For decades, Amazonian communities in different Latin American countries have lived with promises of economic development driven by oil. What many have experienced, however, are oil spills, deforestation, forced displacement and the deepening of social inequalities. This reality is portrayed by the project "Até a Última Gota" (Until the Last Drop), a cross-border and multidisciplinary journalistic investigation that examines the impacts of oil exploration in the largest tropical biome on the planet.
Coordinated by InfoAmazonia in collaboration with GK (Ecuador), Ojo Público (Peru) and Rutas del Conflicto (Colombia), the project investigated extensive databases, unpublished documents from governments and companies, and conducted dozens of interviews in five countries that are home to more than 80% of the rainforest: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana and Peru. After investigating for almost a year, the combined work of journalists, photographers, data analysts, designers and scientists resulted in six reports on oil exploration in the Amazon.
“The idea came from InfoAmazonia, based on the controversies surrounding oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon River on the Brazilian equatorial margin,” Flávia Milhorance, InfoAmazonia journalist responsible for coordinating the project, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “In 2023, this possibility returned to the center of the debate. The Lula government, with the discourse of strengthening Brazilian diplomacy through environmental means and reversing the environmental setbacks of the Bolsonaro government, began to strongly pressure the exploration of the area. It was a contradictory movement, and at that time, discussions were still very much restricted to the political and rhetorical realm. Therefore, the idea of the project was to expand the database and concrete information about the region and about this new oil offensive.”
Milhorance said there was a need to understand oil exploration in the Amazon as a whole, especially in countries where it had been happening for a long time, which is not the case in Brazil. Thus, the idea of transforming the report into a joint investigation with journalists from other countries was born.
“The media partners from Ecuador, Peru and Colombia came with this baggage to add. They brought historical context, territorial disputes, business strategies and environmental damage – and how much of it was not remedied,” she added.
Producing a series of reports covering an area as vast as the Amazon and with stories about five different countries brought challenges such as language barriers, different ways of working between partner outlets and the complexity of conducting investigations directly from the Amazon rainforest.
“InfoAmazonia has experience coordinating projects and investigating stories with media outlets from other countries, but each case is different,” Milhorance said. “We had weekly meetings in Spanish – sometimes more in Portunhol – so there was a language barrier, but also a process barrier: the way InfoAmazonia works is different from the way other media outlets work, which is different from the way individual contributors work. And finally, investigating in the Amazon always brings a layer of complexity, due to logistics, security issues, access to traditional peoples. Sometimes we have a journalistic time frame that is not suited to the reality of this region. So we have to control our anxiety with deadlines so as not to overwhelm sources and the necessary planning time.”
The varying levels of access to information and public data in each of the countries profiled in the reporting project were another significant challenge. The team struggled to expand its access to documents and numbers, but according to Milhorance, in some cases they ended up abandoning certain analyses due to a lack of representative data.
“We learned that access to data in Brazil, despite much criticism, is still much more transparent and comprehensive than in other countries, such as Colombia and Ecuador,” Milhorance said. “In these countries, requests under the access to information law often go unanswered. But the team was very insistent on expanding this access. There were many, many meetings, reviews, demands on authorities and consultations with experts to get out the published articles.”
Ensuring the safety of the teams that participated in the reporting project was also an important issue. Milhorance said InfoAmazonia applied the same security protocol developed by a specialist that was used for field work in the Amazon Underworld project, which sought to understand the impact of criminal activities on the Amazon region.
According to the journalist, the protocol involves the use of GPS for satellite communication; daily check-in times, lists of basic supplies and recommendations for risky situations.
“The reporters also spent some time assessing the risk levels of the trip, with sources and research on the region,” Milhorance said. “And we set aside part of the budget for rescues, which fortunately were not necessary. But this type of protocol is increasingly common among local media outlets, we cannot deviate from it in the current circumstances.”
In Colombia, the reporting faced additional risks. Pilar Puentes, from Rutas del Conflicto, said the permanent presence of the armed group Comandos de la Frontera (Border Command) was one of the main challenges.
"We had to reinforce the security protocol and communicate with local sources, who helped us select the areas where we could walk, conduct interviews and do field work without being in danger," Puentes told LJR.
The report on oil exploration in the Colombian Amazon shows how Indigenous communities face pressure from oil companies and armed groups, while seeing their rituals weakened by the deterioration of their rivers. The story is set on the Putumayo River, and the only route to access the communities is by water, which meant the team had no phone service some of the time. Puentes said it was necessary to use satellite phones and follow a strict routine of what would be done in the field.
"Months before we traveled to the territory, several community leaders and spokespeople were displaced by armed groups. They were prohibited from speaking to the media. Many of the interviews we conducted were outside the territory, and to avoid intimidation by armed groups, we traveled with the community at all times. We knew that our presence in the territory was a risk not only to our safety, but also to our sources," Puentes added.
Due to the critical security situation, Puentes said they chose not to include the names of any people interviewed in the territories. According to her, the information was verified through documents, the work of civil society organizations and experts.
"In the case of people who were afraid to speak out, we sought, first, for them to trust the journalist and the objective of the investigation and, second, to show them how their remarks would appear in the text," Puentes said.
Detailed planning was an essential part of the preparation process for Isabela Ponce, Emilia Paz y Miño and Diego Lucero of Ecuadoran site GK. The report published by the team, with photos by Lucero, says that the three companies operating in the oil extraction area in Ecuador have adopted strategies to fragment local communities and make them dependent on their activities. However, they have encountered resistance from Indigenous leaders and organizations. The team accompanied Rosa Aranda, an Indigenous leader from the region, on a foray into the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Ponse durante apuração na Amazônia equatoriana. Crédito: Diego Lucero / GK
“When you go to the Amazon, especially like deep down in the rainforest, you always need to have a guide. And in this case, it was Rosa Aranda,” Ponce, co-founder and editorial director of GK, told LJR. “There were a lot of logistical things to think about beforehand. We brought a tent, repellent, sunblock, those very small towels that dry faster, you know, typical things to go to the Amazon, but also basic things, too, like water. We took a lot of water, so the boat was very heavy. In this case the preparation was more logistics than safety issues because we know it is not an unsafe territory as others more in the border with Colombia, where other Indigenous communities live.”
Ponce said the team in Ecuador did not face direct threats, but divisions within local communities were a challenge. The journalist also said they had difficulty accessing oil companies, despite repeated requests.
“What we faced were people [in the territories] not wanting to answer our interview requests, or saying 'yeah, we can meet', and then just canceling it again and again,” Ponce said. “The oil company answered us months later, only via email, with very short answers. It's very hard to have access to their version. They didn't allow us to enter the oil field, saying it was not safe and we asked for months.
Still, safety played a central role in GK’s choice of subject matter for the series of reports. Ponce said that when choosing the focus of the investigation, she consciously decided to avoid topics that could pose additional risks to the team.
“We had to choose how to explain and tell the relationship with the communities and oil,” she said. “I would discard things that can have an extra safety concern relating to illegal mining or narco. Safety issues are always there, but they can be more profound. I tried not to pick a place where I would know that the hazards would have been worse.”
In both Colombia and Ecuador, journalists report worsening conditions for environmental journalism. Among the main risks and challenges listed by professionals today are organized crime, lack of security, which was not previously so related to this type of coverage, and the resulting difficulty in accessing certain regions.
“It is impossible to travel to areas of the Amazon due to the presence and disputes of various armed groups,” Puentes said. “Communities are afraid to speak. The [Colombian] State does not enter territories; 15 National Natural Parks are not staffed due to constant threats from armed groups. It is a challenge for journalists to confront the dangers in the territory, and they must do so with the help of the communities and organizations that work in the territory. Otherwise, they will be putting their lives and the lives of the people they interview at risk.”
Ponce said there is currently no topic that journalists can cover without risk. Specifically, she said environmental journalism can touch a range of crimes, such as illegal mining and fuel trafficking, which increases the danger.
“Every journalist now has further more risks than we had two or three years ago, because of organized crime,” she said. “And organized crime is not like before. Five, six, ten years ago, if you covered safety issues, like the military police, murders, you were obviously close to these sources or these risks. Now I feel like there's no theme that you would cover without a risk.”
