IPFA 2005 - Lucio Flavio Pinto

Lúcio Flávio Pinto

Read an interview in Caros Amigos (em português):

http://carosamigos.terra.com.br/do_site/sonosite/entrev_ago04_lucio.asp


Following are transcribed excerpts from a videotaped interview with Pinto, airing as part of CPJ's International Press Freedom Awards Dinner:

Q: What are the main difficulties a journalist may find when working in the Amazon region?

A: Well, the difficulty, in general, that a journalist faces in the Amazon is that he's isolated. His headquarters are far, if he's a correspondent, and the region itself--be it in Belém or Manaus--it's the long distances. So, in general, he's by himself and he's like a firefighter, because the Amazon is always going through social fires, economic fires, environmental fires. So, he feels unprotected. He feels permanently exposed to the actors behind those developments, and many of those actors are violent, aggressive people who don't live by the rules of civilized coexistence. So, I believe this is a very serious problem for journalists to do the journalism that the Amazon needs.

Q: What is happening in the Amazon that makes it a center for so many illegal activities? Why is there so much crime in the region?

A: A criminal seeks impunity and the Amazon is an excellent place to go unpunished. So, I think it attracts criminals because the arms of legality and modernity take a long time to come to the Amazon, and that's why it attracts that marginal fauna. ... An important figure in the history of the Amazon was a minister in the military regime, the most powerful minister in the military regime, Delfim Neto--currently a federal legislator for the state of São Paulo. He used to say, "The Amazon is living the time of the bandit. It's wild and primitive, a land for pioneers. So, first bandits have to come and tame the land, the rest will come later."

Q: Why do you think the Amazon has become one of the most dangerous places to practice journalism in Latin America?

A: If you want to do serious journalism, you have to do a journalism of denunciation, a journalism that sees what is happening. So here, where the only ethics is the ethics of the criminal, it's crucial that journalists point to the real facts, and the real facts are in contradiction with [official] discourse and rhetoric.

So, journalists are always running risks, because journalists are always displeasing people. And, unlike in a major city such as Rio, São Paulo, or New York, where a journalist sometimes doesn't run into the person he denounced, here you run into--sometimes the same day--the person you said was a thief. And that person doesn't like to be called a thief. So, journalists are always facing major and immediate risks.

Q: Why do Brazilian media ignore or fail to investigate issues as important as environmental degradation, rainforest devastation, and political and corporate corruption in the Amazon?

A: Well, there was a time when Brazilian media, which is concentrated in the South and Southeast, had a stronger presence here: regional offices, correspondents in state capitals. Today that has virtually disappeared. So, press coverage is episodic: when there's an accident or a conflict, when there's a traumatic development, the Brazilian press covers it. So, because it's not a systematic coverage, the media do not have an in-depth vision of the Amazon, they have an exotic vision. There's a discontinuity in the press coverage of the Amazon. ... The media don't realize, for instance, that some goods currently produced in the Amazon are in world markets. The state of Pará is the world's single largest producer of iron ore. And that is not covered. The state of Pará has the world's largest bauxite mine. And that is not covered either, because it's not exotic.

Q: You say that your main feeling about the Amazon is hopelessness. Why?

A: My feeling of hopelessness is more in retrospect. It's hopelessness considering what has happened, what we have lived through in the Amazon. But in order to stay here, to keep reporting the news, to keep trying to establish the truth, I have to be optimistic and hopeful.

When I started working as a journalist, the deforestation of the Amazon was less than 1 percent. Today's it's 18 percent. There was never a people in the history of mankind who destroyed as much rainforest as has been destroyed in the Amazon, in less than half a century. What was destroyed in the Amazon was 400,000 square kilometers. So, that's shocking, and not because mine is a poet's vision, or an ecologist's vision, it's because the rainforest is the Amazon's reason of being. Could you imagine if Egypt wanted to fill the Nile River with silt? It would finish off Egypt. Egypt is a product of the Nile, and we are a product of the rainforest.

Q: Why do you continue to fight to change things for the better?

A: We still have that chance, of making a different history in the Amazon, a history in which the settlement model in the region is based on the rainforest. All peoples in the history of mankind destroyed the forests, they were homo agricola. We, who have the world's largest rainforest reserve, we can be for the first time people of the rainforest. That's not what's happening. On the contrary, we are the ones who have destroyed the rainforest the most. Even so, we still have a unique chance in the history of mankind. The moment the Amazon is devastated--and the consequences will be terrible--we will be just like all the other. That's why it's worth it trying to make a different history.