‘Bolso shows all signs of fascism’: the journalist who predicted Brazil’s future – and paid the ultimate price

“Bolso shows all signs of fascism, as do his supporters,” the murdered British journalist Dom Phillips told me before his death. “His sons are all more extreme if anything.”

These words were written in 2018 by the Guardian contributor shortly before the election of the far-right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil – a prospect that Dom viewed with dread.

As he predicted back then, this would lead to more mortalities, more destruction of the Amazon rainforest and more danger for journalists. His own life and death were to prove the prescience of this foresight.

Dom was killed four years ago alongside the Brazilian indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, but his views feel alarmingly relevant once more as Brazil braces for a presidential runoff this Sunday in which a member of the far-right Bolsonaro clan is once more a favourite to win – despite all the dangers that poses to the environment and those who seek to protect it.

Polls suggest Flávio Bolsonaro – the son of Jair Bolsonaro – is narrowly ahead of the Workers party incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Although the difference between them is within the margin of error and Lula appears to have gained momentum, the possibility of another Bolsonaro administration is likely to fill any friends of Dom and Bruno with alarm.

Dom was no diehard political leftist. In an earlier election, he shocked me by expressing support for the centre-right challenger Aécio Neves because he felt the then Workers party administration had become too entangled in corruption. But while Dom eschewed ideology, he had clear ideas about the importance of sound, considerate government in the interests of people and the planet.

He saw the Bolsonaro family as a menace to both. Looking back through our exchanges of WhatsApp messages, I am struck by the prescience of his observations.

Some may be inclined to normalise Flávio as just another candidate, or to assume that all politicians are as bad as each other. That was certainly not how Dom saw things – and he came to pay the ultimate price for his efforts to address those concerns.

“I don’t think I have ever been so negative about Brazil’s future. Spent a week in Manaus, everyone seemed to be voting for Bolsonaro,” he wrote ahead of the first-round vote in 2018. “ If he wins, what would it be like living here? It’s like a ‘carte blanche’ to attack anyone his mob disagrees with.”

Two weeks later, he observed the creeping hostility towards the media at a Bolsonaro press conference, which he said was packed with rightwing supporters who loudly booed a journalist that they considered unfriendly.

This followed a physical attack on the organiser of an anti-Bolsonaro women’s group. “Chilling times here,” he wrote on 12 October of that year.

“I agree that Bolso shows all signs of fascism, as do his supporters.

“This is a very dark and worrying period and it is only going to get worse. My sense if [sic] that it is also going to become more dangerous for journalists.”

He detailed the changes he was already seeing – the proliferation of lies, a hardening of discourse online and a rising sense that violence was acceptable. He predicted more people would die as a result of Bolsonaro’s policies, and the wider environment would also pay a heavy price.

Over the following years, Dom’s reports for the Guardian confirmed his worst fears. Bolsonaro’s mismanaged response to the Covid crisis contributed to more than 704,000 deaths – the second highest toll in the world after the US.

His four years in power saw the highest level of Amazon deforestation of any presidential terms. Orwellian misinformation campaignsincluded efforts to blame environmental groups for forest fires and to boast – contrary to all the evidence – that his government was saving the Amazon.

In August 2019, Dom told me these claims were “staggering even by Bolsonaro standards, especially given Flávio Bolsonaro’s bill to get rid of legal reserves”, the latter a reference to a proposal by the then president’s son – and now presidential candidate – to remove one of the greatest protections for the rainforest.

Dom also came under social media attack after he politely asked the president about Amazon deforestation at a press conference. Bolsonaro snapped back, “the Amazon is Brazil’s, not yours, OK?” – a reply that was instantly spread across networks to suggest the nationalist had bested the foreigner.

Dom felt he had been set up. “The smile doesn’t last for long,” he observed. “Wonder how much of the Amazon will be gone by the end of Bolsonaro’s first term?”

That answer to that question would be 45,000 sq km (17,400 sq miles) over Bolsonaro’s 2019-2022 period in office, roughly equivalent to the loss of more than a million trees a day, and 59.5% higher than the previous four years.

Dom never got to report on that. He too was cut down, murdered alongside Bruno on 5 May 2022 close to the Javari Valley indigenous territory while he was researching a book titled How to Save the Amazon.

The man who confessed to their killing was a fisher named Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, who is now on trial. He apparently resented Bruno’s efforts to prevent him invading the indigenous territory, incursions that were illegal but encouraged by the president’s weakening of protections, rhetoric against environmental groups and tacit acceptance of lawlessness. As Dom had foreseen, Bolsonaro had made life more dangerous for journalists and the forest.

Jair Bolsonaro lost office later that year and was then convicted for attempting a military coup to overturn the election results. Dom had also anticipated this: “He is a criminal and I sincerely hope one day I see him being arrested by those federal police guys in the balaclavas in black,” he wrote in 2021.

I am sure Dom would have been cheered by last week’s government announcement of record low deforestation in the Amazon and the neighbouring Cerrado savanna thanks to strong enforcement during Lula’s current four-year term.

Such gains look precarious now that one of Bolsonaro’s “more extreme” sons is frontrunner in the presidential runoff and has promised, if he wins, to free his father and give him any job of his choice in the government.

Is there time for Lula to turn this around? How much worse could a second Bolsonaro family administration be? How much life – people, trees and other species – will die if they return to power?