Lopes's murder sows a seed
By Marcelo Soares Posted Oct 1 2003
Tim Lopes, a television reporter, went underground with a hidden camera in the favelas, shantytown cities that rise above Rio de Janiero, to investigate drug dealing and child prostitution. He was discovered by drug lords and murdered. His body was dragged through the streets of one of the favelas and then incinerated.
In the aftermath of that murder, Brazilian journalists recently formed ABRAJI (the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism) to stimulate the development of investigative reporting throughout Brazil and to train reporters in how to properly gather information and report hard-hitting stories.
The necessity to form such an association in Brazil has increased over the years. Since the 1960s, a kind of paternal relationship between gambling bosses and shantytown communities has turned into a silent pact. To gain support from the people, the gambling bosses provide basic services (mostly protection and urbanism) to areas that the government is unable to reach.
For years, the favelas of Rio have lacked basic services, such as sewage, electricity and running water, because they are located in the mountains high above the city. In the absence of these services, organized crime-lords filled the void by providing water, electricity and protection in exchange for criminal safe-havens. In addition, these crimelords also became the promoters of leisure and art by supporting Brazilian social centers like samba schools. In the favelas, organized crime had full room to flourish, and the lucrative business of drug trafficking quickly became the chief industry.
“They want power, and they're taking it by assault,” says Miro Lopes, brother to the slain Tim Lopes and an independent journalist with 44 years of experience. The assault includes the systematic use of violence “to get more of the concrete symbol of power – money – laundered under the law's breaches and the lack of inspection that the system offers.” Miro, whose independent newspaper O Pontual suffered two attacks from military censorship in the late 1970s, says the murderers of journalists have “the intention to shut the mouth of the press.”
For journalists, the favelas are a nation apart from Brazil. It's both difficult and dangerous to cover what occurs in the favelas of crime-lords. To be allowed into Rio's favelas to report on a subject, journalists must identify themselves and have that identification approved by the drug lords in charge. Cristina Grillo, an experienced editor and former reporter from Rio, says Lopes' death was not the beginning of this but rather a dramatic point in a long timeline.
Grillo recalls that during the 1980s, journalists simply had to clear their stories with favela drug lords but that the situation began to change in the early 1990s with an explosion of sensational TV shows. In such programs, which are still popular, TV crews follow police with cameras. According to Grillo, such programs blurred the role differences between reporters and policemen.
“I have the impression that, since then, they have lost the respect they had – or at least pretended to have – towards journalists,” writes Grillo in an e-mail interview. “Of course, they became violent to everyone, but until then they used to show the same respect towards journalists, religious people and social service workers.”
Fernando Molica, Tim Lopes' colleague at TV Globo, sees the creation of ABRAJI as a critical step in making investigative journalism more common in Brazil. “Little by little, we get to advance in wider aspects, such as the relationship of drug lords with other spheres of economical and institutional power – such as as the legislative and the judiciary,” he says.
Since last October, membership in ABRAJI has grown from a handful of journalists to over 200. Arrangements to form the association began with a listserv gathering journalists, many of whom worked for major media, from most of the 27 states of Brazil.
ABRAJI plans to stimulate the development of investigative journalism in Brazil with courses, seminars, awards and possible financing of investigative projects. The association will also provide a forum to discuss new investigative techniques, the need for freedom of information laws and the judicial threats posed toward journalists.
The men behind the idea of ABRAJI, Marcelo Beraba, the first president of the association and the newsroom director for the Rio edition of Folha de S. Paulo, and Rosental Calmon Alves, the director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, organized a seminar in São Paulo in December 2002. About 150 journalists from 12 Brazilian states attended. At this seminar, journalists exchanged ideas on how to form ABRAJI. Brant Houston, of Investigative Reporters and Editors in the United States and Pedro Armendares, from the Mexican center Periodistas de Investigación, shared their experiences as well as gave workshops on computer assisted reporting and advanced web researching.
ABRAJI's bylaws were written in April of 2003, and in early May, ABRAJI subscribed to the Global Journalism Network. Later in May, ABRAJI held a seminar on organized crime. It was held in the city of Londrina, a medium-sized city close to the Brazilian border with Paraguay and Argentina. This was the first event done by ABRAJI as a formal association, and most of the nearly 300 participants came from smaller cities in inner Brazil. According to Beraba, the association must “bring in journalists from smaller cities, who work mostly alone, to our projects.”
This fall, ABRAJI will be conducting a seminar in Brasilia on Freedom of Information as well as an investigative journalism conference in Pernambuco.
ABRAJI has established its headquarters at the University of São Paulo and created the quarterly journal Revista de ABRAJI. Sadly, since Tim Lopes' death, six more Brazilian journalists have been killed including ABRAJI member and photographer Luiz Alberto Costa, who was shot July 23.
ABRAJI's president Marcelo Beraba sees the association's growth as derivative from loss. “ABRAJI is born from the seed Tim Lopes has sown in each of us who have worked with him,” says Beraba. “It's the commitment to a journalism without prejudices, brave, well done and which can and will be improved.”