‘We’re afraid of dying’: Brazilian news site will not cover upcoming elections after threats

Original article by Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro

Four years ago, during Brazil’s last presidential election, the tyres were slashed on the pickup truck used for reporting by Tapajós de Fato, an independent journalism website in the Brazilian Amazon.

Days later, a cat’s severed head was left next to the car park, alongside a note bearing the name of one of the site’s founders, Marcos Wesley Pedroso, and a warning that he would be next.

Last July, security cameras outside Pedroso’s house showed cyclists circling the block, whistling and filming his car until, minutes later, another car crashed into it. “I believe they wanted me to come outside so they could ambush me,” said Pedroso.

Police have not identified those responsible or established whether the cases are connected, but Pedroso sees them as part of a wider series of threats linked to Tapajós de Fato’s reporting on environmental and Indigenous rights violations, land disputes, and pesticide contamination in the Amazonian state of Pará.

As a result, the site’s team decided not to cover this year’s elections – which will choose the next president, state governors, members of the lower house and part of the senate, with the first round on 4 October.

“We’re afraid of dying and of putting our families’ safety at risk,” said Pedroso.

He added that the site, whose name refers to the 1,238-mile-long (1,992km) Tapajós River, would remain online and continue covering environmental issues, but would avoid stories about the election.

News of violence around election time is not uncommon: in 2022 a man was struck on the head with a piece of wood after saying he did not support the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro’s re-election bid.

Journalism and free-expression organisations in Brazil see Tapajós de Fato’s decision, first reported by a network of independent Amazonian media outlets, as a serious example of the consequences of attacks against journalists during the electoral period.

“It reflects the different forms of attempted censorship and silencing that journalists have to face in Brazil,” said Letícia Kleim, legal coordinator at the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism.

“Silencing the message by silencing the messenger affects not just their community, but democracy as a whole, which will no longer receive the valuable information they were providing by reporting on the Amazon from within the region.”

Her association is part of a coalition that recorded 4,400 online attacks against journalists, media outlets and the press on X and Instagram between 30 August and 12 September alone, an increase of 67% compared with the previous two weeks.

Because the election campaign was still under way, Kleim said it was not yet possible to know whether there had been more attacks than in the previous election, although she stressed that the context four years ago was particularly hostile because of the then president Bolsonaro, who routinely attacked the media and made threatening remarks to reporters such as: “I’d like to smash your mouth.”

Kleim said: “His government made discrediting the press a priority at times; his family, supporters and politicians close to him embraced that agenda, and many continue with it.”

Bolsonaro is now unable to run because he is under house arrest serving a sentence for attempting a coup after losing the 2022 election, but one of his sons, the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, is in a technical tie in the polls with the incumbent, the leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

“The possibility of Flávio being elected worries me enormously,” said Pedroso. He said reporting was even more dangerous four years ago, particularly in the Amazon – where Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental and anti-Indigenous policies led to soaring deforestation, a gold rush into Indigenous lands and increased criminal activity.

In 2022, the British journalist Dom Phillips, who reported for the Guardian from Brazil, and the Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were ambushed and killed in the Amazon by men accused of links to a transnational criminal network exploiting an Indigenous territory.

The Amazon-based NGO Comitê Chico Mendes, named after the environmentalist murdered in 1988, issued a statement deploring the threats against Tapajós de Fato: “We cannot normalise an Amazon where fear determines what can and cannot be reported.”

Pedroso said that Tapajós de Fato had decided to make the threats public after years of reporting them to the authorities without any investigation producing results.

“Deciding not to cover the elections was not easy,” he said. “With a great deal of humility and responsibility, I know the role we play in educating and informing many people in the communities around us, but there was no other way. In the end, those are the people who lose out.”