‘He wants to die’: illegal fishing threatens lives – 06/03/2023 – Environment

José Maria Batista Damasceno weeps as he describes his decades running from death in the Brazilian Amazon. Once, in the region of the Japurá River, an illegal fisherman threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave the city. “You better go, or we’re going to harpoon you,” Damasceno remembers hearing.

A few years later, he narrowly escaped an ambush and death in another remote corner of the jungle—where Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips met last year.

“It was very, very heavy,” says Damasceno, getting emotional as he describes how his boat’s engine failure saved him from encountering a band of heavily armed assassins who were lying in wait for him.

Damasceno is not an indigenous activist or journalist, like Pereira and Phillips, whose murders exposed the environmental battle deep in South America’s rainforests.

He is a fisheries engineer who has dedicated his life to convincing small riverside communities that sustainable fishing programs would benefit them more than the quick, short-term profits offered by the illegal fishing mafias that plunder the region’s rivers and indigenous lands.

These efforts to encourage green living have put Damasceno on the opposite side of environmental criminals. But he insists on fighting.

“I’ve always trusted God to protect me from harm — and here I am fulfilling my mission,” says the soft-spoken sustainable fishing advocate, who recently traveled to the region where Pereira and Phillips were killed, hoping to promote sustainable fishing there.

The world in which Damasceno operates is one of hidden dangers, ruthless rules and huge illegal profits, where highly organized bands of hunters suspected of links to international drug trafficking groups prey on endangered Amazonian species such as the pirarucu.

After last year’s murders, members of Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government painted the crime as the fruit of a local conflict, disconnected from the devastation inflicted on the Amazon by his anti-environmental policies and dismantling of indigenous protections.

But the murders exposed a much uglier reality: the rampant and highly lucrative illegal trade in fish and wildlife that plagues Brazil’s isolated and lawless tri-border with Colombia and Peru.

At the center of this trade is Atalaia do Norte, the poor riverside town where Pereira and Phillips set out on their last journey on June 2 last year.

As the closest town to the entrance to the territory of Vale do Javari, Brazil’s second largest indigenous reserve, Atalaia serves as a base for the indigenous activists whose work Phillips was reporting on when he was killed.

Its bumpy streets offer a startling portrait of the cultural and linguistic diversity of a region that is home to six indigenous peoples, including the Matis and Marubos, as well as 16 groups with little or no contact with the outside world.

In recent years, Atalaia has also become a key part of a transnational banned hunting network, with suspicious links to drug factions that transport large amounts of Peruvian cocaine through what police now consider Brazil’s second most important drug smuggling route. .

After visiting Atalaia last year, congressional investigators concluded that “wealthy and heavily armed criminal associations” and “highly dangerous criminals” had set up camps in the region, funding groups of illegal fishermen who plunder the protected waters and forests of the indigenous reserve where life natural is more abundant.

“We are sure that illegal fishing in the Vale do Javari region is not from riverside people trying to make a living, but in fact from much larger organizations that make considerable investments and make exorbitant profits,” wrote the investigators.

Bruno Pereira’s attempts to combat this illegal trade by organizing indigenous patrols put him on a collision course with these criminals.

“That’s why Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed,” a friend and former colleague, Armando Soares, told Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit organization that coordinates The Bruno and Dom Project. Earlier this year, police named an alleged local illegal fishing boss as the mastermind behind the crime.

The most valuable asset in the Javari Valley is the Arapaima gigas, the Latin name for a giant air-breathing fish that Brazilians call pirarucu and Peruvians call paiche. One of the largest freshwater fish in the world, the arapaima can grow up to 3 meters long and weigh 90 kilograms. It is considered a delicacy in major Latin American cities such as Lima, São Paulo and Bogotá.

Years of unregulated overfishing have undermined pirarucu stocks in waters outside the protected Javari indigenous lands — where outsiders are forbidden to enter without permission and commercial fishing is prohibited. As a result, poachers have increasingly invaded the territory to extract huge amounts of fish, as well as a river turtle called tracajá.

“They use small boats and travel in small groups,” said Orlando Possuelo, an indigenist who continues Pereira’s work with the patrol groups fighting to stop these invaders. “They are specialists in the field. Many of them were born there [antes de o território ser oficialmente criado em 2001]so it’s not easy to find them.”

After being smuggled out of indigenous territory on ice-filled wooden barges, the fish are sold in several border towns, including Leticia in Colombia, Islandia in Peru and Benjamin Constant, a riverside town near Atalaia named after one of the founders of the Brazilian republic.

A year-long investigation by Forbidden Stories found that illegal trade continues to flourish in the Tri-Border region, despite government pledges to crack down on environmental crime after last year’s killings. None of the countries has strict control over the origin of the pirarucu being sold.

Brazil has not yet reopened the offices of its environmental agency, Ibama, in Tabatinga, the closest city to Javari, after it was closed in 2019. The regional production company in Peru does not have fishing inspectors in Santa Rosa del Yavarí, a Peruvian city on the other side of the river, in front of Tabatinga. And the Colombian authorities do not control the amount of fish from the 40 companies registered to operate in Leticia, on the Colombian side of the border.

External scrutiny is not welcome. “There’s nothing here. You want to die,” a man warned a reporter from Peru’s OjoPúblico, one of the 16 media outlets involved in The Bruno and Dom Project, when he visited a fishing warehouse in the Colombian border town in search of illegal fish.

Activists say the near-total lack of control means the illegal fish trade continues to thrive despite the international scandal caused by the Pereira and Phillips murders.

“I don’t think anything has changed,” said Possuelo, recalling that indigenous activists received reports of illegal hunters operating in the Javari territory in the days after the disappearance of the two men, on June 5 of last year.

Despite the risks, Damasceno said he was determined to continue his crusade to bring sustainable fishing to some of the most isolated and dangerous corners of the Brazilian Amazon, where he was born and raised.

At the age of 65, the fishing engineer intends to retire after what will be his last mission, and perhaps the most difficult: to implement projects of this type in São Rafael, São Gabriel and Ladário, three fishing communities where Pereira’s alleged assassins came from. and Phillips.

This involves helping these communities create three different types of lakes that will help restore local arapaima stocks and, it is hoped, prevent fishermen from encroaching on indigenous lands: “permanent protection lakes” where fishing is prohibited; “maintenance ponds” where local families can fish for food; and “management ponds”, where up to a 30% quota of adult fish can be legally harvested after their numbers reach certain levels.

“If there are 100 fish, you can catch 30 so that stocks can recover,” Damasceno said.

The engineer argued that sustainable fishing is the only way to prevent further violence along the Itaquaí River and help needy families to resist the temptation to supply fish to organized crime. As proof that this is possible, he recalled that the fisherman who once threatened to harpoon him later embraced sustainable fishing and became a close friend.

“I always say that sustainable fishing is the way out of this type of conflict. It unites people. It raises awareness, opens the door to equality, rights and acceptance,” insisted Damasceno, who hopes to retire to write a book about the pirarucu once your mission is complete. He intends to call it “The union of people and sustainability in the Amazon”.

On a recent trip to fishing villages near where Pereira and Phillips were killed, Damasceno urged residents to embrace the idea of ​​long-term, legal survival rather than short-term illegal gains.

“Lift your heads. You must continue,” he told them. “Think of your children.”

Additional reporting by Ana Ionova (The Guardian), Rodrigo Pedroso (OjoPúblico), Cécile Andrzejewski and Mariana Abreu (Forbidden Stories);

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THE BRUNO AND DOM PROJECT

This report, by the British newspaper The Guardian, is part of O Projeto Bruno e Dom, an international press consortium involving more than 50 journalists from 16 media organizations, coordinated by Forbbiden Stories, an entity dedicated to continuing the work of journalists murdered in the exercise of their profession. A Sheet joins the consortium.

The indigenist Bruno Pereira and the journalist Dom Phillips were killed in Vale do Javari (AM) on June 5, 2022.