Exclusive: Brazilian government ignored warnings about “imminent dangers” at Vale do Javari

The search for journalist Dom Phillips and indigenous expert Bruno Pereira has now gone on for ten days without finding the two men who went missing on June 5. They were last seen in the vicinity of Atalaia do Norte — a city close to the Vale do Javari indigenous reserve in the western Brazilian Amazon. 

The region has been plagued by the rampant activity of illegal fishermen and poachers, gold miners, and drug traffickers. The Vale do Javari reserve itself, which is as big as Portugal, has been a lawless territory in which the state has withdrawn from performing its role. 

The Brazilian Report was given access to internal documents from the Brazilian National Indigenous Foundation (Funai) which show that the federal government was well aware of how dangerous the area had become. And the warnings, which happened on at least four separate occasions over the past year, were left unheeded.

The people who issued the warnings forwarded the documents to the Federal Prosecution Office and the Federal Public Defender’s Office. (We have agreed not to publish excerpts in order to protect the identity of our sources, who asked to remain unnamed.)

The complaints were about an insufficient number of government officials; exhausting working hours; a lack of Funai workers or safety equipment; and insufficient infrastructure necessary for the functioning of Funai’s branches within the indigenous territory. 

The documents seen by The Brazilian Report also flag the lack of firearms available at Funai postings in an area known for attacks from angry fishermen and poachers. The decision to disarm federal employees in a zone of conflict is all the more shocking given the Jair Bolsonaro administration’s fierce defense of gun ownership rights for the general population.

Bodies such as Ibama, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, allow some employees to carry guns for personal protection. But Funai never regulated which weapons could be used — even for employees working in conflict regions.

“The problem is that Funai and the government collected...