The pirarucu is one impressive fish: a huge, thrashing Amazonian monster with red-and-black scales the size of serving spoons.<\/p>\n
Still, it’s just a fish. How is it possible it could have gotten British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira murdered?<\/p>\n
Police say Phillips, 57, and Pereira, 41, were shot dead on June 5 returning from a research trip in Brazil’s far-flung Javari Valley.<\/p>\n
At first glance, the jungle-covered region near the Peruvian and Colombian borders seems like one of the last untouched wildernesses, home to a sprawling Indigenous reservation with the biggest concentration of uncontacted tribes on Earth.<\/p>\n
But the double murder lay bare growing violence in the region fueled by illegal fishing, logging, mining and drug trafficking.<\/p>\n
Fishermen in Atalaia say poaching pirarucu — a tasty, coveted fish that can reach 4.5 meters (nearly 15 feet) and weigh up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds) — is a big-money business linked to drug traffickers operating in Peru and Colombia.<\/p>\n
A report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature found 83 percent of the illegal fish seized in Brazil from 2012 to 2019 was pirarucu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":6,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[177],"tags":[2344,391],"region":[2006],"source":[1727],"country":[2007],"state":[],"city":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/95579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/newss"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/95579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95580,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/95579\/revisions\/95580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95579"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=95579"},{"taxonomy":"source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/source?post=95579"},{"taxonomy":"country","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/country?post=95579"},{"taxonomy":"state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/state?post=95579"},{"taxonomy":"city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/city?post=95579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}