This “crazy Brazil” had disappeared on Sunday, June 5, when he was traveling with Brazilian indigenist Bruno Araujo Pereira in the northeast of the country. His death was confirmed by an expertise practiced on human remains found in the Amazon.
by
“Amazonia, that you are beautiful.” These words are the last writings by Dom Phillips on his Facebook account, five days before his disappearance on the Rio Itaquai, in northeast Brazil, Sunday, June 5, then that he was traveling with the Brazilian indigenist Bruno Araujo Pereira. The phrase in the shape of a romantic confession is accompanied by a video where we see a motor boat advancing on the water with in the background a long strip of earth surmounted by a cathedral forest. After ten days of research, remains of his body were unearthed 3 kilometers from the river. They were identified by the federal police on June 17. Dom Phillips was 57 years old. He had just settled in Salvador de Bahia with his Brazilian wife, Alessandra Sampaio, after having lived in Sao Paulo then in Rio de Janeiro.
Evoke Dom Phillips, who was a journalist at the Guardian and the Washington Post, is to recall the words of Chamfort: “Why do you assume that I say good, because he is my friend? And why do not Do you not rather suppose that he is my friend, because there is good to say it? “Dom, I rubbed shoulders with Brazil for a long time, at the time of Dilma Rousseff, social movements and crises Politicians, the end of the PT golden age, the workers’ party of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known as “Lula”. Dom was a singularly endearing man, of rare modesty, too, and a humanity that forced admiration. Endowed with a sense of vitriol humor, overflowing with affection and tenderness for his own, he was interested in everything, with, in the work, the expression and the requirement of a very high professional conscience .
With him, it is a “madman of Brazil” who disappears, one of those who had made this country-continent their reason for living, their passion. Brazil, Dom knew the contours and the depths for having crisscrossed it for almost fifteen years. From brutal police descents to favelas to the crazy electoral campaigns, from corruption trials to dismissal procedures which he had the opportunity to cover, he reported with accuracy and rigor. Smiling lips, determined to never take himself seriously, he accumulated notes, meetings, small and large stories. Dom, that was, a soda of style and prose for whom politeness and kindness had to accompany the field work. Only the very British accent posed on a Brazilian language which he mastered almost perfectly betrayed, not without delights, a slight form of restraint from elsewhere.
You have 66.6% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.