With four Guajajara people killed and three others surviving attempts on their lives, 2023 marked the deadliest year for Indigenous people in the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in seven years.

In this session, Karla Mendes, investigative reporter for Mongabay, will show the behind-the-scenes of her year-long investigation that revealed a pattern of targeted killings of Indigenous Guajajara amid the expansion of illegal cattle ranching and logging in and around Arariboia, in the Brazilian Amazon.

She will unfold how she tracked several dozen illegal or suspicious activities in the region and made a correlation with the crimes that remain unpunished, through a combination of field reporting, data and spatial analysis, and court documents. The driver of her investigation was the murder of Paulo Paulino Guajajara, the first killing of an Indigenous defender to go before a federal jury in Brazil, an unprecedented move to fight violence against Indigenous people in the country. Paulo was killed in November 2019 in an ambush by illegal loggers in Arariboia. She interviewed Paulo nine months before his death for a documentary film she co-directed, which won four international awards. In August 2023, Karla returned to Arariboia to shine a light on this case that still hasn’t gone to trial.

Speakers