A federal police investigator in Brazil says a suspect has confessed to fatally shooting an Indigenous expert and a freelance British journalist in the Amazon, and the investigator said the suspect took officers to where the bodies were buried.

Officer Eduardo Alexandre Torres said at a news conference on Wednesday evening that the prime suspect in the case had detailed what happened to the pair who went missing on June 5. Torres said the suspect confessed he used a firearm to kill Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira of Brazil and freelance reporter Dom Phillips of Britain.

Police say they recovered human remains on Wednesday but they have not yet been positively identified.

“We found the bodies nearly two miles into the woods,” an investigator said. “They put bags of dirt on the boat so it would sink,” he said.

Pereira, 41, and Phillips, 57, were last seen on their boat in a river near the entrance of the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, which borders Peru and Colombia. That area has seen violent conflicts between fishermen, poachers and government agents.

The number of child migrants who crossed the treacherous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama has spiked, the United Nations Children's Fund said Friday. UNICEF said that in May 2021, 500 children were detected crossing on the jungle trail. But in May 2022, that number had risen to 2,000.

The fund estimates that about 5,000 children have crossed the Darien Gap so far this year.

Plagued by wild animals, swollen rivers, rough terrain and thieves, the gap claims many lives each year. The overall number of migrants crossing the land bridge between South and North America doubled.

The overall number of migrants crossing the land bridge between South and North America doubled, with about 32,000 crossing so far this year, compared to 16,000 in 2021.

A dispute over a gender-neutral bathroom has endangered Peru's plan to host the next gathering of the Organization of American States' top decision-making body.

Peru's congress is dominated by social conservatives, and it has voted to deny authorization for the scheduled Oct. 5-7 OAS General Assembly. It is supposed to bring together foreign ministers from across the hemisphere under the theme: "Together against inequality and discrimination."

The OAS had requested at least one gender-neutral bathroom be available. Peru's Foreign Minister César Landa issued an appeal on Twitter Friday urging lawmakers to reconsider. He said the action "seriously damages the international image of Peru."

“If they want to go to the bathroom here, they will go the bathroom that corresponds to their sex as it is: woman and man,” said Tania Ramírez, a Popular Front legislator.

The controversy struck gay lawmaker Susel Paredes as “a complete absurdity.” A gender-neutral bathroom is just “another bathroom that has a toilet, nothing more.”

The weary Indigenous men gathered at their base camp, nestled among towering trees and dense vegetation that form a disorienting sea of green. They sensed that their ancestral land — Selva Madre, or Mother Jungle — was unwilling to let them find the four children who'd been missing since their charter plane crashed weeks earlier in a remote area in southern Colombia.

Indigenous volunteers and military crews had found signs of hope: a baby bottle, half-eaten fruit, dirty diapers strewn across a wide swatch of rainforest. The men were convinced the children had survived. But punishing rains, harsh terrain and the passing of time had diminished their spirits and drained their stamina.

The weak of body, of mind, of faith do not make it out of this jungle. Day 39 was do or die — for the children and the search teams.

That night at camp, Manuel Ranoque, father of the two youngest children, reached for one of the most sacred rituals of Indigenous groups of the Amazon — yagé, a bitter tea made of plants native to the rainforest, more widely known as ayahuasca. For centuries, the hallucinogenic cocktail has been used as a cure for all ailments by people in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil.

Henry Guerrero, a volunteer who joined the search from the children's home village near Araracuara, told The Associated Press his aunt prepared the yagé for the group. They believed it would induce visions that could lead them to the children.

“I told them, 'There’s nothing to do here. We will not find them with the naked eye. The last resource is to take yagé,'” Guerrero, 56, said. “The trip really takes place in very special moments. It is something very spiritual.”

Ranoque sipped, and the men kept watch for a few hours. When the psychotropic effects passed, he told them it hadn't worked.

Some searchers were ready to leave. But the next morning, 40 days after the crash, an elder reached for what little was left of the yagé and drank it. Some people take it to connect with themselves, cure illnesses or heal a broken heart. Elder José Rubio was convinced it would eventually help find the kids, Guerrero said.

Rubio dreamed for some time. He vomited, a common side effect.

This time, he said, it had worked. In his visions, he saw them. He told Guerrero: “’We’ll find the children today.”

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The four children — Lesly, Soleiny, Tien and Cristin — grew up around Araracuara, a small Amazon village in Caquetá Department that can be reached only by boat or small plane. Ranoque said the siblings had happy but independent lives because he and his wife, Magdalena Mucutuy, were often away from home.

Lesly, 13, was the mature, quiet one. Soleiny, 9, was playful, and Tien, nearly 5 before the crash, restless. Cristin, 11 months then, was just learning to walk.

At home, Mucutuy grew onions and cassava, and used the latter to produce fariña, a type of flour, for the family to eat and sell. Lesly learned to cook at age 8; in the adults' absence, she often cared for her siblings.

The morning of May 1, the children, their mother and an uncle boarded a light plane. They were headed to the town of San José del Guaviare. Weeks earlier, Ranoque had fled his home village, an area where illegal drug cultivation, mining and logging have thrived for decades. He told AP he feared pressure from people connected to his industry, though he refused to provide details about the nature of his job or business dealings.

“The work there is not safe,” Ranoque said. "And it is illegal. It has to do with other people ... in a sector that I can’t mention because I put myself more at risk.”

He said he left Mucutuy $9 million Colombian pesos, about $2,695 U.S. dollars, before leaving to pay for food, other necessities and the charter flight. He wanted the children out of the village because he feared they could be recruited by one of the rebel groups in the area.

They were on their way to meet Ranoque when the pilot of the Cessna single-engine propeller plane declared an emergency due to engine failure. The aircraft fell off the radar a short time later.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday ... The engine failed me again ... I’m going to look for a river ... I have here a river to my right,” pilot Hernando Murcia reported to air traffic control at 7:43 a.m., according to a preliminary report released by aviation authorities.

“103 miles out of San José … I’m going to land."

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The Colombian military launched a search for the plane when it failed to arrive at its destination. About 10 days later, with no plane and no signs of life found, the Indigenous volunteers joined the effort. They were much more familiar with the terrain and the families in the area. One man told them the plane was making an odd noise when it flew over his house. That helped them sketch out a search plan that followed the Apaporis River.

As they walked the unforgiving terrain and took breaks in groups, ants crawled on them and mosquitoes feasted on their blood. One searcher almost lost an eye to a tree branch, and others developed allergy- and flu-like symptoms.

They kept searching.

Historically, the military and indigenous groups have feuded, but deep in the jungle, after food supplies and optimism diminished, they shared water, meals, GPSs and satellite phones.

Sixteen days after the crash, with morale running low among all search parties, searchers found the wreckage. The plane appeared to have nosedived — it was was found in a vertical, nose-down position.

The group assumed the worst. The men had found the wreckage and seen human remains. Guerrero said he and others started packing up their camp.

But one of the men who'd walked up to the plane spoke up.

“Hey,” he said, according to Guerrero. “I didn't see the kids.” The man slowly realized that when they found the wreckage, they hadn't seen any children's bodies. He'd approached the plane and seen the children's bags outside. He noticed that some stuff appeared as if someone had moved it after the crash.

He was right. The bodies of three adults were recovered from inside the aircraft. But there was no sign of the children, nor any indications they were seriously injured, according to the preliminary report.

The military's special operations forces changed its strategy, based on the evidence that the children might be alive. No longer were they quietly moving through the jungle.

“We moved on, to a second phase,” 1st Vice Sgt. Juan Carlos Rojas Sisa said. “We went from the stealth part to the noise part so that they could hear us.”

They yelled Lesly’s name and played a recorded message from the children’s maternal grandmother asking them in Spanish and the language of the Huitoto people to stay in place. Helicopters dropped boxes with food and leaflets with messages. The armed forces also brought its trained dogs, including a Belgian Shepherd named Wilson who did not return to its handler and is missing.

On the ground, nearly 120 members of the military and more than 70 Indigenous people were searching for the children, day and night. They left whistles for the children to use if they found them, and marked about 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) with crime scene-like tape, hoping the children would take the markings as a sign to stay put.

They began to find clues to the children's location, including a footprint they believed to be Lesly's. But no one could find the kids.

Some searchers had already walked more than 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) — the distance between Lisbon and Paris, or Dallas and Chicago. Exhaustion was setting in, and the military implemented a plan to rotate soldiers.

Guerrero made a call and asked for the yagé. It arrived two days later.

____

On day 40, after Elder Rubio took the yagé, the searchers combed the rainforest again, starting from the site where they found the diapers. His vision had reignited hopes but provided no specifics on where the children might be. Groups fanned out in different directions. But as the day went on, they returned to base camp with no news.

Sadness set in at camp. Guerrero told Ranoque as teams returned: “Nothing. We couldn't ... there is nothing.”

Then came the news. A soldier heard via radio that the four children had been found — 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the crash site, in a small clearing. Rescue teams had passed within 20 to 50 meters (66 to 164 feet) on several occasions but missed them.

The solider told Guerrero, who ran to Ranoque. “They found the four,” he said, through tears and hugs.

A helicopter lifted the kids out of the dense forest. They were first flown to San José del Guaviare and then to the capital, Bogota, each with a team of health care professionals. They were covered in foil blankets and hooked to IV lines due to dehydration. Their hands and feet showed scratches and insect bites.

Ranoque said Lesly reported that her mother died about four days after the crash. The children survived by collecting water in a soda bottle and eating cassava flour, fruit and seeds. They were found with two small bags holding clothes, a towel, a flashlight, two phones and a music box.

Tien and Cristin had birthdays while searchers looked for them.

All four remain in the hospital. A custody fight has broken out, with some relatives claiming Ranoque was violent against the children's mother. He has admitted to verbal and occasional physical fights, which he called “a private family matter.” He's also said he's not been able to see the two oldest children.

Officials, medical professionals, special forces and others have praised Lesly's leadership. She and her siblings have become a symbol of resilience and survival across the globe. The Colombian government, meanwhile, has boasted of the cooperation among Indigenous communities and the military as it tries to end national conflicts.

“The jungle saved them,” President Gustavo Petro said. “They are children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia.”

That's true, Ranoque told AP, but the Indigenous culture and rituals saved them, too. He credits the yagé and the vision of the elder among their group.

“This is a spiritual world,” he said, and the yagé “is of the utmost respect. It is the maximum concentration that is made in our spiritual world as an indigenous people.”

That's why they drank the tea in the jungle, he said: “That was so that the goblin, that cursed devil, would release my children.”

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Friday authorized including former president Jair Bolsonaro in its investigation of who incited the Jan. 8 riot in the nation's capital, as part of a broader crackdown to hold responsible parties to account.

According to the text of his ruling, Justice Alexandre de Moraes granted the request from the prosecutor-general's office, which cited a video Bolsonaro posted on Facebook two days after the riot. The video claimed Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wasn't voted into office, but rather was chosen by the Supreme Court and Brazil's electoral authority.

Prosecutors in the recently formed group to combat anti-democratic acts argued earlier Friday that, although Bolsonaro posted the video after the riot, its content was sufficient to justify investigating his conduct beforehand. Bolsonaro deleted it the morning after he first posted it.

Otherwise, Bolsonaro has refrained from commenting on the election since his Oct. 30 defeat. He repeatedly stoked doubt about the reliability of the electronic voting system in the run-up to the vote, filed a request afterward to annul millions of ballots cast using the machines and never conceded.

He has taken up residence in an Orlando suburb since leaving Brazil in late December and skipping the Jan. 1 swearing-in of his leftist successor, and some Democratic lawmakers have urged President Joe Biden to cancel his visa.

Following the justice's decision late Friday, neither Bolsonaro nor any of his three lawmaker sons had issued comment on social media.

Brazilian authorities are investigating who enabled Bolsonaro's radical supporters to storm the Supreme Court, Congress and presidential palace in an attempt to overturn results of the October election. Targets include those who summoned rioters to the capital or paid to transport them, and local security personnel who may have stood aside to let the mayhem occur.

Much of the attention thus far has focused on Anderson Torres, Bolsonaro’s former justice minister, who became the federal district’s security chief on Jan. 2, and was in the U.S. on the day of the riot.

De Moraes ordered Torres’ arrest this week and has opened an investigation into his actions, which he characterized as “neglect and collusion.” In his decision, which was made public Friday, de Moraes said that Torres fired subordinates and left the country before the riot, an indication that he was deliberately laying the groundwork for the unrest.

The court also issued an arrest warrant for the former security chief, and he must return within three days or Brazil will request his extradition, Justice Minister Flávio Dino said Friday.

“If by next week his appearance hasn’t been confirmed, of course we will use mechanisms of international legal cooperation. We will trigger procedures next week to carry out his extradition,” Dino said.

Torres has denied wrongdoing, and said Jan. 10 on Twitter that he would interrupt his vacation to return to Brazil and present his defense. Three days later, that has yet to occur.

The minister pointed to a document that Brazilian federal police found upon searching Torres' home; a draft decree that would have seized control of Brazil's electoral authority and potentially overturned the election. The origin and authenticity of the unsigned document are unclear, and it remains unknown if Bolsonaro or his subordinates took any steps to implement the measure that would have been unconstitutional, according to analysts and the Brazilian academy of electoral and political law.

But the document “will figure in the police investigation, because it even more fully reveals the existence of a chain of people responsible for the criminal events,” Dino said, adding that Torres will need to inform police who drafted it.

By failing to initiate a probe against the document's author or report its existence, Torres at very could be charged with dereliction of duty, said Mario Sérgio Lima, a political analyst at Medley Advisors.

Torres said on Twitter that the document was probably found in a pile along with others intended for shredding, and that it was leaked out of context feed false narratives aimed at discrediting him.

Dino told reporters Friday morning that no connection has yet been established between the capital riot and Bolsonaro.

The federal district’s former governor and former military police chief are also targets of the Supreme Court investigation made public Friday. Both were removed from their positions after the riot.

Also on Friday night, the popular social media accounts of several prominent right-wing figures were suspended in Brazil in response to a court order, which journalist Glenn Greenwald obtained and detailed on a live social media broadcast.

The order, also issued by Justice de Moraes, was directed at six social media platforms and established a two-hour deadline to block the accounts or face fines. The accounts belong to a digital influencer, a YouTuber recently elected federal lawmaker, a podcast host in the mold of Joe Rogan, and an evangelical pastor and senator-elect, among others.

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AP writer Bridi reported from Brasilia.

BROWNSVILLE, Texas —

Video above: US reports record surge of migrant children

Paying a smuggler, Edgar Mejia could afford to take only one child with him to the United States. He chose his 3-year-old "warrior" son, leaving his 7- and 12-year-olds with their mother in Honduras.

"Pitifully, I had use him like a passport to get here," Mejia said last week after picking up milk from volunteers at a Brownsville, Texas, bus station for the last leg of their journey to join relatives in Atlanta. "I am here because of him."

Mejia, 32, and his son, who paid a smuggler $6,000 for a "new dream" that Honduras couldn't provide, are among the Border Patrol's nearly 170,000 encounters with migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border in March, a 20-year high. The total, announced Thursday, includes nearly 19,000 children traveling alone, the highest monthly number on record.

About four in 10 border encounters last month were with families and unaccompanied children — many from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — at a time when policies in the U.S. and Mexico favor them staying in the United States while they seek asylum. It marks the third sharp jump in Central American asylum-seekers in seven years.

For decades, predominantly Mexican men crossed the border illegally, with many returning for visits until heightened border security made going back and forth more difficult. Migration rose and fell but was fairly steady and predictable.

Over the last decade, a complex mix of factors has produced periodic, dramatic spikes, especially among families and children, who get more legal protections and require more care. The Government Accountability Office identified 10 potential causes for a spike in the number of unaccompanied children at the border in 2014, including poverty, violence and perceptions of U.S. immigration policy.

A large increase in family arrivals in 2019 followed an end to the Trump administration's practice of generally separating parents from their children at the border. The latest jump follows ferocious storms in Central America and President Joe Biden ending his predecessor's hardline immigration policies, though many changes attributed to Biden are rumors or have been fabricated by smugglers to generate business.

The "root causes" prompting Central Americans to leave haven't changed, said Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, whose temporary shelter has been hosting 400 to 500 people nightly, compared with a peak of about 1,000 in 2019.

"I think that it's simply that the traffickers use whatever is happening in the United States to extort the families, to lure them, to create a narrative that says, 'Come right now. The president is going to let you in,'" she said.

Migrants, in dozens of interviews over the last two weeks, generally said circumstances in Central America led them to the U.S. When asked about Biden, nearly all said his relatively pro-immigration positions influenced their thinking.

Smuggling fees vary widely, with some paying up to $10,000 a person in the Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings. There is often a discount for additional relatives. The trip can take weeks in cars, buses and trucks, ending when an inflatable raft reaches the banks of the Rio Grande and families and children turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents.

Mejia said he and his son were in a group of 18 Hondurans on a trip divided into four parts, including one leg traveling in a trailer from Mexico City to Monterrey and a final stretch in an open-top boxcar to the border city of Reynosa. Children were told to be quiet when the trailer came to military checkpoints.

"(Smugglers) tell you it's going to go well, but the reality is different," Mejia said, turning to his 3-year-old son at the bus station in Brownsville, a border city of about 200,000 people on the Rio Grande. "I have a warrior here. We suffered greatly."

Douglas Perez, 24, said he stood with 10 people in a covered pickup truck, including his wife and two children, ages 4 and 1. He held the baby, planting his palm on the roof to avoid falling over. They were released in the U.S. with notices to report to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

Perez, who paid a smuggler $27,000 to bring his family to the U.S., said he left the western highlands of Guatemala because his job picking corn no longer provided enough food to eat.

Carlos Enrique Linga, who was released from custody with his 5-year-old daughter, said he could no longer afford new clothes for his family in Guatemala after rains destroyed their house. That prompted him to try to join a friend in Tennessee to earn money. His wife, 2-year-old twins and newborn stayed in Guatemala because they couldn't pay a smuggler.

"Our houses got carried away by the current, the water," Linga said after breakfast in a migrant shelter in Mission, Texas. "Our ranch is no more. We are without a house."

The Border Patrol had 168,195 encounters with migrants last month, the highest since March 2001. The numbers aren't directly comparable because more than half of those stopped last month had been quickly expelled from the country under federal pandemic-related powers that deny people the right to seek asylum. Being expelled carries no legal consequences, so many people make multiple attempts.

Biden has exempted unaccompanied children from expulsion, allowing them to stay in the U.S. while pursuing asylum claims and live with "sponsors," usually parents or close relatives.

Mexico has been reluctant to take back Central American families with young children, especially in Tamaulipas state bordering the Rio Grande Valley, so many of them are being released in the U.S. while their claims are considered by immigration authorities.

Migrants who enter the Rio Grande Valley as single adults or in families with children 7 and older are expelled to Reynosa, an organized-crime stronghold. Unfounded rumors are rampant in a plaza there where migrants plan their next move. Last week, rumors spread that the U.S. would open its borders April 5 or that the borders would be open for Biden's first 100 days in office.

Hermelindo Ak, a corn grower, heard in Guatemala that chances were better for families but didn't know how a child's age was considered. Information seemed to change "day to day," he said.

He was expelled with his 17-year-old son, then sent his son alone for a second attempt after learning unaccompanied children can stay in the U.S. Ak, 40, planned to return home to his wife and other children, who stayed in Guatemala because they couldn't afford to pay a smuggler.