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Ex-chief of Brazil’s indigenous agency charged over Amazon murders

Marcelo Xavier accused of indirectly contributing to killings of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips by failing to protect workers in the region

Police with the recovered bodies of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips in Atalaia do Norte, Brazil, on June 15th, 2022. Photograph: Victor Moriyama/The New York Times

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Sat May 20 2023 - 06:56

Federal police have brought criminal charges against the former head of Brazil’s indigenous protection agency for alleged acts of omission they believe indirectly paved the way for the murders of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips in the Amazon last year.

Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro made Marcelo Xavier the head of the indigenous agency Funai in July 2019, six months into his environmentally devastating four-year administration.

Mr Xavier – a former police chief who activists accused of playing a key role in the dismantling of indigenous protections – was removed from his position in December after Mr Bolsonaro lost the presidential election to his leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

On Friday afternoon it emerged that Francisco Badenes, the federal police chief responsible for the inquiry into the murders of Pereira and Phillips, had formally accused Mr Xavier of indirectly contributing to those crimes on the grounds that he had failed take steps to protect Funai workers in the Amazon.

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The two-page federal police indictment is dated May 12th, 2023, but was only reported on Friday afternoon by the Brazilian broadcaster TV Globo.

The accusation against Mr Xavier is based on the legal concept of dolus eventualis – when a person is aware of the risk of a crime taking place but fails to act to prevent it.

Another senior Funai official, Alcir Amaral, was indicted on the same charges.

Mr Pereira worked for Funai until he was removed from his post in late 2019, two weeks after he helped lead an operation targeting illegal miners in the remote Javari Valley region where he and Phillips, a British journalist and longtime Guardian contributor, were killed.

At around the same time one of Mr Pereira’s Funai colleagues, Maxciel Pereira dos Santos, was shot dead in the city of Tabatinga.

After that still-unsolved assassination, Mr Xavier was reportedly warned of the risk of further violence in the region but failed to act.

Mr Pereira and Mr Phillips were killed June 5th, 2022, after coming under attack while travelling down the Amazon after a four-day reporting trip looking at the situation facing indigenous communities in the Javari region.

Their bodies were found after a 10-day search.

Mr Xavier sparked fury in the days that followed the men’s disappearance, wrongly insinuating the two men had entered an ndigenous territory without government permission. i

A judge later ruled that the two men never entered indigenous lands, conducting interviews outside the borders of the Portugal-sized territory.

Neither Xavier nor Amaral made any immediate comment about the accusations. Writing on Twitter last August, Mr Xavier claimed the murders were being manipulated by leftist opponents of Mr Bolsonaro’s government.

Since Lula took office in January, Funai has undergone a radical shake-up. It is now run by the indigenous activist and politician Joênia Wapichana, while a ministry for indigenous peoples has also been created under the leadership of another prominent indigenous politician, Sônia Guajajara. – Guardian

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