An unprecedented journalistic investigation in Brazil, Projeto Escravizadores, from Agência Pública, mapped the ancestors of 116 Brazilian politicians to find out if they had a connection with the country's slave-owning past.
From inception to the publication of the special report, the project required 16 months of work involving a team of 31 people. The findings? At least 33 office holders analyzed allegedly have direct ancestors who owned slaves, used slave labor or acted to contain revolts by Black and poor people during colonial Brazil and the Empire.
“I think journalism has a lot to say about showing other ways of telling history and showing stories that have not been told, that are not official. We are still trying to figure out how to talk about slavery and reparations for slavery, but it is a first step,” Bianca Muniz, one of the project coordinators, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
The inspiration for the initiative was the special report “Slavery's Descendants,” published by Reuters in June 2023. The news agency examined the lineages of more than 600 public office holders in the United States, including presidents, legislators, governors and judges, and found that more than 100 have slave-holding ancestors. In July of the same year, the Pública team began dissecting the methodology used to study how the report could be replicated in Brazil.
“If this is seen there [in the U.S.], where slavery was very prominent, what could we find in Brazil? Power in Brazil was maintained because of slavery, people became rich because of it. Politics here is very familial and this has been perpetuated over generations,” Muniz said.
Reuters partnered with research labs and researchers for document analysis, but in their case the American databases and documentation were more standardized.
In Brazil, the information was dispersed, lacked standardization and had different levels of access in each state, which made it impossible to follow the step-by-step method used by foreign researchers and highlighted the need to create a methodology more attuned to the Brazilian reality. With the challenge of setting up a research methodology from scratch, the team decided to analyze the presidents elected since redemocratization, the senators of the current legislature and the governors in office.
“We thought about the number of hands we had and the volume of work. The pool of people to be investigated was already too large for us to be able to carry out checks and rechecks in the time we had. We are also interested in looking at deputies [legislators from the lower chamber of Congress], but initially, we decided to start with these to put the methodology in place before going on to more than 500 names,” Muniz said.
The investigation began with initial research to assess the viability of the project carried out by a mixed team led by Muniz in an unprecedented partnership. This first team was made up of two journalists and four researchers from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR, for its initials in Portuguese), supervised by Professor Ricardo Costa de Oliveira, a specialist in political genealogy. Over the course of three months, the team mapped the available sources and created a database with documents such as a type of census carried out in the 19th century and inventories with details of assets left behind, including enslaved people.
“We had never done this, we had no experience in doing genealogy. So we had training with UFPR staff and learned different genealogical research methods, such as Sosa-Stradonitz numbering. I never imagined that I would need to put parents and children in Excel, but when it reaches the seventh generation it becomes very confusing, and Ricardo taught us how to organize this data so that we could later find people,” Muniz said.
The project's main search tool was FamilySearch, a platform administered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that allows access to millions of historical records, including immigration documents, parish and civil certificates, censuses and other records from several countries. State newspaper libraries and the National Library were also used, in addition to DivulgaCand (the Superior Electoral Court candidate database), state genealogical banks and Google Scholar.
“Today we are able to carry out genealogical research on families in Brazil in recent centuries with great scientific rigor because the quantity and quality of databases has increased greatly with the digitization of materials,” Professor Ricardo Costa de Oliveira told LJR. “But this is also a social issue, because the more important the individual and the family, the more data, the more documents, the more information we will have. The more modest the origin, the greater the difficulty in building a genealogy.”
Genealogy of the 19th century in Brazil is entirely based on documents from the Church, which kept demographics at the time using baptism, marriage and death records, as Oliveira explained. And in the case of Black and Indigenous people, as well as people who were peasants, there are less documents because they often did not get married in the Church, for example.
“This is very important for us to understand power, society and inequality in Brazil. We have few Black politicians and we often can't go back even to the person's great-grandfather or great-grandmother. Humble Brazilian families lived under another social logic. When it’s someone who comes from powerful families, with social capital, you can go back many centuries,” Oliveira said.
To visualize the information collected, Muniz used programming to create visual diagrams and share the findings in a simpler way with reporters who would carry out the necessary investigations and checks in later steps. Artificial intelligence was also used to help understand what was written in old documents that were difficult to read.
After the initial stage, the genealogical research of all selected politicians took almost a year to be completed. This work was done between October 2023 and September 2024. Throughout the production of the report, around 500 documents were analyzed and more than 200 relationships were recorded, in addition to checking all material, conducting interviews, following up with the politicians mentioned and doing historical reviews of the information found. In total, twelve journalists and five academic researchers worked on the reporting process of the project.
“For all genealogies we find documentation to prove names and surnames, such as birth, baptism, marriage and death records. We gathered several documentary sources talking about the same family of a politician, both from church and notary’s offices, blogs, dissertations and other academic research. This gives more strength to our findings,” Muniz said.
Just like Reuters, the Pública team also took care to look for the politicians mentioned and give them a reasonable period of time so they could analyze all the documentation and comment on the findings. Many of the politicians sought did not take a position. There were also cases of denial, distancing from the past of slavery and those who condemned the attitudes of ancestors and wanted to show measures adopted in favor of the Black population.
“We don’t expect to hold today’s politicians accountable. Indeed, it is very difficult for us to know about past generations so far back. And people are not to blame for what their ancestors did, there were even those who said that. But now that the person knows and is a figure in a position of power, with relevance, what will they do with this information? There's no right answer, but I think it's very significant that they don't want to talk. It’s an open wound and society doesn’t know how to deal with it to this day, even so long after,” Muniz said.
For journalist Tiago Rogero, creator of Projeto Querino, a multimedia journalism project that seeks to retell the history of Brazil from an Afro-centered perspective, the Pública report became a reference for journalists by investigating a little-explored part of the history of Brazil and of journalism itself, including the way the article was made.
“I hope there are new projects like this because it is a topic that can still reveal a lot of information that we have not yet had contact with,” Rogero told LJR.
Among its plans for the future, Pública wants to investigate members of the Chamber of Deputies, in addition to expanding the project to other areas related to slavery and its maintenance, such as the lack of information about enslaved people.
“We made a report that talks about the difficulty of putting together a genealogy of Black people, but there is a documentary source that is the emancipation letters that say a lot about the stories of enslaved people,” Muniz said. “I think one of our next steps is to look at these other documents and tell these untold stories.”
