In the far west of Brazil is a vast strip of rainforest and rugged terrain that can only be reached by snake-brown rivers. Trapped near the border with Peru, the Havari Valley is almost the size of Portugal and is the largest refuge for indigenous tribes living in isolation from the outside world.
“Havari is one of the last true bastions of the primordial desert in the Amazon – and in the world,” said Scott Wallace, author of The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes.
But the region is also an illegal area where criminals go unpunished, said Wallace, now an associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut.
Located along Brazil’s Amazon-Peru border, the local reserve in the Havari Valley is the second largest in the country, at 85,000 square kilometers (33,000 square miles) – almost as large as Portugal.
Jawari’s tropical wealth has made it a hot spot for poachers, fishermen and illegal loggers, sparking violent clashes between locals and riparian communities who fiercely opposed the establishment of the reserve in 2001. It is also a smuggling route for cocaine traffickers. who have won a lack of state presence and a struggle to control smuggling routes between Brazil, Peru and Colombia.
This was the situation in which the British journalist Dom Phillips and the defender of the indigenous population Bruno Araujo Pereira disappeared on Sunday. They traveled along the Itakuai River, the main waterway to access the Hawari Valley. The suspect has been arrested in connection with their disappearance, although police say they have not yet found any evidence of a crime in the case.
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The last decade has seen an explosion of drug trafficking through the hidden waterways of Havari, as the cultivation of coca – the plant used to produce cocaine – has grown across the Peruvian border.
Coca cultivation increased by nearly 20% between 2019 and 2020 to 61,777 hectares (152,654 acres) in Peru, the second largest producer after Colombia, according to the United Nations.
For their part, the growing drug trade has unleashed a bloodbath on the triple border between Brazil, Peru and Colombia, while Colombian and Brazilian cartels are fighting to control access to the Amazon River to supply their cocaine to the lucrative European market.
General Mauro Esposito, a former coordinator of special border operations for Brazil’s federal police, said the triple border has become the most dangerous part of the country’s 10,492-mile long border due to the “massive” increase in coca cultivation in Peru.
“Since the 2000s, there has been coca flights to Peru’s border with Brazil,” he said.
Esposito oversaw the arrest in 2014 of prominent cartel leader Jair Ardela Michue, also known as Javier, who is personally responsible for at least 50 murders, including a Peruvian police officer. But the capture of the Peruvian capo in a joint Peruvian-Brazilian police operation did not stop the bloodshed.
Amazonas, the state of the Havari Valley, is now the most violent per capita in Brazil after a 54 percent increase in homicides last year, according to a study on the G1 news website, Brazil’s Public Security Forum and a nonprofit university. from Sao Paulo (AP).
“The Amazon is a battleground for war between powerful criminal organizations,” said a source in Peruvian police.
For years, the local band Family of the North, the Sao Paulo-based First Capital Command and the Rio de Janeiro-based Red Command have been fighting for control of the Amazonas. Since 2020, the latter has become dominant, according to security experts.
Colombian criminal factions are also involved in the conflict, including militias made up of dissidents and former rebels, a police source said. “This is a war with a lot of violence, a lot of cruelty.”
But the remote region is also a haven for contactless tribes. It is home to approximately 6,000 indigenous people belonging to 26 ethnic groups, 19 of whom live in isolation.
It was the pristine beauty of the Havari Valley that brought Wallace to the region two decades ago, when he accompanied legendary Brazilian explorer and indigenous defender Sydney Posuelo on an expedition to track down contactless tribes.
Many are descendants of survivors who “escaped slavery and massacre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” Wallace said. They fled to the most “inaccessible redoubts” of the harsh desert, where the springs of many tributaries of the Amazon are located.
“Twenty years ago, there were indications of the beginning of drug trafficking in the region and especially in the areas around the reserve,” he added. Today, he complains that it is much worse, as the current Brazilian government is showing much less interest in “exercising the rule of law”.
Jair Bolsonaro and his government “seem to support mining activities that ultimately plunder the forest,” Wallace said, adding that the right-wing president’s position provides “a wide field for criminal gangs.”
“They ceded these territories to criminal operations.”
Indigenous environmental groups and rights groups have long argued that Bolsonaro’s public stance on local lands has encouraged land invaders and criminal groups to go unpunished.
“Bolsonaro’s story facilitates illegal mining and any use of the territory for many [extractive] activities, “said Antenor Vaz, a former leader of Brazil’s Funai National Indian Foundation in the area where the couple is missing.
Meanwhile, Brazil’s congress is considering legislation that will open up local lands to extractive industries, such as mining and logging, Vaz said.
“There is organized crime in the Yavari Valley. “State institutions do not fight and do not ensure justice,” he added. “Criminals feel very empowered by the president’s discourse.”
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