Dom Phillips started his career as a music journalist and ended it as a vocal advocate for the Amazon rainforest. Bruno Pereira was an indigenist who dedicated his life to helping the native population of the Amazon protect themselves from the poachers and drug traffickers ever ready to overrun it. The two men’s causes aligned, and they started working together. Then they disappeared. Ten days later, their bodies were discovered. Missing in the Amazon – a podcast produced by a newspaper Dom wrote for, The Guardian – explores what happened to them, and why.
The six-episode series is hosted by The Guardian’s Latin American correspondent Tom Phillips, who was a close friend of Dom. That they were one letter off from having the same name caused many to get them mixed up or think that they were related; there was a running joke that they should become “a Brazilian country music duo, Dom e Tom.” The last time Tom heard from his old friend was in a consoling text Dom sent on the morning of Tom’s fortieth birthday. The older man reassured him: “Forties is a great decade!”
Because of that friendship — and the fate that awaited Dom and Bruno — the story is told with a generally somber tone. Missing in the Amazon is a true crime podcast in that it technically covers a true crime, but it cedes to none of the genre’s queasier impulses; it never feels like the show is deriving its narrative engine from human suffering. With an audible lump in his throat, Tom states that he won’t be going into the details of the horrors inflicted upon Dom and Bruno. The podcast is about how they lived, and what they lived for, far more than how they died.
There is consolation in how fitting a tribute Missing in the Amazon is to the men who are gone. They weren’t naïve, particularly Bruno, whose profession inherently involved riling up some very dangerous people. They knew that what they were doing came with risks, but they carried on anyway, even after things had become frightening. In telling their story, the podcast is continuing the mission that they cared about so much, as well as offering the many people who loved them a chance to share what made the two so special.
One of the most impressive aspects of Missing in the Amazon is the concision, with episodes averaging around half an hour in duration. Once you factor in recaps, previews, and ads, that doesn’t leave much time to dive into a nuanced, multi-faceted investigation — to explore the people involved, heroes and villains alike, and their motivations. But while there’s certainly enough material here for a more rigorous deep dive, the show does an excellent job of explaining complicated histories quickly and clearly.
The assassinations stemmed from a complex web of geopolitics and local resentment, the culpable ranging from small-fry village poachers up to the then-president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. (We hear a chilling clip of Dom confronting Bolsonaro about his environmental negligence, and Bolsonaro’s furiously contemptuous response). In addition to the biographies of the murdered men, we’re led through the battle between those who know how important the Amazon is to the earth’s survival and those, like Bolsonaro, who see it solely as a resource to be plundered. We’re also given a potted history of the long-running hatred between the indigenous population of the rainforest and the settlers, context that proves essential to understanding the central killings.
It’s excellent journalism: clear, engaging, informative. And that deft combination of the educational and the emotional is what makes Missing in the Amazon such a compelling listen.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.