On the beat in the Amazon

BELEM, BRAZIL — In 42 years of reporting about the Amazon, Lucio Flavio Pinto has been cursed, kicked, beaten, repeatedly threatened with death and sued 33 times. More than half of these legal dust-ups were instigated by his former employer, O Liberal, the region's biggest, most important media company, whose late family patriarch used to be one of Pinto's best friends.

With ex-friends like O Liberal, Pinto hardly needs enemies, though he's got plenty of those too: Politicians, who've been trying for years without success to shut him up or buy him off. The Brazilian military, a frequent target of Pinto's sharp pen. Cattlemen, ranchers and loggers, intent on deforesting the Amazon River basin and converting it into pasture lands and soybean fields, a process that could help feed a protein-hungry planet but, say scientists, would dump billions of tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

Then there's the Brazilian state hydroelectric company Electronorte, gearing up to build more dams that would spur job growth but swamp the land and disrupt the lives of subsistence farmers and fishermen. And multinational conglomerates, siphoning off rich veins of aluminum ore, timber and iron ore from the world's largest rain forest.

During his long career, the 58-year-old maverick reporter -- who has compared himself to the ancient fire-bestowing Greek deity Prometheus but still refuses to carry a cellphone -- has tangled with all of them. In doing so, he has earned a reputation as a creature even rarer than the endangered Amazonian manatee: an authoritative, stubbornly independent journalist who doesn't shrink from confronting some of Brazil's most potent interests.

"People know when they start a fight with me I will never submit to their power," Pinto says in his soft, measured voice. "Only the people saying the truth will impress me."

Neither his isolation nor his legal quandaries have stopped Pinto from writing and publishing Jornal Pessoal (Personal Newspaper), a 12-page, bimonthly, 2,000-circulation newsletter. Pinto has been producing the journal out of his modest home here for 20 years, after he quit working for O Liberal in 1987. The journal relies entirely on sales to cover its costs. It carries no ads because Pinto, the author of several books, believes that accepting even one centavo for commercial promotions would taint his publication's integrity.