After 20 years reporting on public safety, journalist Cecília Oliver says the issue isn’t information, it’s political will.
Brazilian journalist Cecília Olliveira was recently called to testify before the Senate’s Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI, for its initials in Portuguese) on Organized Crime. Legislators wanted to hear from the reporter on strategies to curb the rise of criminal factions and militias in Brazil.
Olliveira explained to the members of the committee her views on police integration and cooperation, combating the economic and political arms of crime and the mandatory use of body cameras during police operations.
For over 20 years, Olliveira has covered public security in Brazil, writing impactful articles, authoring books and helping research, giving interviews in Brazil and abroad, and helping set the agenda on the topic in a country where safety is one of citizens’ greatest concerns.
Born in Minas Gerais but currently living in Rio de Janeiro, she is also a co-founder of The Intercept Brasil and founder of the Fogo Cruzado Institute, which keeps an open-source database on armed violence in Latin America.
As part of the “5 Questions” series, LatAm Journalism Review (LJR) spoke with Olliveira about her extensive coverage of public security, the limitations and idiosyncrasies of her work , side projects like Fogo Cruzado and the connections between crime and power in Brazil. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Being in Brasília for a debate like this reinforces something I’ve been highlighting both in my journalistic work and in the book “Como Nasce um Miliciano (How a Militiaman Is Born)”: there is no real separation between organized crime and politics in Brazil—what exists is a structural relationship between them. In the book, I start precisely from this idea that the line between the State and crime dissolves over time, to the point where they begin to operate in an intertwined manner, in a new mode of functioning. That is why I emphasized that the militia is not a “parallel power.” It is the State itself operating for the benefit of criminal groups, often with the direct participation of public officials and elected representatives.
And this translates into a lack of action that affects the entire country in a very tragic and painful way. The CPI revealed—once again—that it is not a lack of information about crime, but the difficulty (or lack of interest) in transforming that knowledge into public policy that has brought us to this point.
In my opening remarks at the session, I emphasized that Brazil has been investigating organized crime for decades, producing analyses and collecting data—but failing to act on them. I even pointed out that today we are dealing with the consequences of these omissions.
The disheartening conclusion of the CPI—which ended amid very underhanded political maneuvers, including the replacement of members and the rejection of the final report—makes it clear that there is no interest in solving the problem, but only in using it as a political platform to garner votes and bargain for power.
The centralization of journalism in the Southeast is not only geographical; it is also epistemological. The way Brazil understands crime and public security is still heavily shaped by experiences in Rio and São Paulo, which end up being treated as the national standard. The problem is that this renders completely different dynamics invisible. The North and the Northeast, for example, feature international routes and illegal territorial and economic disputes that operate on a different scale and logic. When these regions lack structured coverage, the entire country loses the ability to understand the phenomenon.
Decentralization involves, first and foremost, the redistribution of resources, funding, grants, calls for proposals and strengthened regional newsrooms. But it also involves recognizing that knowledge already exists outside the major urban centers. It is not about “bringing journalism” there, but about stopping the practice of ignoring those who are already producing it.
Fogo Cruzado, when the platform expanded to cover other cities, demonstrates this: when you create data infrastructure, you not only improve coverage, you change who can produce that coverage. Open data is a tool for decentralization. And finally, there is an editorial issue. As long as journalism continues to react to crises rather than structuring ongoing coverage, it will remain concentrated. And here we enter the realm of another debate, regarding the dismantling of newsrooms and the profession—which has a major impact on the type of coverage we have, especially outside the Southeast, often considered “too expensive” and/or of “little relevance.”
Fogo Cruzado was born out of a deeply journalistic unease: the understanding that we were reporting on violence without being able to grasp its full scale.
In traditional journalism, you often work with individual cases—and cases have enormous narrative power, but they can also distort perception if not contextualized. Fogo Cruzado gave me scale. It forced me to look at patterns, recurrence, territory and temporality.
This completely changes the way you investigate and write. You stop asking just “what happened?” and start asking “why does this keep happening?” and “who benefits from this continuity?” At the same time, journalism was essential to ensure Fogo Cruzado didn’t become just a data platform. Data doesn’t speak for itself. It needs to be interpreted, examined and challenged.
What I do is precisely build this bridge: transforming data into public narrative. And, at the same time, using the narrative to push for the use of this data in public policy. It’s a feedback loop that has resulted in the largest database on armed violence in Latin America, open to journalists, researchers, policymakers and anyone interested in better understanding why things are the way they are.
The first step is to break away from the idea that public security is a technical issue restricted to law enforcement. That is not true—public security is, above all, a rights issue. When a school closes due to a police operation, that is education. When a person cannot move around the city because the streets are closed due to a shooting, that is mobility. When a family lives under constant threat, that is mental health. Crime is not just an event—it is a condition that reshapes people’s lives. The problem is that journalism still operates tied to the logic of the incident: what happened, who died, who was arrested. This reduces the phenomenon and, often, reproduces the official narrative. The “why” is left behind, hidden in the oversimplification demanded by the urgency of our times.
Changing this involves three things: broadening sources, changing language and deepening context. Broadening sources means listening to those who experience violence—and not just those who combat it. Changing language means stopping the treatment of certain populations as permanent suspects and ceasing to revictimize people. And deepening context means showing that crime is linked to public policy, the economy, inequality and racism. And that is not simple. It requires a debate about the priorities of journalism, its social function and how it is tied to the business model and individual interests of media owners, who are often people holding elected office or from families with a long history in politics.
It was a process—and, in fact, a necessity. I had only recently entered the profession when Twitter took off in Brazil. For me, as I was moving to Rio, it was essential for building new sources. It was also the primary place for my stories to gain greater visibility and reach a much larger audience. Before it became a place with so much extremist discourse, Twitter was a very important platform for debates and the exchange of ideas.
For a long time, investigative journalism spoke mainly to audiences that were already convinced or specialized. But when you work on public security, you realize that there is a very intense battle over narratives in the public sphere—and that, often, the most simplistic explanations win out because they’re easier to spread.
Social media emerges as a space to intervene in this. Not in the sense of simplifying the content, but of making it accessible without losing its complexity.
Videos, for example, are an attempt to translate dense topics—such as security policy—into direct, almost didactic language. It’s a constant exercise in synthesis, but that didn’t come easily. It involved learning about language, format and rhythm. And also an understanding that public presence comes at a cost—exposure, attacks, attempts at delegitimization.
Today, I see social media as an extension of my journalistic work. It doesn’t replace investigation, it doesn’t replace reporting, but it expands the reach and, above all, allows me to challenge interpretations and contribute to the debate.
