“Journalists reporting on Indigenous issues are doing critical work, and must be able to do so without fearing for their safety,” he said.

Phillips is writing a book about preservation of the Amazon with support from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which awarded him a year-long fellowship for environmental reporting that ran through to January.

The place where they disappeared is the primary access route to and from the Vale do Javari, where several thousand Indigenous people live in dozens of villages. People in the area say that it is highly unlikely they would have gotten lost in that sector.

“He is a cautious journalist, with impressive knowledge of the complexities of the Brazilian environmental crisis,” Margaret Engel, the foundation’s executive director, wrote in an email. “And he is a beautiful writer and a lovely person. The best of our business.”

Brazil’s federal public prosecutors said in a statement they have opened an investigation and mobilised the Federal Police, Amazonas state’s civil police, the national guard and navy. The latter will coordinate search efforts, according to the statement. In a statement, the navy said it was dispatching a search and rescue team.

The army’s footprint and manpower is far greater than the navy’s in the region. It didn’t respond to an Associated Press email seeking comment.

Loading

The army’s Amazonian Command released a statement on Tuesday saying it was ready to “fulfil its humanitarian missions of search and rescue” but was waiting for official clearing. In a later update, it said the operation had begun.

Phillips’ wife Alessandra Sampaio appealed to the authorities to hurry up, saying “... in the forest every second counts, every second could be the difference between life and death,” The Guardian reported.

The Guardian quoted a spokesperson as saying it was “very concerned and is urgently seeking information about Mr Phillips’ whereabouts and condition. We are in contact with the British embassy in Brazil and local and national authorities to try to establish the facts as soon as possible.”

Phillips resides in Salvador, Bahia, in the north-east of Brazil.

“I hope they are found soon, that they are fine and safe,” former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva posted on Twitter, while recalling Phillips interviewing him in 2017.

The Vale do Javari region has experienced repeated shootouts between hunters, fishermen and official security agents, who have a permanent base in the area, known for having the world’s largest population of least contacted Indigenous people. It is also a major route for cocaine produced on the Peruvian side of the border, then smuggled into Brazil to supply local cities or to be shipped to Europe.

In September 2019, an employee of the Indigenous affairs agency was shot dead in Tabatinga, the largest city in the region. The crime was never solved.

“It is extremely important that Brazilian authorities dedicate all available and necessary resources to the immediate realisation of searches, in order to guarantee, as soon as possible, the safety of the two men,” Maria Laura Canineau, the director of Human Rights Watch in Brazil, said.

Journalists working for regional media outlets in the Amazon have been murdered in recent years, though there have been no such cases among journalists from national media nor foreign media. However, there have been several reports of threats, and the press has limited access to several areas dominated by criminal activity including illegal mining, land grabbing and drug trafficking.

AP, Reuters