely. He knew that area like the back of his hand, getting turned around, would have been extremely out of character for him.

A theory law enforcement considered on day one of the investigation was whether the men's boat had stalled or perhaps sank and they'd been left stranded somewhere in the jungle. Dom's wife, Alessandra, told The Guardian that in a strange way, that suggestion gave her some comfort. She told the publication, quote, All I can do is pray that Dom and Bruno are well, somewhere, and unable to continue with their journey because of some mechanical problem,

and that all this will end up being just another story in these full lives of theirs, end quote. But the men's boat becoming disabled or sinking didn't make sense to the staffers who'd been expecting the men. You see, those workers knew that the boat Bruno and Dom had taken only had a 40-horsepower engine in it. It was new, plus the men had taken 70 liters of extra fuel, seven empty gas cans, and a satellite phone with them. and a satellite phone with them. So their vessel failing, and then them not being able to contact the outside world for help, just seemed like an unlikely scenario.

When word of the men's disappearance made news headlines on the morning of Monday, June 6th, the day after they were reported missing, the story spread like wildfire. By nightfall on Monday, Dom's family members in Britain and staff at the news publication he worked for, The Guardian, took to social media to express their concerns and begged the Brazilian government to take the matter seriously. Everyone who knew the nature of that part of the Amazon

knew that time was of the essence. They feared that if search and rescue teams didn't swarm the jungle along the section of river where the men had last been seen fast enough, the duo would perish from either encountering hostile people or dangerous wildlife. According to The Guardian, Dom's sister posted a video online that said, quote, we are really worried about him and urge the authorities in Brazil to do all they can to search the routes he was following. If anyone can help scale up resources for the search, that would be great because time is crucial, end quote. Dom's wife

voiced the same sentiment and requested the Brazilian government work with a sense of urgency. The Guardian's editor, Jonathan Watts, released an official statement for the publication that said, quote, The Guardian is very concerned and is urgently seeking information on Phillips' whereabouts. We are in contact with the British Embassy in Brazil and local and national authorities

to try and ascertain the facts as soon as possible. End quote. The organization Human Rights Watch also vocalized its concerns about the men's disappearance and called on Brazil's government to act more swiftly. The entity's director wrote, quote, It is extremely important that Brazilian authorities dedicate all available and necessary resources to the immediate execution of the searches in order to guarantee as soon as possible I mentioned it a second ago, but the glaring fact that was apparent to Dom and Bruno's families and all the organizations advocating for them was that where they'd been working in the Javari Valley

was known to be extremely unstable and prone to violence. In fact, it was almost guaranteed the pair would encounter some level of danger while in that part of the Amazon. And according to Orlando Pozuelo, the man who first noticed they were missing, a somewhat violent encounter was exactly what had happened hours before Dom and Bruno vanished. Orlando told the Washington Post that while Dom and Bruno had been traveling through the Javari Valley, they'd been documenting every time they saw someone illegally fishing, especially if those people were folks that Bruno knew had made threats against conservationists like him in the past. Now, for context, harassment wasn't new

to either Dom or Bruno. They'd received numerous death threats for years, and some threats had even come in right before they left for their trip. The Brazilian government, the federal police, and the National Human Rights Council were all aware that had happened. In fact, Tom Phillips reported for The Guardian that a publication called O Globo published that shortly before leaving for their trip, Bruno had been handed a written threat that said, quote,

we know who you are and we'll find you to settle the score, end quote. So yeah, the message from Bruno and Dom's haters was real. According to G1 Brazil, Bruno was used to continuous aggressions coming from miners, fishermen, and loggers because of the work he was doing to preserve indigenous land and protect the native people who lived in the Javari Valley.

Dom, for all his years of expository work, had also endured hardships because of the truths he'd written about. Still, their friend Orlando Pozuelo told the police that an incident that had occurred on the Atacuayu River the very weekend Dom and Bruno had vanished was suspicious and should be investigated further. He said that sometime on Saturday morning, Bruno had called up to the Univaza staff

to let them know that while he and Dom had been boating, they'd stumbled upon some men illegally fishing. According to the Washington Post and The Guardian via the Associated Press, during this interaction, the fishermen had become hostile with Bruno, and one of them flashed a gun. Orlando said while the threat had unfolded, Bruno was able to snap a picture of the menacing man's face, and some of the other men in Bruno's group, including Dom, had documented the threat. the other men in Bruno's group, including Dom, had documented the threat. Orlando said Bruno planned to bring all that footage back with him to Adelaide du Nord to notify police and government officials. And there was something else Orlando told the Washington Post he'd mentioned to police

that he thought was vitally important. He said shortly after the initial searches had gotten underway on Sunday afternoon, a surveillance team employed by his organization that was stationed somewhere along the river near the community Dom and Bruno had last been seen passing, said that the boat owned by the illegal fishermen who'd gotten into it with Bruno had been spotted trolling not far behind Bruno and Dom's boat during the hours they'd gone missing. Which, I mean, talk about sus. This information, along with the fishermen's names, were provided to federal police investigators, but according to Univaza staff, the lead wasn't followed up on right away. A reality that upset many people who worked for the organization.

An attorney told the Washington Post, quote, My frustration goes beyond just a slow search mission. We need to know the motives and circumstances behind the disappearance of Dom and Bruno. These are armed gangs that are causing violence not only against indigenous, but also our partners. There needs to be investigation by police, end quote. According to Tom Phillips's reporting for The Guardian, by the end of the day on Tuesday, June 7th, police detectives announced they were treating the case as a criminal matter and had interviewed at least five people, four of which they labeled as witnesses and one they categorized as a suspect.

That same article also mentioned that 24 hours into the investigation, Brazil's army had finally come around and sent a patrol into the valley on a boat to help. By that point, the public outcry from the men's family and friends that the Brazilian government wasn't doing enough to find them had gotten so loud that then-president Jair Bolsonaro couldn't ignore it. It was widely known that Bolsonaro wasn't a fan of the work that men like Dom and Bruno were doing. The Associated Press reported that he wanted there to be more development in the Javari Valley, not more measures put in place to conserve it. When he took office as president in January 2019, he quickly became a strong voice downplaying the importance

of setting aside more protected lands for indigenous people. According to CNN, Bolsonaro's entire campaign running up to election day had focused on what kinds of future efforts could be made to explore the untouched territories of the Amazon for farming and natural resource extraction. One of his first actions as president was cleaning house at the Brazilian Indigenous National Foundation and transferring the organization out of Brazil's Ministry of Justice Department to the Ministry of Agriculture. He also ousted many longtime environmentally

conscious leaders from the organization and put men like Bruno, who were leading operations and programs to reach isolated people, on administrative leave. Two days after the men vanished, Bolsonaro issued a blunt initial response that rubbed folks who knew Dom and Bruno the wrong way. initial response that rubbed folks who knew Dom and Bruno the wrong way. Bolsonaro told news outlets, including CNN, quote, two people alone on a boat in a region like that, completely wild. It's an unrecommended adventure. Anything can happen. It could be an accident. It could be that they have been executed. Anything could have happened. We hope and pray to God that they will be found soon. End quote. Now, I don't think he necessarily intended

to sound cavalier with his statement, but many people close to Bruno and Dom and others who opposed the president's stance on environmental issues felt like it was a backhanded way of questioning the men's mission and purpose. Basically, see, this is what happens when you unnecessarily go to places you shouldn't and do stuff that's

dangerous kind of thing. But even though Bruno was on administrative leave during the summer of 2022, the 41-year-old was as dedicated as ever to working with indigenous communities in the Javari Valley and being a guide for journalists like Dom. At 57 years old, Dom was an established foreign correspondent who didn't shy away from the opportunity to cover controversy. He'd spent the last 15 years living in Brazil. According to his obituary by The Guardian, he met his wife Alessandra in 2013, and the two had gotten married in 2015. Through tough times, Dom had remained dedicated to telling gripping stories about Brazilian residents living in remote regions of the Amazon.

Even when his dedication required him to make several expensive trips that neither he nor his research grant sponsors could afford. that neither he nor his research grant sponsors could afford. The Guardian reported that in the summer of 2022, he and his wife had been forced to move to the less expensive Brazilian city of Salvador to live, because he was relying on supplemental income from his family members in Britain to make ends meet. Still, Dom hadn't wavered. He knew his life's calling was to report about the travesties taking place in the Javari Valley. According to reporter Jonathan Watts, Dom's first visit to Brazil had been in 1998,

after his first marriage in England had ended, and while in the country, he decided to start over and move to South America full-time. Brazil was completely different from where he'd grown up in the small town of Bebbington, Merseyside, England, with his parents and two siblings during the 1960s and 70s. In addition to having an insatiable appetite for storytelling and writing, Jonathan Watts wrote that Dom loved music. Growing up, everyone in his family had a guitar or sang. As a young man, he'd scratched and clawed his way through a college education and then wandered through various countries playing music and writing. In the 90s, his passion for music led him to pursue a writing and publishing career

in that genre, but ultimately his interest in South America's political and environmental conflicts had been what had kept him working as a full-time foreign correspondent. Dom had taught himself to speak fluent Portuguese, which was a huge help navigating his way through stories in Brazil. He'd been contracted for prestigious newspapers and magazines across the globe, which included The Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and others. Leading up to 2022, Dom had extensively covered several environmental disasters in the Amazon, two of which were results of failed iron ore mining operations. He'd seen firsthand how the influx of natural resource extraction was devastating ecosystems in the pristine landscape.

In 2018, he joined Bruno for a trip into the Javari Valley for the first time to see how companies and illegal hunters and prospectors were impacting native uncontacted tribes. And after seeing how much of the indigenous people's land was being destroyed by outside forces, Dom couldn't stop writing about all the issues that were going on. Unfortunately, the stories he'd written were so explosive, they'd made him a handful of powerful enemies.

One in particular, and you guessed it, it was Jair Bolsonaro. According to Jonathan Watts' reporting for The Guardian, during a press conference in 2019, after Bolsonaro had just officially won the presidential election, Dom asked him what his administration was going to do to address an increase in forest fires that had been plaguing the Amazon. And Bolsonaro barked back, quote, the Amazon is Brazil's, not yours, end quote. So yeah, these two guys weren't friendly. But this tension only proved to fuel Dom's fire as an investigative journalist.

The whole reason he was traveling with Bruno in the summer of 2022 was because he was in the middle of writing a book about all the messed up things that were happening in the Javari Valley. Things that he felt were being ignored by the Brazilian government. He titled the novel, How to Save the Amazon. He titled the novel, How to Save the Amazon. A big focus of the book was going to be how unwarranted contact with remote indigenous tribes was extremely dangerous and what solutions could be generated in the future. According to the website Survival International, forced contact with indigenous tribes in the Javari Valley had been happening for decades, all the way back to the 1970s. And it came at a very high human price. An article on the site describes how non-native visitors like missionaries brought

diseases like the measles and the flu to these remote people groups and all but wiped them out because the indigenous tribes had no built-up immunity to those ailments. The article also details how during the 1980s when big oil companies like Shell ventured into the valley in search of untapped oil reserves, their crews bumped into one particularly isolated tribe. And in a matter of a few years, roughly half of the people in that tribe died from different diseases. Diseases they likely would never have been exposed to if they hadn't met the oil explorers. Because there are so many ways unwanted contact with indigenous people groups can go wrong, the governments of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, which all border the Javari Valley,

had measures in place to protect the indigenous lands and make sure no contact was forced on natives. But as you probably guessed, those rules were constantly being broken by non-Indigenous residents. A local activist who knew Bruno and Dom told The Guardian's Tom Phillips that because President Bolsonaro's administration so heavily promoted development in the Amazon, an anti-conservation message had slowly galvanized non-Indigenous citizens over time to become more violent with activists in the valley

and essentially treat the region however they wanted. Illegal mining, logging, and poaching had all increased under Bolsonaro's administration. This activist told The Guardian in part, quote, The invaders felt empowered and became more aggressive. They are veritable gangs, and they are very violent, end quote. Regarding how tense things had gotten to keep non-native visitors out of the Javari Valley indigenous reservation land, a former FUNAI official told the Associated Press, quote,

To this day, the locals don't accept that they can't fish, hunt, or cut wood there. Colombians and Peruvians also considered the area as a reserve for them to take whatever they want, end quote. So there was no question by the summer of 2022, violence had permeated the Javari Valley because of the stringent protective initiatives put in place over the decades. And then a systematic dismantling of those initiatives under new political leadership.

Multiple news outlets reported that gunfire battles had broken out between clashing drug cartels as well as non-Indigenous and Indigenous people groups. Some FUNAI workers had either been killed or gone missing while living in or traveling through the Javari Valley. In 2019, a man who was employed to root out and report illegal logging and poaching operations was shot to death, and his case has never been solved. But to get back to the search for Dom and Bruno,

all day Tuesday, so two days after they disappeared, more search and rescue resources joined the efforts to find them. This time, the Amazon Military Command and the Brazilian government's military-trained officers with faster boats, diving equipment, and investigating expertise combed the Javari Valley. the Javari Valley. That afternoon, Bruno's brothers and partner, Beatrice, spoke publicly about the case and told CNN that they wanted everyone who was searching for the men to work hard and smart. They cautioned Cruz to remember to respect indigenous land if they met uncontacted people groups while looking for Dom and Bruno. Beatrice also told a local newspaper that she was distraught not only for herself but for her two and three-year-old sons. The source material isn't clear as to whether Bruno was their dad, but still, I must imagine he definitely cared for them and was part of their lives. According to Andrew Downey and Caio Brisso and Tom Phillips reporting for The Guardian,

on Wednesday, three days into the search, the police officially announced they'd interrogated a handful of people and arrested two men so far in their investigation. One of the two guys that had been detained, who authorities didn't name, had been arrested for having drugs, a firearm, and ammunition that was illegal. The other guy, whose name was Amardio da Costa de Oliveira, also had been arrested for the same offenses and questioned in relation to Dom and Bruno's case. And according to the article,

that's because Amardio was the fisherman who threatened Bruno and his men on Saturday morning with the gun. You know, the guy who'd been well-documented in pictures? Yeah, well, in addition to undergoing an interrogation, police also took his boat to search for additional clues. On Wednesday, authorities also announced that they were widening the search for Dom and Bruno, and by that point had roughly 250 people out looking for them. They'd utilized airplanes, drones, and 16 boats to scour as much of the landscape as possible, but still nothing had turned up. Not a scrap of clothing, not a piece of equipment, the missing boat, nothing.

The Brazilian army had also dedicated more personnel to go into remote parts of the jungle, but those efforts also hadn't pushed the investigation forward. What's interesting to me is that even though three full days had passed with no sign of the two men, investigators were still reluctant to say on the record that they believed something bad had happened to Dom and Bruno. Instead, federal police detectives said they genuinely thought the pair was still alive, saying, quote, we still don't have a strong indication a crime

was committed, end quote. But despite that, authorities were still side-eyeing Amardio and not letting him go anywhere, so they kept him detained in jail while they continued their investigation. According to Andrew Downey's reporting for The Guardian, by the end of the first week of searching, things were looking grim. And it only got worse when authorities announced they'd found something disturbing floating in a portion of the Atagwe River, not far from Atalaya de Norte. Human remains. According to Andrew Downey's article,

federal police investigators told the press that on Friday afternoon, five and a half days after Dom and Bruno were last seen, searchers had found, quote, human organic material on the Attaquahee River. Authorities didn't clarify what this material was, just that it was human and suspicious. But police did reveal that during their search of Amardio's boat, they'd found blood,

but wouldn't say whether it belonged to Bruno or Dom. The only thing investigators would confirm was that samples of the blood from the boat and the human remain material from the river were going to be sent off to a forensic examiner. DNA samples from Dom's house in Salvador and samples from Bruno's relatives were also going to be collected for comparison. The Guardian reported that shortly after that,

more ominous clues surfaced. Tom Phillips reported that on Saturday, a small platoon of indigenous residents who'd been searching in tributaries near where the men vanished found a blue tarp tied around a tree that they recognized as having come from a local group of indigenous workers. Floating in the water not far from the tarp were a pair of men's trousers, which I think refer to pants, boots, and a health care card that were quickly identified as belonging to Bruno. Also with those items was a backpack with another set of boots and more articles of clothing in it that were later determined to be Dom's. The Guardian also published that a backpack, laptop computer, and sandals were discovered near Amardio's house, which was located on the river.

So I'm not sure whether this article was referring to the same stuff from the previous article I just mentioned or something different, but based on what I could gather, it seems like Amardio's house wasn't too far away from where the men's clothing and boots

were discovered by the tied-up tarp. Anyway, forensic investigators took all of Dom and Bruno's personal items as evidence and continued to meticulously dig around the spot where the stuff had turned up. On Monday, June 13th, Brazil's ambassador to the UK incorrectly broke news to Dom's family, mistakenly telling them that his body had been found instead of just some of his belongings. And almost as quickly as he'd released the false information, his office had to go into damage control and apologize,

which wasn't a great look and really portrayed to the public that the Brazilian government and its search crews on the ground were not communicating well, as many people already suspected. The next major update came the following day when authorities announced they were upgrading Amardio to prime suspect for alleged aggravated murder, and arresting his brother Osne, the Costa de Oliveira, in connection with the case. When officers took Osne into custody, they'd served a couple of search warrants that allowed them to seize several bullet casings and an oar from a boat as evidence. The next day, Wednesday, June 15th, federal police officials announced the truth

had finally come out. According to reporting by Metropolis and Andrew Downey and Tom Phillips for The Guardian, while being interrogated on Tuesday night, Amardio had cracked and confessed to murdering Dom and Bruno and enlisting other men to help him bury their bodies in a remote secluded spot in the jungle about two miles inland from the banks of the Atagüey River. According to Terrence McCoy's reporting for the Washington Post, Amardio told investigators that after seeing Dom and Bruno pass by in their boat, he and his men had followed the pair and shot at Bruno, who he said returned fire with a.38 Taurus handgun he kept

on him. But Bruno's pistol was no match for Amadio's shotguns, and eventually Dom and Bruno's boat crashed into some trees along the banks of the river. Both men had been fatally shot. Amadio said after getting their bodies off the boat, it had taken at least four hours to try and burn them. And when that ultimately failed, they'd partially dismembered them with a machete and then sunk their boat so that no one could find it. Amardio claimed his brother Osne and a third man named Jefferson de Silva Lima had helped him every step of the way. After confessing on Tuesday night, Amardio then spent the early hours of Wednesday morning accompanying police investigators as well as Army and Navy officers to the shallow burial

site where he and his accomplices had discarded Dom and Bruno's remains. A few hours after locating the victims, police investigators respectfully removed the remains and took them by boat to Adelaide de Nort to be transported out of the valley. Forensic tests came in a few days later and confirmed without a doubt that the remains were Dom and Bruno. When word of this development got out, Dom's wife Alessandra released a statement expressing her sadness as well as bittersweet relief.

She said, quote, this tragic outcome puts an end to the anguish of not knowing Dom and Bruno's whereabouts. Now we can bring them home and say goodbye with love. End quote.

Shortly after the bodies were found, police announced they believed as many as five men were involved in the murders and the attempted cover-up. This number included the Oliveira brothers and their friend Jefferson. However, the government didn't go as far as to say that investigators thought a larger criminal organization was behind the killings.

UNIVASA staff, on the other hand, definitely thought an organized crime group that profited from illegal fishing had hired the Oliveira brothers to carry out the crime. The agency even went as far as filing a long report begging the Brazilian government to thoroughly investigate the suggestion. But those efforts fell on deaf ears. A few days after the bodies were sent off for examination, Bruno and Dom's autopsy results were released to the media. The reports confirmed they'd both been shot to death with a shotgun, and then partially burned and dismembered before ultimately being hastily buried in the muddy jungle. Within a day of that information being released, Jefferson Da Silva Lima, the third man involved in the plot,

turned himself into the authorities and confessed to helping commit the crime. Andrew Downey, Oliver Laughlin, and Robert Coz reported for The Guardian that after Jefferson came clean, federal police detectives investigated a handful of other men who they believed might be connected to the case. And one of those guys gave them false documents while being questioned, but he was never arrested in relation to the murders. By the end of June, Bruno and Dom's missing boat had been located and dredged from the Atakwe River. It was processed for evidence,

and according to Andrew Downey's reporting, Dom and Bruno's killers had weighed it down with six bags of soil and sunken it 20 to 30 meters beneath the Murky River's surface. At the end of July, prosecutors in Brazil formally charged the Oliveira brothers and Jefferson for Dom and Bruno's murders. The government said the only reason the local men had attacked the pair was because they'd resented Bruno's work in the Amazon, had a personal vendetta against him, and did not want Dom, his companion, to publish the pictures and eyewitness accounts of their illegal fishing.

There was no mention of any possible connection to a larger criminal organization. A Washington Post article written by Terrence McCoy went into detail about how Amardio had fostered a deep personal hatred toward Bruno and the organizations he was associated with. In short, the piece discussed how, as a young man, Amardio had experienced a lot of personal and financial turmoil in the region and grew resentful of increased restrictions on fishing and hunting. By early August, though,

federal police investigators had changed their tune a bit in regard to how big the conspiracy surrounding the killings might have been. The Guardian reported that authorities arrested five other people who they claimed participated in Dom and Bruno's makeshift burial in the jungle, one of which was the known ringleader of a, quote,

illegal fishing mafia based in the Amazon region, end quote. Apparently, this guy was the person providing boats, fuel, firearms, and supplies to illegal fishermen so they could conduct their operations in the jungle. He was released on bail shortly after his arrest, which only frustrated people advocating for harsher restrictions for the suspects involved in the murders. Still, after fall of 2022, no further arrests were made, at least not that I could find in recent reporting. When and if the three main suspects in Bruno and Dom's case will see the inside of

a courtroom or prison cell for their crimes is something that's unfolding in real time. Like I said at the start of this episode, these murders happened in the summer of 2022, so just last year. Pedro Madera reported in May of this year that the judge presiding over the case had rescheduled a major hearing four different times already. The federal court there in Brazil is still in the phase of determining if Dom and Bruno's accused killers will have a jury trial. Something that's thrown a bit of a wrench into things is that the defendants are now claiming they killed Dom and Bruno in self-defense, an argument that many people who've been following this story and reporting on it are shocked by. I'm sure there'll be more updates to come, but the one thing that won't change is the fact that Bruno and Dom are gone.

Their impact, though, will never be forgotten. Unfortunately, they'll never see the beauty of the Amazon rainforest ever again, but the work they accomplished there while they were alive, and some would argue are still accomplishing even in death, is unmatched. Their families and supporters continue to publicly express grief over their loss, and thousands of Brazilian citizens have rallied against the government to reform laws and regulations that seek to develop the Amazon rainforest. The fight Dom and Bruno were taking part in is still far from over, and they deserve to have the world remember their names. So this is for you, Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira.

May you rest in peace and forever be known. Park Predators is an AudioChuck original show. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?