Katia Brasil

Kátia is redefining and strengthening investigative journalism in the Amazon with native peoples as co-producers of quality information in real time. In this decentralization and reordering of the standard journalistic logic, Kátia empowers young people from different communities (ribeirinhos, quilombolas and indigenous) as important actors and brings skills and tools for them to become active communicators.

Traditional Brazilian media cover political-economic conflicts in the Amazon in a biased and superficial manner that threaten the traditional peoples of the region. To change this, Kátia co-founded Amazônia Real, the first non-profit investigative journalism agency based in the Amazon. Kátia is transforming the journalistic coverage of socio-environmental issues in the region by placing the narratives of affected traditional populations at the center of the reports. She and her team democratize information through the active support of traditional peoples who share their own narratives. In the agency, young indigenous, quilombola and riverside leaders also play a central role and are trained to report possible violations or events that affect their territories so that they can be active agents in communicating their values, customs and culture. The decentralized performance, in which the team is located in different territories of the Amazon, allows the agency to overcome the difficulties of covering in real time and with quality the main events of one of the most complex territories in Brazil.

Amazônia Real comprises a network of professionals, including journalists, photographers and young leaders, with representatives in 10 states in Brazil. Several national and international media partners are releasing the network’s coverage of the Amazon, which is available in an open license format, Creative Commons, allowing the replication of materials and reports free of charge. The agency is a reference in socio-environmental journalism and the quality of this work has given visibility to allegations of negligence and attacks on human rights that have impacted legal and political decisions.

Kátia dedicates herself to the visibility of traditional peoples, especially through young people, training them and providing them with tools and skills so that each young person can be an active agent in communicating their values, customs, and culture, as well as reporting possible violations or events that affect their territories and communities. “Jovem Cidadãos” (Young Citizens), the training program in edu-communication for young people from the native communities, leads the writing of reports and articles that contextualize the news written with a perspective from their lived experience, breaking with false stereotypes triggered by traditional media. Kátia holds socio-environmental journalism workshops, debates and exhibitions on critical topics in the Amazon region, in partnership with public and private universities and non-governmental organizations. Through this work, she furthers the access to information, defends freedom of expression and human rights, and gives visibility to the voices of the people of the Amazon that are often silenced or have little space and visibility in the mainstream press.

The Amazon is a territory surrounded by political and economic disputes that affect the way of living of the traditional peoples that inhabit it and cause an accelerated destruction of the environment. The economic interests behind mining, logging and agribusiness activities threaten the basic rights of indigenous peoples, quilombolas, and riverside dwellers. In this context, these peoples experience a process of invisibilization, which is materialized in the negligence of government agencies and in the misinformation conveyed by traditional media.

There is a lack of interest by traditional national and regional media in Brazil in contextualizing the coverage of disputes in the Amazon. These channels, mostly linked to political groups or committed to the economic interests of their sponsors, typically mining, logging, and agribusiness corporations, provide superficial and distorted coverage of these issues, promoting approaches that reinforce stereotypes of these populations and perspectives guided by the interests of the country’s urban centers. As the Amazon is a complex territory, the costs of journalistic production in this region are high, making it difficult to practice investigative journalism.

Furthermore, the voices of traditional populations are not heard by the media. The lack of representation of these peoples contributes to the silencing of relevant causes, misinformation about the threats to the lives of these populations, and negative political and economic decisions, which affect the lives of the entire planet. Since 2019, the numbers point to an increase in violence against traditional peoples in Brazil, when the highest number of murders of indigenous leaders in 11 years was recorded. Brazil is the fourth most violent country for environmental activists, according to the annual report of the NGO Global Witness 2018, making evident the need for other strategies to expose the challenges faced by the people who inhabit and preserve the Amazon.

In 2013, Kátia founded the first non-profit journalism agency in the Amazon to democratize information and give traditional peoples the leading role in their own narratives. Through collaborative and decentralized formats, Amazônia Real brings the voice of people who care for and live in the Amazon to the center of the discussion, training leaders and, mainly, young people to do independent and investigative journalism. The agency produces exclusive reports on environmental impacts on the Amazon rainforest, such as deforestation, mining and hydroelectric effects, and climate change. The coverage prioritizes the demands of traditional peoples and reports the violation of human and territorial rights, agrarian conflicts, migration, human trafficking and corruption. The network, which feeds the content and is at the forefront of events, is made up of communication professionals, young people, and leaders spread across more than 10 states in Brazil.

As of April 2022, over 3,000 reports have been produced and disseminated, with approximately 1100 produced in the two years of the pandemic. The team currently has 63 people, from journalists and photographers to young people trained by the Young Citizens program. All content published by Amazônia Real can be republished and shared with the guarantee of copyright under the Creative Commons open license, which guarantees the democratization of information and access to content free of charge for all, which is also especially important for traditional peoples to have access to these reports. Amazônia Real has reached an audience of more than 10 million people since its foundation and its reach is worldwide, with access in the United States, Portugal, India, France, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and Italy, among more than 180 countries that read agency reports. The highest frequency of accesses, 90%, is from Brazilians, mostly based in São Paulo (SP), Manaus (AM) followed by Rio de Janeiro (RJ), Brasília (DF), Belém (PA) and Belo Horizonte (MG).

With a decentralized team, Kátia overcomes the challenges of logistics and access for the production of data and audiovisual materials. Today, 13 young communicators produce content for the Young Citizens of the Amazon Blog within the agency's platforms and are paid through scholarships and trained by the Young Citizens program, an edu-communication initiative to train young indigenous, quilombola, and river dwellers. The training addresses how to produce reports and communicate on social media, encouraging them to produce content about their culture, customs and activities, as well as major events that take place in their communities, making use of technology. It covers topics from internet safety and basic knowledge of English to photography and reporting skills. Created in 2018, the Young Citizens Project has trained more than 40 young people from traditional communities in the use of Information and Communication Technologies so that they can reaffirm their identity, portray their reality and tell stories about their people and reduce inequality in access to media.

As a result of the training, land invasion conflicts, reports of deforestation and other problems that affect the communities are transmitted in real time, and the police and authorities can be called immediately. The quality of the production of information in real time confirms Amazônia Real as a reference in socio-environmental journalism and its reports have been disseminated by traditional national and international media such as Rede Globo, Folha de São Paulo, BBC, The New York Times and The Guardian. In addition to the independent agency being a source of information for major media outlets, the impact of in-depth reporting supports policy making, instigates mobilization and promotes change. The coverage of forest fires in 2019 was used as a basis for measuring the impacted areas. Since 2020, coverage of COVID-19 in indigenous territories has denounced negligence in public and indigenous health, lack of medication, hospital beds and even violations of rights in the population’s burials. The reports were cited in several actions by the Federal Public Ministry, and Kátia spoke at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

As a result, Amazônia Real has consolidated important support from the Ford Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, and Agência EFE, the fourth largest news agency in the world, which distributes the content produced by Amazônia Real. In 2020, Kátia received support from the Google News Initiative and the Open Society Foundation for her coverage of COVID in the Amazon and for information production about COVID. Kátia’s focus moving forward is to give more visibility to young peoples in the region. Her goal is to transform the Young Citizens of the Amazon Blog into its own independent website.

Kátia attended journalism school in Rio de Janeiro, where she co-founded the Jornal de Santa Teresa to communicate news from the neighborhood. Social inequalities were on the agenda, such as sanitation and drinking water in Rio's favelas. She was also the producer of a theater group that staged Greek tragedies, which won the Mambembe Prize at the time.

After graduating, Kátia went to work in Roraima in a newly opened newspaper. There, she started her career in investigative journalism, but faced a series of challenges, as she belatedly discovered that the newspaper only published articles aligned with the political interests of the newspaper owner. In Roraima, she met and approached journalists who covered the Amazon and traditional peoples and discovered that it was the work she wanted to have: giving visibility to the voice of indigenous peoples and reporting on what was happening in the region. Kátia got to know firsthand the challenges these populations were experiencing and saw the urgency of putting their experiences and demands on the national agenda.

In 2013, together with her professional colleague, the journalist Elaíze Farias, Kátia founded the first news agency that aimed to enhance the voice of the populations of the Amazon: indigenous peoples, quilombolas, riverside communities, fishermen, rural workers, women, migrants, among others; people who have their voices silenced, and have little space or visibility in the so-called mainstream press. As she went deeper into the issue, Kátia decided to expand her work to train young forest communicators, so that they too could become qualified professional journalists in their own right.