Since completing a master’s degree in Radio Journalism at Goldsmiths College, University of London, I have incorporated a multi-media approach to journalism. I am a regular contributor to Free Speech Radio News, an independent radio newscast aired by the Pacifica Network in the US, and to Panos Institute London, a UK-based organization that promotes communication for development. I am also a freelance reporter for the Brazilian press, having written for some of the major newspapers in the country. I am currently wirting my second book in Portuguese, about a resistance newspaper during the military regime in Brazil.

While living in the UK I collaborated with The Independent and The Sunday Times newspapers, and with the Brazilian section of the BBC World Service. I also researched and assistant-produced documentaries for the English section of the BBC World Service (UK), for CBC – Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CA) and for PBS – Public Broadcasting Service (US), working together with top investigative journalists such as Amnesty International Award winner Stephen Grey and Pulitzer-prize winner Lowell Bergman.

Back in Brazil, I continue to work with the foreign media, trying to establish a better flow of information between South America and Europe/US by fixing, researching, pitching stories, finding experts, and producing a variety of projects. I was a blogger with the Frontline Club, a UK-based organization that champions independent journalism, for many months.

In partnership with the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists (Abraji) and the Center for Investigatibe Journalism in London I coordinated a Open Society Institute sponsored project that brought top international investigative journalists to Brasil for the first time, including Lowell Bergman, BBC’s sports investigator Andrew Jennings and Ceter for Public Integrity David Donald. They took part in the Abraji Congress that happened in Sao Paulo, in July 2010.

My CV

Feature produced for the Guardian Weekly about the Roma comunity in Brazil, which has historically been overlooked by governments even though Brazil is one of the fews countries to have had a president of Roma origin – Juscelino Kubitchek.

US forest strategy boomerangs in Brazil

Article written for the Center for Investigative Reporting in the US about how a campaign by a lobby group aimed at convincing US farmers to support carbon credits from forest conservation went very wrong and enraged Brazilian environment groups.

Brazil’s deadly land wars puts indigenous leaders in firing line

I wrote this article for the Independent after the murder of an indigenous leader in Mato Grosso. Ortiz Lopes was a respected leader of the Guarani-Kaiowa community, which was expelled from their traditional land in the 1970s. Forced to live in a small area, the Guarani-Kaiowas have some of the highest rates of violence and suicide amongst the indigenous peoples. Lopez was known for his efforts to reclaim their traditional territory.

Flight logs reveal secret rendition

This article was the result of a one-month investigation that established for the first time which military flights to Guantánamo crossed Europe carrying passengers – and which passengers were on each flight. I assisted Stephen Grey by researching, contacting people, checking and cross-referencing data. Complete tables with extra info about the Guantánamo prisoners can be seen at Stephen’s website: http://www.ghostplane.net/

Brazil’s media agenda: whose news is it anyway?

This opinion piece analyses the consequences of adopting international news agencies as the sole providers of foreign news to the majority of news services in Brazil. It also covers other issues such as the death of the foreign correspondent; the lack of a Brazilian approach to international news coverage; and the public interest.

A Bolivian military colonel speaks

Interview with the colonel Jaime Cruz Vera in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the website Narconews Bulletin. Mr. Cruz Vera, commander of the Mobile Patrol Unit that conducted the forced eradication of coca, talked openly about Evo Morales, who at the time was a leader of the coca growers. He also commented on the pressure made by the US Government: “everything you see at this military base is what the Embassy has given us”.

An investigation into international bribery led by one of the world’s top investigative journalists, Lowell Bergman. Bergman and his team followed the trail of corrupt international deals from the US to UK and even Nigeria to reveal shocking details of bribe scandals such as the UK-Saudi Arabia Al Yammamah arms deal. I was a field producer for the PBS team in London.

Anthrax War

This investigative documentary looks into the Anthrax-laced letters mailed in the US after 9/11 as a starting point to uncover an unsuspected growth in the germ weapons threat worldwide. Transfomer Films reporter Bob Coen also got a rare interview with “Dr. Death” Wouter Basson, who headed Project Coast, the South African apartheid-era bio-warfare program. I was a London-based assistant producer for the film.

Jumping monkey

A 10-minute radio piece produced as part of the MA Radio Journalism curriculum. It is a sound-rich edition of a long interview with researchers Renata Meirelles and David Reeks. Half the story is told by the couple in linear narrative form and the other half unfolds via the colorful recordings of children playing in the Amazon.

War reporting

A 5-minute radio piece about war reporting in which two top war correspondents opened their hearts about the thrills, the glamour and the psychology of reporting in a war environment. I must thank BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen and Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith for their collaboration to this project – also produced during the MA Radio Journalism at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

All too slow for scientists

A news piece producecd for Free Speech Radio News and the Climate Change Media Partinership during the 14 UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland. IPCC scientists urged world leaders to  adopt tougher reduction targets and accuses them of not understanding the severity of the situation.

Indigenoug peoples feel left out

A radio feature produced for Free Speech Radio News and the Climate Change Media Partinership during the 14 UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland. Indigenous movements demand the creation of an Expert Group on Indigenous Peoples within the UN climate forum to ensure that their rights are taken into account in the climate change debates.

Saint Agnes rasta colony forever changed

A news piece for Free Speech Radio News about the melancholic closure of the case against the St Agnes Rastafari Centre. One year after the longest-living Rastafari centre in Europe had been demolished amid accusations that it had become a crack den, all the Rastas accused were acquitted, and the trial had collapsed  in confusion. A story largely unnoticed by the UK media.

Tibetans in India Speak Out Against Chinese Detentions

I produced this radio feature in Dharamsala, northern India, where the Dalai Lama is based. The town is home to thousands of Tibetan refugees, and another 2,000 arrive every year after crossing the frozen paths of the Himalayas in search of a better life away from the Chinese rule. Many of them are children, like the 16-year-old boy interviewed, who developed a bad case of frost bite after crossing the mountains with his younger brother.

The idea for the book Plantados no Chão (Planted in the Earth) was simple: me and the editors at Conrad Editora wanted to publish a list of all the social and union leaders who were killed during the government of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. Soon after the first inquiries, we had uncovered over 180 cases. But we also ended up finding that such stories are widely unreported, and nobody had ever looked into this problem with consistency. Plantados no Chão (Planted in the Earth) is the first book to discuss this grave issue. The press release  in English can be found below.

Jair Antônio da Costa, Anderson Amaurílio, Iraguiar Ferreira da Silva, Josenilson José dos Santos, Anderson Luís and Dorothy Stang did not know one another, but they remain forever linked by a shared destiny. Their names are part of a long list of victims of a modality of violence considered extinct in Brazil since the end of the last dictatorship: political assassination.

If political assassination was once a form of State-sponsored terrorism, the situation today is rather more complex, involving militants from social movements who clash head-on with private interests (often those of large corporations, landowners or even members of the state apparatus), whose protectors decide to silence the legitimate struggle for social rights with their own hands or with the support of corrupt sectors of the Government, sometimes even the police or Judiciary.

The journalist Natalia Viana selected six cases that, when viewed from this perspective, could indeed be considered political in nature and which serve to illustrate how the Brazilian State has chosen to handle politically-motivated killings. Three of these cases concern different perspectives and struggles related to the agrarian issue, and all came to the same tragic end: Dorothy Stang, a North-American missionary involved with the Pastoral da Terra (Earth Pastoral) in Pará, who was murdered in an ambush contracted by ranch-owners; Miguel José dos Santos, leader of the Landless Movement at the Terra Prometida encampment in Felisburgo, Minas Gerais, who was killed in a massacre that claimed four other lives and left thirteen wounded – a cruel bloodbath ordered by Adriano Chafik, owner of the Nova Alegria property; Josenilson José dos Santos and José Ademislon Barbosa, Indians of the Xukuru tribe in Pernambuco, both assassinated during a struggle for the demarcation of their homeland.

The other three accounts show that it is not only social movements from the fields that have become targets for this sort of violence. Labour unions and the student movement have their own sad tales of political assassination: Anderson Amaurílio da Silva, a militant of the Passe Livre (free transport) movement, killed during a protest at the Urban Bus Terminal in Londrina; Jair Antônio da Costa, a member of the Igrejinha shoemakers union (a CUT [the Major Central of Unions] affiliate), murdered by police after a protest against a wave of lay-offs decimating the shoe industry of Rio Grande do Sul; Anderson Luís, President of the Cold Meats and Dairy Workers’ Union of Rio de Janeiro and Baixada Fluminense (also a CUT affiliate), both mysteriously killed on their way to work.

Bringing those responsible for the crimes related in Planted in the Earth to justice has been an extremely slow process. When the investigations do actually identify the perpetrator(s) (something increasingly rare in Brazil), the characteristic sluggishness of the justice system helps maintain the impunity. The case of Dorothy Stang is an example. The coverage the crime received in the international press spurred the federal government to unprecedented action. The two gunmen charged with carrying out the crime were swiftly convicted, while the first conviction of one of their contractors was only issued as recently as May 15, 2007 – more than two years after Sister Dorothy’s death.

Unionists, indigenous militants, agrarian reform movement leaders, students from the free transport movement – people fighting for social change that became victims of the inefficiency of the State, whether through omission when it came to protecting those under threat or its incapacity to punish those responsible for their deaths, thus paving the way for further crimes. After all, as the journalist Jan Rocha observes in his preface to the book, “the killing of a leader is not just the elimination of an inconvenient individual, but a blow against hope, against the future”.