Over the span of one year, U.S.-based Spanish-language broadcaster Univision and Salvadoran digital investigative site El Faro partnered to investigate and map the experience of Central American refugees. The result is a bilingual four-part multimedia project released in October, “From Migrants to Refugees: The New Plight of Central Americans,” which profiles several refugees from the region at different stages in their journey to safety.
In the second week of November, journalists from at least 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries crossed the Atlantic Ocean and met in Johannesburg, South Africa, to share investigative techniques with colleagues from around the world and seek strategies to consolidate collaboration among journalists in the region.
At the beginning of the year, eight independent Brazilian journalism organizations started to think about how to stimulate a collaborative culture among independent journalism newsrooms in Brazil and Latin America. The result of this collective was Festival 3i, held in Rio de Janeiro from Nov. 11 to 12.
Residents of favelas, villages and low-income neighborhoods all over Brazil gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the 1st National Meeting of Communication of the Peripheries. After four days of discussion between Oct. 12 and 15, 70 activists and communicators wrote a statement in which they committed to creating a network of support and action to use communication as a tool to fight for life and to guarantee human rights.
The anchors are experienced journalists reporting national stories and interviewing the nation’s leaders for a professionally-produced television news program. Everything about the two-hour daily newscast from Peruvian newspaper Correo looks and operates like a professional newscast.
On July 12, a Brazilian federal judge sentenced former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to nine and a half years in prison for corruption, obstruction of justice and money laundering in relation to the Lava Jato case, a corruption scheme in at least 12 countries involving several Brazilian companies and politicians in Latin America.
What appeared to be a case of money laundering done through a network of laundromats and car washes (in Portuguese, lava jato means “pressure washing”), turned out to be the largest corruption network in Brazilian history that ultimately extended to at least 12 countries. It has brought businessmen to justice and has shaken more than one government.
A lost dog in Setúbal, a Taiwanese restaurant in Espinheiro, a 91-year-old barber from Jardim São Paulo. These are the kinds of hyperlocal issues specific to neighborhoods in the metropolitan neighborhoods of Recife, Brazil that one-year-old news platform PorAqui aggregates for thousands of readers throughout the capital of Pernambuco state.
The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji) and nonprofit Transparency Brazil launched the project Achados e Pedidos (Request and Found), which aims to be the country’s largest platform for requests and responses to the Law of Access to Information (LAI), as well as a tool to monitor compliance with the legislation.
For almost thirty years, Lúcio Flávio Pinto has been the sole writer and editor of a unique and independent newspaper, which investigators and closely monitors in the powerful in Pará and the rest of Brazil’s Amazon region. His reporting made him a renowned and award-winning journalist around the globe, but also attracted threats and attacks.