Back in July, Mathias Felipe joined us for the first time on The Tuesday Daily as part of our special News Hound show. On that show, Mathias spoke to Max and I about journalism and writing clickbait headlines (which he was very good at). But during our chat, he mentioned that he had just finished working on a project about criminal gangs in the Amazon rainforest that had seen one of his colleagues going undercover with an armed group for quite some time. This shocked me as I thought people only went undercover in movies and a few episodes of Brooklyn 99, so I asked Mathias to come back on the show to tell me the full story.

Amazon Underworld is a project that Mathias worked on with a number of other journalists from around the world, exposing the criminal networks that operate throughout the Amazon in order to mine for gold and other minerals. This has devestating consequences on the environment, Indigenous populations, and anybody else who unwittingly gets caught up in it. So how do these gangs run? What are they actually doing in the Amazon? And what can be done to stop them? Mathias explains it all.