The recent disappearance and murder of British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira in a remote area of the Amazon rainforest is part of a longer history of violence and criminality in the region.

Today, we learn more about the murders and put this history in context with Laura Waisbich, co-author of a new report on environmental crime in the Brazilian Amazon, and Maria Luisa Mendonça, who has recently written about land grabs in Brazil and increasing environmental destruction under president Jair Bolsonaro.

Laura Waisbich is a senior researcher at the Igarapé Institute, an independent think-and-do tank focused on the areas of public, climate, and digital security and their consequences for democracy. She holds a PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge.

Maria Luisa Mendonça is a research scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a PhD in human geography from the Universidade de São Paulo.

Cover photo: Rio Juruá by Alexander Gerst, 2018, shared under CC BY-SA 2.0

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