"A resistência do jornalista da Amazônia, apesar de décadas de ameaças e perseguição" é o título da matéria de Cláudio Rabin. |
Editor do Jornal Pessoal, a
mais longeva publicação da imprensa alternativa brasileira, em circulação há 29
anos, o jornalista paraense Lúcio Flávio Pinto, com sua saga em defesa da
Amazônia, é pauta do site norte-americano Mongabay, em matéria de Cláudio Rabin, repórter do jornal Folha
de S. Paulo, reproduzida abaixo:
MONGABAY SERIES:
ENDANGERED ENVIRONMENTALIST
Amazon
journalist endures, despite decades of threats and harassment
31st March 2016/Cláudio
Rabin
Lúcio Flávio
Pinto’s coverage of the plunder of the Brazilian Amazon, shady dealings by
prominent families, and government corruption has made him a target for death
threats, a beating, and dozens of lawsuits.
ince 1987 Lúcio
Flávio Pinto has published his own one-man bimonthly newspaper in the Brazilian
state of Pará, Jornal Pessoal.
His independent
coverage of the plunder of the Amazon, shady dealings by prominent families,
and government corruption earned him national and international accolades over
the years, as well as many prominent enemies.
Pinto has continued
his work in spite of numerous death threats, a beating, and dozens of lawsuits
that have left him in precarious circumstances.
On January 22, 2005, a big headline filled the front page of Diário do Pará, the second biggest
newspaper of the northern Brazilian state of Pará. “The journalist Lúcio Flávio
Pinto has been beaten and threatened by the executive director of the newspaper
O Liberal, Ronaldo Maiorana and by
his bodyguards,” the headline blared.
Four days before, Pinto, an independent journalist who doggedly writes
about the plunder of the Amazon, shady dealings by prominent families and
officials, and government corruption, had published a story about the murky
finances within the media group Organizações Romulo Maiorana, which owned O Liberal.
Unsurprisingly, O Liberal, the
most-read publication in the region, published nothing about the beating.
Pinto, who owns a small alternative newspaper in Belém, the regional
capital of the state of Pará in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest, had made
many enemies in his career. They had already tried everything to muzzle him.
They sued him. They sent him death threats. And now, finally, they beat him.
Only death could effectively silence him, but by 2005 he had become too
prominent to be murdered. Pinto was then, and is now, widely regarded as the
most important journalist in northern Brazil.
It was the first time he was physically assaulted, but not the first
time that his work as a journalist brought him problems with the powerful
Maiorana family. And it wouldn’t be the last.
Between 1992 and 2005 Pinto received 33 lawsuits. Fifteen of them were
from the Maioranas, the others from businessmen, judges, and politicians. Some
alleged moral damage, some material loss, and one was a criminal suit. Even so,
he continued to write about deforestation, land thieves, drug trafficking, and
corruption. The plan, Pinto told Mongabay in one of six recent phone
conversations, was to silence him by making his life difficult and forcing him
to spend all his time defending himself.
But the tactic backfired. He won most of the suits, sometimes writing
his own defense and having his lawyer simply sign the document for him. And
although the beating left him with bruises on his face, back, and torso near
his liver and kidneys, it ultimately served as a turning point. The case
attracted a lot of national and international attention and put pressure on his
accusers. He hasn’t been sued since.
“They could not prove I was wrong. Now they changed the strategy and are
trying to ignore me,” Pinto said.
Nevertheless, four of the lawsuits are still ongoing in the very slow
pace of the Brazilian justice system — one from a judge and the other three
from the Maiorana family. If he were to lose all of them, Pinto would have to
pay almost $350,000 in fines — a sum he does not have.
“I can be surprised by a court decision any time. They would be lethal
for my work,” said Pinto.
Pinto’s “Personal
Newspaper”
Since 1987 Pinto has published his own one-man bimonthly newspaper
called Jornal Pessoal, which
translates as “Personal Newspaper.” It is a small but fearless enterprise that
sells around 2,000 copies, regularly upsetting the local elite in Belém. He is
a kind of green I.F. Stone, the legendary American independent journalist.
“I never thought it would last for so long. In the beginning, I planned
to write it for three years, no more than that. Now, after 29 years it ruined
me, I’m broke, it kept me away from my long-term projects, but I kept doing
it,” Pinto said. “The only way to stop me is to kill me.”
What keeps him going is the same thing that made him start, he said: to
publish what nobody else wants to print.
When he started Jornal Pessoal he was already an accomplished
journalist. He had won one Esso prize in 1985, the Brazilian equivalent of the
Pulitzer, and received an honorable mention earlier. He had been a local TV
commentator and had worked for almost all of Brazil’s main national
publications. But in those roles he found he could not be completely
independent. And that was what he needed to be in a place dominated by two
family-owned media groups that have strong personal relationships with
government officials.
In 1987, Pinto investigated the murder of the lawyer Paulo Fontaneles by
two gunmen. Fontaneles was a former state congressman who defended posseiros
(small farmers) from grileiros (land thieves). After three months of
investigations, Pinto tried to publish at O Liberal, but the story raised
suspicion that some elite families might be involved in the murder, and the
newspaper refused to run the story.
Without any place to publish his story, Pinto decided to create his own
media. Ironically, the first edition of Jornal Pessoalwas printed in the
Maioranas’ company printing press as favor.
At the time, Pinto was at peace with the powerful family. For more than
20 years, he wrote for O Liberal and
cultivated a strong relationship with Romulo Maiorana, the founder of the
family’s media group and the father of Ronaldo, with whom he would later
tangle. It was a two way relationship. The elder Maiorana gave journalistic
freedom to Pinto in exchange for the credibility and respectability that his
name gave to O Liberal. Everything would
change a couple years after the death of the regional media mogul in 1989.
“When I started to work at O
Liberal, in 1989, Lúcio had already left. His name was not mentioned in the
newsroom after the lawsuits began, but everybody read his newspaper in secret,”
Maria do Socorro Furtado Veloso, a professor at Universidade Federal do Rio
Grande do Norte who wrote her doctoral thesis about Jornal Pessoal, told Mongabay.
Amazon: the Green
Sicily
Pinto often quotes Euclides da Cunha, a Brazilian writer from the early
twentieth century who was overwhelmed by the Amazon’s magnificence. He
described the Amazon as the final unwritten page of Genesis that God had left
to men to write.
But what men created is a place Pinto once called “the Green Sicily,”
where independent journalists cannot work without being harassed. He likes to
say that he does not pick a fight; he only reports the facts without regard for
the consequences. And in Pará, the consequences may include not only arrests
but also death threats, murder, or if you are too important to die, lawsuits.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), six journalists were
murdered in Brazil last year. It was the third deadliest country in 2015,
behind Syria and France.
“I lost count of how many lawsuits I had,” Augusto Barata, a political
blogger based in Belém, told Mongabay. “They institutionalized judicial
censorship.”
Barata considers himself an easy target because he works alone and has
no political connections. “There are some names that I am forbidden by court
decision to write in my blog,” he said.
He credits Pinto with breaking the regional monopoly on information
previously held by the two big media companies in Pará. “His newspaper helps
democracy to breathe,” Barata said.
In many cases, however, the rules of democracy have been used against
Pinto.
Since the lawsuits began in 1992, he only lost one suit, filed by a man
he accused in print of being the biggest land thief in Brazil and “perhaps even
the world.” In 2012, after twelve years of judicial battles, a judge found him
guilty of moral damage for calling the businessman Cecílio do Rego Almeida a
“land pirate” in a 1999 article about Almeida’s claims on a tract of forest the
size of Belgium in the Xingu Valley of Pará. Pinto’s article said the land
belonged to the state and that the documents proving Almeida’s ownership were
fabricated.
In 2013 Pinto was forced to pay a court-ordered settlement of $7,000 to
the family of the businessman, who had died five years earlier. He did not have
the money at the time. His newspaper has a small circulation and accepts no
advertising because he thinks it could undermine his absolute editorial
freedom. So Pinto turned to the internet for help.
In a wave of solidarity, several journalists and former newsroom
colleagues shared Pinto’s manifesto about the saga. He raised enough money to
cover the settlement and eventually had to ask people to stop donating. Later,
in a different legal process, Brazilian courts ruled against Almeida’s land
claims, proving Pinto’s thesis.
“He could be a rich man today,” Manuel Dutra, a journalism teacher at
Universidade Federal do Pará in Belém and a former colleague of Pinto, told
Mongabay. “[I]nstead he chose not to make any kind of concession.”
The decision was costly. He is now 66 years old and far from retirement
because he stopped paying for social security more than a decade ago (something
independent small businesspeople can opt out of in Brazil). He makes no more
than $300 per month from his newspaper and rarely charges for lectures. He said
he does the cleaning in his house and gave his car to his brother.
His humble condition is not what you might expect for a man recognized
internationally for his work. In addition to the Esso, he won the Colombe d’Oro
per la Pace from the Italian NGO Archivio Disarmo in 1997 and the International
Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in 2005. In
2014 the French NGO Reporters Without Borders dubbed him an “information hero”.
But he was unable to receive the CPJ prize in the United States. “[A]lso
missing from tonight’s award ceremony will be Lucio Flavio Pinto, 56, a
newspaper editor in Brazil’s Amazon region. He’s not in prison, but the corrupt
businessmen and local officials he writes about have filed so many harassing
lawsuits against him that he dare not leave his home: One missed court
appearance would give authorities an excuse to put him in jail,” a Washington Post editorial titled
“Endangered Journalists” stated at the time.
Even so, the honors have served him well in protecting him from the
worst fates of Brazilian journalists. “All the national and international
prizes helped to create a symbolical shield around him and make him safer. Any
crime against him would have a strong repercussion,” said Dutra.
Amazon ignored
Pinto thinks Brazilian media largely ignores the Amazon. For a long
time, the media only covered the exotic, such as a wild animal killing a man.
Even today, ties between the national economy and the forest go unreported.
“Fifty kilometers from here [Belém] there is an aluminum factory that is
Brazil’s largest single energy consumer,” Pinto said. “Nobody talks about
that.”
Trained as a sociologist at the Universidade de São Paulo, he sees the
region through a kind of Marxist lens. He argues that Brazil has a colonial
relationship with the Amazon, pointing to cattle ranching as an example.
Traditionally ranching is used in Brazil to occupy new territories. It is also
a cheap way to make money, because the costs are very low, and it does not
require many employees. The ranchers clear forest, move cattle in, and bring
the land into the national economy. It brings no regional development and the
money does not stay in Pará because most of the producers are from outside.
Similarly, as many observers have pointed out, the huge investments in
dams, mineral exploration, and other extractive industries in the Amazon have
largely been made to meet international or southeastern Brazilian demand —
never local demand.
“The twenty-first century began in 1973, not in 2001,” Pinto said,
referring to the global energy crisis. “It started with energy shortage, with
the consciousness that it is expensive and scarce — and the Amazon is the
world’s biggest reserve of energy.”
This worldview sometimes drives Pinto to an unconventional understanding
of events. For instance, he sees the main problem with Belo Monte, the world’s
third largest hydroelectric dam on the Xingu River, as being economic, not
ecological. “The environmentalists broke up with me for this, but it is true,”
he said.
In 2001, during the controversial dam’s planning phase, after several
disputes on ecological grounds, the developers diminished the size of Belo
Monte’s water reservoir. This made the reservoir too small to produce enough
energy to support the size and cost of the dam. The whole project became
uneconomical, according to Pinto, and Belo Monte will now require government
subsidies or will have to build another lake further up the river. Ultimately,
Pinto believes the economic error will lead to more environmental damage, and
his reporting proved that Belo Monte is simply a bad project.
“The economic argument does not attract NGOs or too much sympathy, but Jornal Pessoal‘s editorial guidelines
are the facts. I don’t care who I will bother. I want to know if it is true or
not,” he said.
That is what he has been doing his whole career, but after 29 years the
journalist admits he is tired.
“I would like it if the newspaper had become unnecessary. When you are
66, you start to envision what you will not have more time to do,” Pinto said.
“I am doing it because the dynamics of the forest are fast and there is so much
omission that I am forced to write.”
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