June 24, 2022

17:06

Bruno Pacheco – Amazon Agency

MANAUS – Amid tributes with indigenous songs of the Xucuru people, the indigenist Bruno da Cunha Araújo Pereira, licensed employee of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) murdered on June 5 this year during an expedition in the Javari Valley in the Amazon, is being mourned this Friday, 24, in the city of Paulista, in the Greater Recife Metropolitan Region.

See also: After an expert examination, the bodies of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira are handed over to their families on Thursday, 23rd

The tributes included posters, photos of Bruno and Dom Phillips and demands for justice. The indigenous people who live in the Serra do Ororubá, in the municipality of Pesqueira, in the countryside of the state, also took maracás musical instrument also known as rattle, to sing the Toré ritual, whose cultural manifestation is a symbol of resistance and union of traditional peoples of the Northeast.

His coffin, covered with flags from soccer teams and a shirt from the Union of Indigenous Peoples of Javari Valley (Univaja), was exposed to the public around 9:30 am.

Killed at the age of 41, along with british journalist Dominic Mark Phillips, 57, after receiving threats from fishermen, the body of Pernambuco native Bruno Pereira arrived in Recife on Thursday night, 23, in a Federal Police aircraft, after undergoing forensic examinations in Brasilia, which indicated that he died of three shots, two in the chest and one in the head, with ammunition typical of hunting.

The indigenous activist’s remains will be cremated at 2pm this Friday (Brasília time), at the Morada da Paz Cemetery and Crematorium, which has made available, on the internet, a memorial page for sending messages, prayers and remembrances to Bruno Pereira. As of the publication of this article, the page already has 572 texts, photos, and videos.

Defender

Born in Recife, Bruno Pereira left his home town at the age of 22 to work for the environmental cause in the Amazon. He has held various positions at the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) over the last decade, when he worked in the regional coordination of Vale do Javari and learned to speak four languages of the local populations.

The indigenist, who leaves a legacy and a lesson on how to act for the rights of the original populations, became one of the country’s main specialists in isolated and recently contactedindigenous, and was considered a reference in the area by colleagues and the original peoples, with whom he built a strong relationship of friendship and was seen as a protector.

Pereira was on leave from Funai, where he worked for approximately 12 years, to participate in a project with journalist friend Dom Phillips, in the Javari Valley, a region on the Triple Border between Colombia, Brazil, and Peru, where there is a large presence of drug trafficking.

Read also: EDITORIAL – The dictatorship of drug trafficking in the Amazon, by Paula Litaiff

Arrested

Up to this Friday, 24th, four people were arrested suspected of participating in the murder of Bruno and Dom: brothers Amarildo and Oseney da Costa de Oliveira, known as “Pelado” and “Da Costa”, respectively; Jeferson da Silva Lima, known as “Pelado da Dinha”; and Gabriel Pereira Dantas, who turned himself in to the São Paulo police on Thursday, 23rd, claiming to have helped “finish off” the victims’ belongings and to have seen the executioners shoot them. The Federal Police does not rule out others involved.