| A few weeks after Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira went missing, Tom sat down in Rio de Janeiro with João Laet, a photographer with deep experience of the Amazon who had also known Dom, and talked about what to do next. “We did what journalists do,” he said. “We decided to just report, to carry on, to do even more of it. A couple of weeks later, we were back in a different part of the Amazon – and we’ve been doing it ever since.” The podcast has been one of the centrepieces of Tom’s part of that work. Over the last three years, he has travelled thousands of miles through the jungle by helicopter, plane, boat and on foot in an effort to understand what happened, and to shed new light on the stories that the two men thought were so important. The series presents a painstaking, beautifully attentive portrait of Dom and Bruno, and the powerful investigative thread of the search for their killers; meanwhile, the story of the violence done to the Amazon by organised crime and industrial deforestation, and the Indigenous people fighting to protect it, plays out in vivid detail. “We wanted to make sure their lives and legacies were properly remembered,” Tom said. “I hope they’d be proud of it.” Where threats to the Amazon stand today When Dom and Bruno went missing, the far-right demagogue Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil, and widely viewed as having nurtured the climate in which their attackers could feel they had impunity. Bolsonaro’s defeat to the leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva later that year was a genuine turning point for the Amazon, Tom said. “Lula was accompanied at his inauguration by Raoni, one of Brazil’s most revered Indigenous leaders. He appointed Marina Silva, a hugely respected environmentalist, as his environment minister. He gave Bruno’s widow, Beatriz Matos, a top job in a new ministry for Indigenous peoples. He started putting resources into the environmental agency, so it could crack down on deforestation and crime. So all of that is very good news.” At the same time, he said, “the fundamental fact is that lots of things haven’t changed. Deforestation has come down massively – but there is still a great deal of destruction going on. You have a right-wing congress which is trying to undermine Indigenous rights and environmental protection. Organised crime has grown in the last few years.” And there is the prospect of a far-right successor to Bolsonaro prevailing in next year’s presidential election. In the Javari valley, where Dom and Bruno were killed, Tom said “all the activists I know still receive threats – every time I come home, I wonder if I’m going to see those people again.” He points to one bleak symbol in particular: a floating federal police base deployed to the valley, called New Era, which has subsequently been withdrawn. How Dom and Bruno’s friends and allies responded to their deaths In a story published last week, and further explored later in the podcast series, Tom describes the extraordinary journey he and João Laet took deep into some of the most inaccessible territory in the Javari valley alongside members of the Indigenous patrol group that Bruno helped to found. The group, named Evu, works to train activists to protect the rainforest and rivers from poachers, fishers, miners and drug traffickers; against just a dozen members in 2021, there are 120 today, an expansion driven by the determination to secure Bruno’s legacy. “These are the same people without whom Dom and Bruno might never have been found,” Tom said. “Three years ago, I was blown away by their skill, their dedication, their persistence. And now they’re not just stepping up in the region, but exporting the model to other parts of the Amazon and Latin America.” The work is astonishingly gruelling: Tom describes joining the team as they carried two aluminium canoes on their shoulders on a hike of 100km in six days through dense rainforest. At the end of their journey, they provided the canoes – and training – to the last of their six mobile teams. Since coming back, “I haven’t been able to put a pair of shoes on for a week,” Tom said ruefully. “My left knee isn’t really bending properly. I fell in the river and lost my glasses. It’s been slightly exhausting, but a privilege.” Meanwhile, a group of journalists led by Guardian global environment editor Jonathan Watts and Dom’s widow Alessandra Sampaio has been at work on the project that Dom was engaged in when he died – the completion of a book called How to Save the Amazon, in which Bruno is an essential character. “No reader should be in any doubt that these pages have been stained by blood,” Dom’s co-authors write. “The killers blasted a gaping wound in this book that is far too great for any infusion of solidarity to heal.” “It’s all part of the same project,” Tom said. “I got my copy in Portuguese the other day. It was an incredibly uplifting thing to receive – this feeling that in some sense, Dom’s mission had been accomplished.” Has the crime been solved? In July 2022, three men were charged with the murder of Dom and Bruno: Amarildo da Costa Oliveira and Jefferson da Silva Lima, who confessed to the killing but have argued that they acted in self-defence; and Oseney da Costa de Oliveira, who was accused of a lesser role, but who subsequently saw the charges dropped – though he is still under house arrest pending a possible new charge. But that left the question of why. In November last year, the alleged mastermind of the attack was charged with arming and funding those responsible. He was identified in Brazilian press reports as Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, a shadowy business person in the Javari Valley who has been accused of running an illegal poaching operation, money laundering, and drug smuggling, but never convicted. Others have been charged as accessories who helped to conceal the bodies. The fifth episode of the series will examine whether Dom and Bruno’s deaths were the result of a wider conspiracy. Among Indigenous activists, “There is a frustration that it has taken so long,” Tom said. “There’s a real worry that if the two fishers are convicted, it will just end there. People want to see proof of a real inclination from the authorities to dig into whether there were more powerful criminal figures behind the murders, and what they might reveal about the region’s struggle with political and police corruption in a hugely important narco corridor for cocaine going from Peru to Europe.” What has it been like to tell Dom and Bruno’s story? As he worked on the series, “I thought a lot about the fact that Dom left his house one day for what he would not have seen as one of his most dangerous reporting trips, said goodbye, and never came back,” Tom said. “So yes, it’s been traumatic. But it’s been therapeutic, too, to have the time and space to try to do this story justice.” There has been a deep poignancy in spending so much time talking to people about his friend – and even the parts of his story that were very far from the Amazon. “We nearly always talked about our affection for Brazil, and the work of reporting here,” Tom said. But as the second episode of the series sets out, Dom had a whole other life in London in the 1990s, where he was editor of Mixmag, and a passionate connoisseur of dance music. “I was only a teenager, but that was part of my world back then too,” Tom said. “I really wish now that we had talked more about those days.” As he says on the podcast, a thread runs through all of Dom’s life, whether going toe-to-toe with a superstar DJ in a row over a coverline in the queue for Ministry of Sound or reporting deep in the Javari valley: “The backbone, the commitment to his ideas. When Dom decided he cared about something, or that it really mattered, he went all-in. And in the end, that was what set him on the path to the Amazon.” | 