"A Murder in the Amazon Reveals What the Fight Over the Rainforest Is All About", 03 December 2022

...Ari was a member of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous people, and he’d spent that evening drinking in a series of bars scattered along the unpaved roads near the group’s reservation. The next morning his body was found at the side of a road around half an hour away. His head was caked with blood that had dried quickly in the searing heat. His phone was nestled in the grass a few feet away. On the sides of the road were walls of grass, and behind that were fields where the mighty Amazon rain forest had once stood.

The story of Ari Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, and the investigation into his murder, is in one way the story of Brazilian Indigenous peoples: their genocide, their daily struggles in a hostile world, and their fight for justice. But it’s also a contemporary tale, of climate change, Brazil, and the influence of Jair Bolsonaro, the recently defeated Brazilian President whose disregard for the Amazon and its inhabitants has led the whole planet to the edge of environmental Armageddon.

...The territory is being squeezed on all sides by loggers and ranchers. And it’s that pressure, say the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, that led to the death of Ari, a schoolteacher and leader, taken at the age of just 35.

Killing Indigenous people got easier in Brazil these past few years. Before taking office, Bolsonaro vowed not to give them “one more centimeter of land,” and he was true to his word...

When news of incursions came in, Ari gathered at dawn with other Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau guardians, and together they would hike into the forest, backpacks over one shoulder, bows and arrows over the other. They knew the invaders were dangerous—“We are always being threatened,” says Bitaté—but drones helped them see what they were dealing with from afar...