Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has become more dangerous

Fly from Europe to Peru and you make landfall over Guyana. For almost five hours you then fly over a dark green carpet festooned with serpentine rivers, some a muddy brown, others inky black. Such, still, is the vastness of the Amazon rainforest. Yet this aerial view is deceptive. At ground level large swathes of the forest have been eaten away. It is an assault that began centuries ago, as colonists pushed up the rivers. Since the 1960s it has gathered pace, accelerated by the chainsaw, the bulldozer and the building of highways. At issue are two opposing visions for the region, of economic development or of environmental protection, and two groups of people: most indigenous tribes on the one hand, and ranchers, farmers, loggers and garimpeiros (wildcat miners) on the other.

Now this conflict has reached even the most hidden areas of the Amazon, as the murders earlier this month of Bruno Pereira, an adviser to indigenous tribes, and Dom Phillips, a British journalist, make clear. According to Brazil’s federal police they were shot dead as they were returning by boat from a research trip in the valley of the Javari, a territory the size of Austria close to the border with Peru that is home to 16 tribes living in isolation. The police say their killers were illegal fishermen, three of whom have been arrested.