Pinto's aggressive reporting commands respect in this sweltering tropical port city of 1.6 million people on the Atlantic Coast. "You may not agree with everything he says, but who else is the local independent journalist?" says David McGrath, a geography professor at the Federal University of Para. "I think the Amazon is fortunate to have a journalist in that role."
Honesty can be deadly
BUT in Para, those who speak truth to power often pay with their lives. The state, one of six that make up the Brazilian Amazon, is notorious for being one of the country's most violent, backward and corrupt areas, a perception underscored by the 2005 murder of U.S. missionary nun Dorothy Stang, who was helping peasant farmers in their land disputes with cattle ranchers.
Partly because of these scandals, the area has come under greater scrutiny in recent years. International interest (many Brazilians would say "international meddling") in the Amazon region is soaring, prompted by rising anxieties over biodiversity and global warming.
Yet one thing this super-abundant region still lacks is in-depth journalistic coverage of its intertwined environmental and human challenges. Even Brazil's largest daily newspapers, such as Folha de Sao Paulo and O Estado de Sao Paulo (for which Pinto formerly worked as a correspondent), generally have assigned just one reporter to cover the vast Amazon region, according to Marcelo Beraba, president of the Brazilian Organization of Investigative Journalism.
By far the most powerful media voice in the region belongs to the O Liberal group, which publishes an influential namesake paper with a daily circulation of 35,000. It also publishes the racier, tabloid-style Amazonia, filled with sports, gossip and crime news and usually featuring a picture of a woman in a bikini. But the majority of Brazilians get their news from television. For many people, newspapers, though relatively cheap, are still unaffordable.
Beraba said the area's inaccessibility and occupational hazards have limited the number of experienced reporters such as Pinto, who grew up in a middle-class family in Santerem, midway between the two largest Brazilian Amazon cities, Belem and Manaus. "In Belem, in Para, it's like he's the only one," Beraba said. "There's not a strong, diversified, independent journalistic scene."
