Brazil police arrest man suspected of ordering Amazon murders

Federal police in Brazil say they have arrested a man suspected of ordering the murders of a Brazilian indigenist and British journalist in a remote part of the Amazon rainforest last month.

Rubens Villar Coelho, who reportedly holds dual Peruvian and Brazilian citizenship but is nicknamed Colombia, was arrested after presenting false identity documents when he voluntarily went for questioning at a police station on Thursday.

At a press conference on Friday, the head of the federal police in Amazonas state, Eduardo Fontes, said Mr Villar Coelho sought out the police because he was preoccupied by media reports linking him to the murders of Bruno Araújo Pereira and Dom Phillips.

He had previously been identified as the chief operator of an illegal fishing operation in the protected indigenous territories of the Javari Valley, near where the two men went missing on June 5th. Their bodies were found on June 15th after Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, one of the local fisherman arrested in connection with their disappearance, confessed to his role in their murder. Another two men are also in custody.

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Mr Villar Coelho admitted to police he had a “commercial” relationship with Mr Costa de Oliveira but denied any involvement in the murders.

Media reports say Mr Villar Coelho financed the illegal fishing of the giant valuable pirarucu fish in rivers flowing through protected indigenous territories. The illegally caught pirarucu is then shipped out to cities in Brazil and Colombia. The scheme is also allegedly used to launder the profits of drug-traffickers who in recent years have increasingly turned to the little-policed Amazon region to run cocaine from Peru and Colombia into Brazil, often for onward shipment to Europe.

One of Brazil’s leading indigenous experts, Mr Araújo Pereira was working with local indigenous communities on how to better protect their territory from illegal fishing, logging and mining when he was murdered. Mr Phillips was with him as part of his research into his upcoming book, How to Save the Amazon.

At the time of his murder, Mr Araújo Pereira was on indefinite leave from his job in Brazil’s federal agency in charge of indigenous affairs after being sidelined by the administration of far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro in 2019. During Mr Bolsonaro’s three years in office, Brazil’s agencies charged with protecting the environment and indigenous peoples have been eviscerated, leading to a dramatic spike in deforestation and criminal activity in Brazil’s Amazon region.