A Murder in the Forest

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Speaker 3 It was intended to be a short trip, three days on the river. And they would go down, they were going to spend two nights at the end of the river and come home.
And that was going to be it.

Speaker 4 This was in a part of northwestern Brazil called the Javari Valley. It's near the borders of Peru and Colombia.
There were two men on the trip.

Speaker 4 One of them was Brazilian Bruno Pereira, an expert on indigenous issues who lived and worked in the region. The other man was a British journalist named Dom Phillips.

Speaker 4 He had lived in Brazil for over 15 years, but was visiting the Javari Valley to write about Bruno's work.

Speaker 4 They'd planned to set up from a small town and sail down the Itiquai River, which cuts through the rainforest.

Speaker 4 The night before they left, Dom Phillips stayed in one of the only hotels in town.

Speaker 3 The morning he left, he was talking to the manager, and he told the manager,

Speaker 3 we're heading east down the river.

Speaker 4 But actually, they were heading south. Terry McCoy is the Washington Post's Rio de Janeiro bureau chief.

Speaker 3 And so he obviously was trying to confuse people on where he was going.

Speaker 3 And then they headed down the river to do their work, going the opposite direction of what he'd told the hotel manager.

Speaker 4 They'd made a plan to go and visit one of Bruno Pereira's friends and collaborators when they got back, an indigenous lawyer named Eliesio Marubo.

Speaker 4 They'd worked together protecting indigenous territory in the rainforest.

Speaker 4 Bruno had called Iliesio to let him know they would be coming.

Speaker 6 He said, I'll arrive on Sunday and we'll stop by your house.

Speaker 4 But then, on Sunday morning, Iliesio received a phone call.

Speaker 6 Saying, look, Bruno didn't get here. He should have arrived at 8 a.m.

Speaker 6 So I said, stay on the watch. He said, no, I'm going to take the other boat and I'm going to try to find him because his boat might have broken down.
So he set out to do that.

Speaker 4 They talked again later.

Speaker 6 And he got back and said, Eliesio, I didn't find Bruno. I didn't find any sign of Bruno.

Speaker 4 Eliesio Marubo is speaking to us in Portuguese. Reporter Julia Carnero translates.

Speaker 6 I called the authorities, I set up a team, and I went up the river again,

Speaker 6 but we didn't find him.

Speaker 4 Eliesio organized a search team

Speaker 6 and we carried out a very thorough search.

Speaker 3 When

Speaker 3 I saw that Dom had gone missing, I didn't know where he was, what what was happening.

Speaker 3 I did know that region, though. I had reported before in the Jafari Valley, and I knew how remote it was.
I knew how distant it was.

Speaker 3 And I know that hours, if not days, can go by without having self-service. And so I thought, you know, I think that this could still turn out okay.

Speaker 3 I called a police source

Speaker 3 and I asked him what he thought had happened.

Speaker 6 And he was like,

Speaker 3 I think they'll show up in a day or two. You know, this happens.
People go, you know, they got maybe a boat thing, boat malfunction.

Speaker 3 So I was feeling, okay, I think this could still turn out okay.

Speaker 4 Then Terry McCoy talked with Eliesio Marubo.

Speaker 3 I remember he told me, I don't have any hope anymore. They suffered an attack for sure.
He knew it.

Speaker 6 We always thought he had been murdered. We didn't share this with anyone, with other people outside of our group, but we already imagined what had happened.

Speaker 4 Eliesio started worrying that other people might be attacked too.

Speaker 4 Things felt so unsafe to him that he left his home.

Speaker 6 I packed a few clothes, a toothbrush, and left for an unknown destination. I went to a different city to live in a different city.
I completely changed my life.

Speaker 6 I had to break up personal relationships. I had to live alone.
I had to reinvent myself.

Speaker 4 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

Speaker 6 I was born in a Marubu community at the head of the Curaçao River.

Speaker 4 Eliezio Marubo is part of the Marubo indigenous tribe.

Speaker 6 Eliezio is my first name, and my last name comes from our people, the Marubu people.

Speaker 4 Iliezio grew up in the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, one of the most remote areas in the world. It's about the size of Portugal.
The territory is home to 26 indigenous tribes.

Speaker 4 19 tribes are what's called uncontacted. and basically have no communications with the outside world.

Speaker 4 The Javari Valley is home to the largest known number of uncontacted people.

Speaker 4 There are no roads in the territory. People use the rivers for transportation.
Iliesio says his community largely lives off the forest, hunting and fishing and keeping small plantations.

Speaker 6 We cut down very few trees. The areas designated for plantations are not permanent ones.
We choose a place near the community, but not too close to it.

Speaker 6 We plant, and after we harvest, we plant plant somewhere else so that the forest can grow back again.

Speaker 6 So, there's generally a lot of fruit, whether wild or cultivated fruits.

Speaker 6 There's a specific area in the community where we only have medicinal plants, which are more difficult to find inside the forest.

Speaker 6 The logic is as follows: You guys buy things and store them and put them in the fridge. We don't need this because everything is at hand.
If we want fish, we go to the lake and catch fish.

Speaker 6 The same thing with meat. The basis of Marubu food is red meat,

Speaker 6 and we really enjoy tapir meat. So we hunt tapirs because tapir meat is the best, the most nutritious.

Speaker 4 A tapir sort of looks like a pig crossed with an anteater. They're sometimes called the living fossil because they've been around for 55 million years.

Speaker 4 People illegally hunt the tapir, along with yellow-spotted river turtles and a prehistoric fish that looks like a giant snake. It's known as the Amazon giant and can grow up to 10 feet long.

Speaker 4 There's also illegal logging. People cut down the forest to sell the wood and to make space for gold mining and large cattle farms.

Speaker 6 Then we start talking about how people are starting to go hungry because many animals that were the basis of our diet no longer exist.

Speaker 6 So we no longer have that food safety. We have to readapt our food needs.

Speaker 6 There are regions where indigenous people lost 100% of their territory.

Speaker 4 A few years ago, a government agency captured a video of a member of an uncontacted tribe. The man was the last survivor of his community.

Speaker 4 The government agency believes everyone else was likely killed by ranchers or illegal miners.

Speaker 4 The man lived alone in the forest for over two decades, avoiding contact with other people. His body was found in 2022.

Speaker 4 Iliesio Murubo works as a lawyer for a small organization called Unavaja, or Union of Indigenous People of the Javari Valley.

Speaker 4 In 2020, Iliesio Marubo filed a lawsuit against American evangelists trying to approach uncontacted tribes in the forest to convert them.

Speaker 4 Bruno Pereira was also working with Unavasha when he disappeared on the river. Iliesio and Bruno had known each other for years and had first met through Iliesio's brother.

Speaker 4 The three of them all had daughters who were close in age.

Speaker 6 They're just a year apart, so our daughters became friends.

Speaker 6 So we ended up doing things together because they wanted to be together.

Speaker 6 We started to do things like friends.

Speaker 4 Bruno Pereira was born far away from the Javari Valley, in a city in the northeast of Brazil.

Speaker 4 He often went on expeditions into the forest that lasted for weeks, and he learned to speak at least four indigenous languages.

Speaker 6 We'd always say he was very similar to us. We'd say, boy, how can it be that you're so similar?

Speaker 6 His thinking was very similar to ours.

Speaker 6 So we got along very well because of that.

Speaker 3 There's something in Brazil called an indigenista.

Speaker 3 An indigenista is somebody who dedicates their lives to the indigenous cause.

Speaker 3 And Brazil, like so much of the Americas, is a story ultimately of colonization and indigenous people losing out on their territories and rights. And Brazil, this is a very animating political issue.

Speaker 3 And Bruno, he decided to dedicate his life to this cause.

Speaker 4 At Unavasha, they felt that the authorities weren't doing enough to protect indigenous populations from poachers or people encroaching on their territory.

Speaker 4 They decided that if the government wouldn't investigate criminal activity in the forest, they would do it themselves.

Speaker 4 They formed groups of people who would work as scouts. They would travel the forest and the rivers to find out about people who were poaching, fishing, or logging illegally.

Speaker 3 These indigenous scout teams would go out for a week or two and take photographs, get geographical positions, video record, find out who's ravaging the territory, make a dossier, and give it back to Bruno.

Speaker 4 So Bruno would go out on the water with the scouts, and then he and his colleagues would share what they found with the police, hoping that they would arrest the poachers.

Speaker 4 British journalist Dom Phillips wanted to write about Bruno's work with the scouts.

Speaker 3 So he got in touch with Bruno, and Bruno brought him out to say, like, come on out here, I'll show you the work that we're doing.

Speaker 4 They decided to spend a few days on the river. During his 15 years in Brazil, Dom Phillips had written about the impact of agriculture on the rainforest, especially big cattle farms.

Speaker 4 He'd written about JBS, which is the world's biggest meat processor. They sell meat under more than 100 brands.

Speaker 4 The U.S. is the second biggest importer of Brazilian beef.

Speaker 4 Dom Phillips reported that some JBS beef comes from cows raised on land that's been illegally cleared.

Speaker 3 Dom was an idealist and he threw himself into that research and into that work in the hope that by educating people of what this region was,

Speaker 3 it could help to preserve it.

Speaker 4 He was inspired by what he saw on his reporting trips, how how Indigenous communities hunt and grow things with no fertilizers. And he was going to write a book.

Speaker 4 He got a grant to go on reporting trips and interview Indigenous people, including the scouting teams fighting illegal poaching and logging that Bruno was leading.

Speaker 3 So he spent months researching different solutions in different areas of the Amazon that he could go visit, understand why the solution is working, what can we learn from it, how can we apply this to other places?

Speaker 3 And then he's going to come back and write a book about it.

Speaker 4 His river trip in the Javari Valley with Bruno was one of the last reporting trips he'd planned.

Speaker 4 And then they disappeared.

Speaker 4 Ten days later, their bodies were found deep in the forest.

Speaker 5 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 4 Growing up in the Javari Valley in the 1980s, Iliesio Marubo said he felt very safe.

Speaker 6 It's a very special place for me.

Speaker 6 I really liked playing in the river. I'd go to the river and spend hours on end.

Speaker 6 I also went out with the elderly women who generally don't like to take boys or men with them when they go do their activities.

Speaker 6 But they made an exception with me and said, Let's go, I'll take you or your brother.

Speaker 4 Iliesio says they would sometimes meet people from a state agency who gave them toys.

Speaker 6 And we tried to play ball. My dad hated it.
He said it was a white man's thing, a white thing. But we played there on this little field.

Speaker 6 So I learned to shoot a bow and arrow to imitate things from the adult world.

Speaker 6 And at night, everyone, a bunch of naked boys, we'd run to the river and jump from the riverbank into the water and bathe until about six o'clock when our mothers would come and say, come on out, threatening to punish us.

Speaker 6 And we'd run into the big hut because we knew that the elders there would protect us.

Speaker 6 When we got there, there was food, so we had dinner, ate, and played, and got dirty again until our mothers took us to the river again for a last bath.

Speaker 6 I really liked it when there was a full moon. We lay down on the hammocks, one next to each other, me, my brothers, and sisters.

Speaker 6 And we'd talk about things and make fun of each other or laugh at something silly someone did during the day.

Speaker 6 We would talk and talk until we got sleepy.

Speaker 6 The next day started very very early. We woke up around 3 a.m., already playing, doing mischief, doing loads of things.

Speaker 6 Life was very good.

Speaker 4 When he was a teenager, Iliesio says things changed.

Speaker 6 When the child is born, the father or the man say, this one is going to be such and such.

Speaker 6 So I was born with this purpose to do politics and to defend the territory. So when I was 16 years old, one day they called me to go to the main hut for a conversation.

Speaker 6 I got there, my grandfather said it was necessary for me to go to the city. I would learn to speak Portuguese, I'd get to know money, everything.

Speaker 6 My journey started there.

Speaker 4 Iliesio moved to the nearest city to go to school.

Speaker 6 It was a very painful, very complicated process.

Speaker 6 I knew what needed to be done, but I had no idea how to do it. So I had lots of ups and downs, with bullying, with a lot of prejudice.

Speaker 6 And then, after some time, my family, my mother, came to join me. And from then on, we started to develop in the city.

Speaker 6 After a long time, I finally managed to finish high school.

Speaker 6 After high school, I took the entrance exam to university. I didn't pass.
I only passed on my third attempt.

Speaker 6 and then I went to study law because I realized that everything I was set to do my whole life had to do with the world of law.

Speaker 4 When Iliesio returned to the Javari Valley, he says he noticed a change.

Speaker 6 Life no longer unfolded in the same way.

Speaker 6 We started to face scarcity of certain things that we had very easily in the past.

Speaker 6 We started to experience fear of things things that we had never been afraid of, like the fear of strangers appearing.

Speaker 6 And we also noticed this impact on the environment,

Speaker 6 the presence of people hunting, fishing, and exploring the territory illegally.

Speaker 4 Today, the entire Amazon rainforest is home to about 30 million people. A lot of people came in the early to mid-1900s to collect sap from rubber trees and sell it.

Speaker 3 You had a lot of very impoverished people going to very remote places working for ultimately rubber barons.

Speaker 3 A lot of these people ended up living along the rivers and becoming fishermen and hunters later on. That was one wave of migration.
Another wave of migration was driven by the government.

Speaker 3 In the 1960s and 1970s, the military dictatorship took over with a dream of taming what had thus far been untamed. And they called it

Speaker 3 a land without men for men without land.

Speaker 3 That meant that we're going to populate this area and make it ours because until then the Amazon had been part of Brazil but totally separate from Brazil.

Speaker 4 They called it Operation Amazon and the military built highways through the forest.

Speaker 3 So it became completely anarchic that people would just take land, claim it was theirs, sell it to someone else, and also became this huge system of

Speaker 3 cutting down the forest to claim it. So, pretty much, it was they built a pathway into this new area.
They did that, but they didn't do enough to develop what was at the end of the pathway.

Speaker 3 And it created this very anarchic, violent, and lawless place.

Speaker 4 The Javari Valley is designated indigenous territory, meaning non-Indigenous people are not allowed to hunt there.

Speaker 4 But lots of other people live in the region, near the indigenous territories, and it's hard to make a living. In the nearest city, only 7% are employed.

Speaker 3 This area in recent years has been subsumed by crime. It's at the nexus of three different countries with a lot of drug trafficking going on between them.

Speaker 3 And this driving of crime also resulted in a ripple effect of people becoming illegal fishers and illegal hunters. And they would poach inside of these indigenous territories.

Speaker 3 These are armed fishermen, poachers, and armed hunters.

Speaker 6 In Brazil, everyone knows that there are two large criminal groups who fight for territory all over the country. In our region, they work with partners.
What do they do?

Speaker 6 They bring in a person who lives close to the indigenous territory, a person who's going to die if he gets sick because he doesn't have a hospital.

Speaker 6 Someone who needs a boat to go to the city when he needs things from there. But he doesn't have a boat.

Speaker 6 He only has a canoe that he built with his own strength and which he paddles for several days to reach the city.

Speaker 6 So if he has the opportunity to get an engine for his boat, if he can get this engine in exchange for simply going to the city, of course he'll do it.

Speaker 6 So he can take drugs to the city, and it's okay if he's arrested because he's a person who is being used in this process. And in the city, he will leave it somewhere.

Speaker 6 And another person who is used by the organized crime will take this drug and take it somewhere else and will receive a pittance for it.

Speaker 4 Organized crime and drug traffickers are set to control a lot of the illegal poaching and logging in the area and don't want reporters or scouts coming around.

Speaker 4 Over the past decade, at least 300 people, many of them indigenous, have been killed in the Amazon.

Speaker 4 In 2018, Jared Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil.

Speaker 3 And one of his most animating political calls was the

Speaker 3 right to develop the Amazon and to pretty much, you know, do away with the nuisance of international pressures to say they couldn't do what they wanted to do with the Amazon.

Speaker 4 At a press conference for international journalists, Dom Phillips asked Bolsonaro about some of the threats facing the Amazon. Bolsonaro replied, The Amazon is Brazil's, not yours.

Speaker 4 And at one point, he said data showing a rise in deforestation was lies.

Speaker 3 The Amazon for years has been protected by several agencies in Brazil that

Speaker 3 safeguard the environment, safeguard Indigenous rights, and what Bolsonaro ultimately did was strangle those organizations, those agencies that had those responsibilities.

Speaker 3 And as those agencies withered, crime surged and crime came in and deforestation rocketed.

Speaker 3 What keeps the lid on top is the strength of these governmental agencies and indigenous communities to defend the forest. And what Bolsonaro did was he lifted the lid.

Speaker 4 Before Bruno Pereira started working with Una Vasha, he worked for a government agency. One day, poachers attacked their base, firing shots at the building.

Speaker 4 There were at least eight attacks in a year.

Speaker 4 And then, one night night in 2019, one of Bruno's colleagues, a man named Maxiel Pereira dos Santos, was shot in the back of the head and killed while sitting on his motorcycle.

Speaker 4 The murder has not yet been solved.

Speaker 4 Bruno requested a leave from work.

Speaker 4 He wrote that he needed a break after the murder of his friend and colleague, and because of the, quote, climate of tension, he told people that he was waiting for Bolsonaro's term to end before he would return to the government agency.

Speaker 4 Instead, he went to work with Iliesio Marubo and Unavaja, training indigenous scouts.

Speaker 3 But that work of going out there and surveilling these people and then taking those documents and then giving them to the authorities, that's going to create a lot of tension, a lot of enemies.

Speaker 4 Unavaja started receiving threats. delivered to Iliesio Marubo's office.

Speaker 3 And then another threat happened where they were all, the workers for Univaja were sitting in the town square, and a guy came up and said, if you don't stop this, what happened to your former colleague who had been killed, Bruno's former colleague who had been killed, is going to happen to you.

Speaker 3 And they told the authorities and they told the authorities and nothing was done.

Speaker 3 So Bruno bought a gun.

Speaker 4 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 4 In 2022, Washington Post Bureau Chief Terry McCoy traveled to the Javari Valley.

Speaker 4 He wanted to find out what had happened in the weeks and months leading up to the murders of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips.

Speaker 4 He read the scouts' reports and spoke with people who knew Bruno.

Speaker 4 And he learned about something that had happened while Bruno was out on the river with the scouting teams, weeks before he disappeared.

Speaker 3 So one day, Bruno is heading back up the river, and

Speaker 3 they hear gunshots,

Speaker 3 and they look up.

Speaker 4 They saw a man they knew well.

Speaker 4 They knew he was involved in illegal fishing, and the scouts had collected information about him.

Speaker 4 He led a team of six men who carried shotguns and went into the indigenous territories at night to to fish illegally.

Speaker 3 His name was Pallado.

Speaker 3 And they see Palado over there holding a gun,

Speaker 3 looking at them.

Speaker 4 As they passed his stilt house on the river, he fired a shot. It went over their heads.

Speaker 3 They reported authorities, but nothing, nothing, they didn't do anything about it. So they went back to the city and continued on with their work.

Speaker 4 A few weeks later, Dom Phillips arrived in the Javari Valley.

Speaker 4 Dom and Bruno spent a couple of days along the river, interviewing people. Sometimes they shadowed indigenous scouts.

Speaker 4 On the second day, they saw Pilato in his boat, and he raised his shotgun at some of the scouts as a warning.

Speaker 4 Months after their deaths, Bruno's phone was found in the forest. It contained photographs of Dom interviewing people, and also two videos of Pallado sailing past them.

Speaker 4 Terry McCoy decided to take the same trip down the river that Dom and Bruno had taken months earlier.

Speaker 3 You know, the funny thing is, you're so worried and you're so worried about what's going to happen. And then when we get out there on the rivers, it felt totally calm and placid and beautiful.

Speaker 3 Oh, it was a beautiful nature. The river was gorgeous.
It was so hard to reconcile.

Speaker 3 You know, the calmness and the beauty of that place with the violence that I know happens frequently.

Speaker 4 On the last day of their trip, Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira knew they would have to sail past Pallado's house to get back to town, so they decided to leave early in the morning.

Speaker 3 But people on the rivers wake up at dawn.

Speaker 4 Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, or Palato, and another man named Jefferson de Silvalima confessed to the murders of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips.

Speaker 4 They told police what happened that morning. Pallato said they shot Bruno and shot Dom, and that Bruno returned fire but didn't hit them.

Speaker 3 And he started to lose control of the boat, and then it crashed into a riverbank, and they ultimately dragged the bodies into the woods,

Speaker 3 dismembered them, burned them, and buried them.

Speaker 3 And then they went back to their river communities and

Speaker 3 tried to conceal that they had done anything. And that's what happened.

Speaker 4 And how were they caught?

Speaker 3 They were caught in large part because of

Speaker 3 the extraordinary international pressure that came down upon Brazil. Bruno

Speaker 3 was a well-known government researcher. And more than that, Dom.

Speaker 3 was an international correspondent with a lot of friends who were also international correspondents who started writing a lot of stories about this and it brought about a large-scale search and pressure to find and out what happened

Speaker 4 in a statement then-president bolsonaro called dom and bruno's trip quote an adventure that isn't recommendable for anyone

Speaker 4 bruno pereira's wife anthropologist beatrice matos told brazilian tv that she was hurt by the statements which quote contradict the extreme dedication, seriousness, and commitment that Bruno has with his work.

Speaker 4 The police arrested Pallado Jefferson and Pallado's brother for the murders.

Speaker 5 Pallado

Speaker 3 said ultimately they killed Dom because they couldn't leave it behind any witnesses.

Speaker 3 But the bigger reason was that he wanted to be able to take control of this fishing cabal that was laying waste to the Javari Valley.

Speaker 3 So he thought because these environmental agencies in Brazil become so weak, the only thing that was protecting this area was Bruno's work with this indigenous surveillance crew.

Speaker 3 So he thought, take away Bruno, you open up the entire area.

Speaker 4 Terry went to the small community on the river where Pallado lived.

Speaker 5 Pallado

Speaker 3 was

Speaker 3 a child of settlers who came to the Amazon to tap rubber.

Speaker 3 And in a lot of ways, the community that he came from were other victims of the Amazon.

Speaker 3 These people were abandoned by the government, effectively. They are encouraged to go out there, but then just abandon out there.

Speaker 3 And a lot of these people, you know, started living living off the forest, living off the river.

Speaker 4 In 2001, the area was turned into an indigenous territory to protect the uncontacted tribes. Other riverside communities could no longer fish and hunt the way they used to.

Speaker 3 There was vast violence, prolific violence between these river communities and the indigenous communities. Killings going back and forth, back and forth for years

Speaker 3 as this hatred grew.

Speaker 4 Pallado and Jefferson de Silva Lima are awaiting trial. Pallado's brother was just released after 27 months in prison.
A federal court ruled there wasn't enough evidence against him.

Speaker 3 Police have continued to investigate this.

Speaker 7 They

Speaker 3 think that it was not just Palado who was acting alone.

Speaker 3 There could have been police involvement.

Speaker 3 There could have been a person who ordered the hit.

Speaker 4 Last year, police arrested another man who is believed to be the leader of an illegal phishing network. He's been charged with ordering the murders.

Speaker 4 And then, another man was arrested for assisting him and for interfering with the investigation and intimidating witnesses.

Speaker 4 Last year, Brazil got a new president, Lula Da Silva.

Speaker 3 And deforestation has plunged by 40%

Speaker 3 last year. One of the great environmental success stories of the last number of years.

Speaker 4 And Brazil got its first Indigenous minister, heading a newly created Ministry of Indigenous Affairs.

Speaker 4 Last year, she took a trip to the Javari Valley along with Dom and Bruno's wives, Alessandra Sampayo and Beatriz Matos.

Speaker 4 She told an audience of mostly Indigenous people, we are here to reestablish the presence of the Brazilian government in the Javari Valley region.

Speaker 4 But some people say not much has changed.

Speaker 3 The forest is still being destroyed every single day. And I've been told even that the killings did nothing to change the fundamental dynamic that's going on in that area.

Speaker 3 It's still an area of high tension, high illegality, and Indigenous people under threat.

Speaker 4 Today, Iliesio Marubo lives in hiding.

Speaker 6 I live in a city that cannot be identified, but I continue working on the legal defense of my region.

Speaker 6 I have tried somehow to continue doing this after June 5th, 2022.

Speaker 4 Iliesio told The Guardian that he thinks the police investigation needs to continue.

Speaker 4 He suspects there's been a cover-up of the murders, and he said he believes the case goes beyond the people who've been arrested so far.

Speaker 6 So, Bruno, he was just a stone that was removed from its place.

Speaker 6 In any case, here I am.

Speaker 6 I continue in the same fight as always

Speaker 5 until the end.

Speaker 4 Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Speaker 4 Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Sedgiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinnane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.

Speaker 4 Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.
This episode was fact-checked by Michelle Harris.

Speaker 4 Special thanks to journalist Julia Carnero.

Speaker 4 A group of journalists are at work completing Dom Phillips' book titled, How to Save the Amazon. Ask the People Who Know.
It will be out next year.

Speaker 4 We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus.

Speaker 4 Once you sign up, you can listen to criminal episodes without any ads, and you'll get bonus episodes with me and criminal co-creator Lawrence Bohr, too.

Speaker 4 To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com/slash plus.

Speaker 4 We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/slash criminal podcast.

Speaker 4 Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

Speaker 1 I'm Phoebe Judge.

Speaker 4 This is Criminal.

Speaker 7 All right, remember, the machine knows if you're lying. First statement: Carvana will give you a real offer on your car all online.
False. True, actually.
You can sell your car in minutes. False?

Speaker 1 That's gotta be.

Speaker 7 True again. Carvana will pick up your car from your door or you can drop it off at one of their car vending machines.

Speaker 1 Sounds too good to be true, so true.

Speaker 7 Finally caught on. Nice job.
Honesty isn't just their policy, it's their entire model. Sell your car today, too.
Carvana! Pickup fees may apply.

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