NEW: Four months ago, my friend Dom was murdered. He was reporting on an issue of global importance — the destruction of the Amazon — when he was shot dead and disappeared, buried deep in the forest, where the killers never thought he'd be found.
washingtonpost.com/world/interact… He was killed alongside Bruno Pereira, an activist who dedicated his life to protecting Indigenous territory and its inhabitants. I knew Bruno, too. A senior government official, we'd spoken numerous times about the threats facing Brazil's Indigenous communities better.

NEW: The violent and lawless erasure of the Amazon forest is perhaps the world’s greatest environmental crime story.

Here’s the part you don’t know: Almost no one is paying for it. washingtonpost.com/world/interact… The institutions in charge of stopping the destruction have been gutted and miss the majority of deforestation. The fines they do manage to write are almost never paid. The cases drag on — some for more than 15 years, records show.

And then there is the most stunning part.

I don’t think people are quite getting how significantly the arrival of the P1 variant has changed the game in Brazil, signaling a much darker phase of the pandemic, and what this means for the world. Nearly 67,000 people died in March — twice the number of any month during the pandemic.

The coronavirus has now reached one of its most vulnerable victims: indigenous tribes in the Amazon forest. But rather than sweep in to help populations the Brazilian state is constitutionally sworn to protect, the government is floundering. Here's how.

washingtonpost.com/world/the_amer… Stunningly, the first indigenous person to be infected in Alto Solimões -- where the worst indigenous outbreak is exploding -- came via a government doctor who’d carried the disease back with him from vacation.

Last month, I went to a lawless border town to report on gangs seizing control of the pesticide trade. It was a dangerous assignment, so I hired a fixer. His name was Leo Veras. On Wednesday, in front of his family, he was murdered. This is what I know.

washingtonpost.com/world/the_amer… I know Leo was a courageous journalist, and a creature of the border. He spoke fluent Portuguese, Spanish and the indigenous language Guarani. He’d reported on crime and drugs for decades, at great personal risk and nearly constant death threats.