In Iceland, it is not difficult to buy a river turtle the size of a table, one and a half meters long and maybe 80 kilos. “They fish them at night and that way nobody sees them,” said Antonio, owner of a grocery store, built, like the whole town, on stilts so as not to flood when the Yavarí rises. Iceland is a municipality of 23,000 inhabitants in the Peruvian Amazon, a tiny island surrounded by the Amazon a few kilometers from the so-called Triple Frontier, where Brazil, Peru and Colombia meet.
Antonio came to Iceland 40 years ago in search of a plot of land. He takes out a plastic bottle filled with a green liquid. "This is the turtle soup we make, delicious." They wanted to try it. But the memory of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira took away the appetite, because the illegal trafficking of the coveted meat of the Amazonian turtle, as well as other exotic species of aquatic life from the immense rivers that cross the jungle, is a key element to understand the murder of the British journalist and the Brazilian indigenista, two months ago, not far from Iceland.
Many of the turtles, as well as the giant pirarucú or paiche fish, are illegally fished within the huge Yavarí Valley indigenous reserve, which straddles the Brazilian side of the border. There, any extractivist activity –fishing, hunting, wood, gold mining– that is not the work of the indigenous people is prohibited. At least, that's what the law says.
"There are three categories of fishermen here," says Manuel Chorimpa, representative of Univaja, the Brazilian NGO for which Bruno Pereira worked. “There is the one who goes out every day and sells to survive; the one that has a refrigerator on the boat and fishes further to get peixeliso (a scaleless fish of up to 50 kilos), highly coveted in Colombia. Then there is the one that fishes pirarucú, turtle, tambaquí..., in the reserve. These have links to drug trafficking and are dangerous people.” A lot is at stake in the Valle del Yavarí reserve, the place on the planet with the most isolated indigenous peoples and without contact with the rest of the world. “Many indigenous peoples live at the headwaters of four rivers here. We have found traces of seven isolated villages, in addition to the 23 already identified, and there may be more,” says Clovis, an indigenous member of the Marubo ethnic group, who was leading the campaign against illegal logging in the reserve. "Everyone is in danger."
Behind it is the smuggling and the expansion of the drug business through the Triple Frontier, where one can cross to any of the three countries without going through passport control. "Much of what is hunted and fished in the reserve is sold in Colombia," says an indigenous leader at the headquarters of Univaja, the NGO Bruno Pereira worked for. “The big fish businessmen are drug traffickers who finance illegal fishermen in exchange for receiving valuable fish for sale across the border; Bruno was killed for seizing the fish”, he assures.
"There are three countries with different economic interests and the State is missing in all of them," says Chorimpa. Crime fills the gap. “It is a poor region in job offers; people will do anything to survive.” The Brazilian part of the Triple Frontier is already number two in the poverty ranking of Brazilian municipalities, according to the latest data from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, in Rio (FGV). Leticia, the Colombian city on the border, an hour by boat from Iceland, has fewer visible signs of poverty among the population. Being killed for a few kilos of fish or turtle meat is another proof of how little life is worth in this lawless region. The day of our arrival in Tabatinga, the Brazilian municipality opposite Leticia, a girl died from a stray bullet in a settling of scores between alleged drug traffickers.
On the outskirts of Iceland, lived Rubén Darío da Silva Villar, the alleged intellectual author of the murder of Pereira and Phillips. Nicknamed Colombia, he bought illegally hunted fish and meat from the reserve to sell in all three countries. He was the owner of a boat seized by the police with 400 kilos of pirarucu, two large and 35 small turtles, as well as 400 kilos of game meat, all obtained illegally in the reserve. He is suspected of having links to drug trafficking. The illegal hunter and fisherman join the list of criminals who enter the indigenous reserves in violent invasions. These include loggers, who sell precious wood on the black market, and garimpeiros (illegal miners), who extract gold that is refined in countries such as Switzerland.
The indigenous are increasingly exposed. With Jair Bolsonaro in the presidency, part of the environmental protection system has been dismantled. “There is a lack of incentives for development; without alternatives it is easier to extract wood from the reserve; if there were alternatives there would be no invasions,” says Clovis.
There is another threat to the indigenous people. "North American evangelical missionaries already use drones to locate isolated indigenous people to evangelize them," explains Clovis. If in Brazil there has been more resistance, "in Peru a large number of indigenous people are already evangelical," he says.
Part of the future of the indigenous peoples of Yavarí and beyond will depend on the outcome of the Brazilian presidential elections, the first round of which is held on October 2. Bolsonaro has never hidden his desire to end the protection of indigenous reserves. "You can't keep prehistoric men in a zoo for the rich," he often says.
Lula, on the other hand, is committed to reinforcing the federal police to regain control of remote regions of the Amazon such as the Yavarí Valley. "If we are very careful, we can prevent what happened to Dom and Bruno from happening again," he insisted in a meeting with foreign journalists in São Paulo.
Another encouraging fact: a record of 181 indigenous candidates have been presented to the Brazilian legislative elections that are held on the same day as the presidential ones. The most important thing for an area like the Triple Frontier is that a new Lula government would recover cross-border integration projects through multilateral organizations like Unasur. The coming to power of a series of leftist governments in Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Mexico would facilitate strategies to promote development and combat drug trafficking, including proposals for the decriminalization of drugs. "The region is fragmented and polarized and it is necessary to recover regional initiatives in various areas, from economic development to the fight against crime," says a former director of Unasur in Brasilia. "With Lula, Brazil will be able to recover its old role as leader of integration."
