Instead, it seems to have been a final chapter for both Phillips and his friend Bruno Pereira, an indigenous specialist and guide. They traveled together for almost two years, with Pereira accompanying Phillips on the reporting journey. Phillips was writing a book on sustainable development in the rainforest, and the youngest was a willing companion. Pereira believed in Phillips’s work and opened doors to the jungle and its people. In a series of trips over the last four years, they have been hunting together in canoes and huddling their hammocks side by side among age-old trees. They shared canned meals, pushed each other into the silent passage of a monkey or a crocodile, and when one of them first fell face down into the murky waters of a river or swamp, the other was there to pull him out. For many people, insects, rain, days without a shower or proper food would be hell. It was a paradise for Phillips. He saw the miracle in the wet. He could not be further away from his previous life. A former style columnist for the Independent on Sunday and once editor of the music magazine Mixmag, Phillips went to Brazil in 2007 to find some peace of mind to finish writing a book on rave culture. But after clicking “send” in the Superstar DJs’ script Here We Go !, he never returned to the United Kingdom. Brazil had understood him and soon had a new career as a respectable foreign correspondent. Much of his work was for the Guardian and the Washington Post, but when interest in Brazil waned in the late 2010s, he turned his hand to one of his true loves: the environment. Phillips has always been a man of the countryside, a diligent hiker and rower, whose tense and nervous physique denied his 57 years. He loved the jungle and wanted to leave his mark with another book. “He said I want to be neutral there, I want to hear what people have to say,” Sampaio said. “He interviewed a miner, he talked to people on the river, to the natives, to environmentalists. “His proposal was to give voices to those voices that are not heard.” In Pereira, he found someone who had been hearing these voices for years. The couple bonded during a 2018 mission to the region, when Pereira was working for Funai, the indigenous institution of the Brazilian government. In a travel article, Phillips described how the team traveled 600 miles (950 kilometers) by boat and hiked more than 40 miles. She described Pereira as “wearing only shorts and flip flops while squatting in the mud; she pops the boiled skull of a monkey with a spoon and eats her mind for breakfast as she discusses politics.” Funai is responsible for protecting the approximately 235 indigenous tribes of Brazil, many of whom have had little or no contact with the outside world. For decades, the task has been to ensure that these people remain isolated, protected from disease, threats and the burdens of external society. The land they occupy, however, is sought after by lumberjacks, hunters, miners and fishermen and is valuable to drug and animal traders who see its remote waterways and hidden trails as ways to move the product. As head of the Funai section for isolated indigenous peoples, Pereira helped turn such areas into protected areas where residents felt safer. But the job became much more difficult in 2019, when Jair Bolsonaro took over as president of Brazil. The far-right former army captain never hid his contempt for the natives – he once said it was a pity that the Brazilian cavalry was not as effective as their genocidal American counterparts. Bolsonaro’s support for the miners and farmers in the area was the antithesis of all that Pereira represented. When his team destroyed an illegal mining base at a Yanomami detention center in September 2019, it was the last straw for the pro-trade camp, he said. He had to leave. In order not to be defeated, Pereira found a new appeal shortly afterwards, working with Univaja, an indigenous rights organization in the area near the Brazilian-Peruvian border. He got lost there last week.
