On the beat in the Amazon

Ennio Candotti, 65, a university professor and former president of the Sao Paulo-based Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science, describes the lawsuits (including the 18 filed by the O Liberal group) against his longtime friend Pinto as "abuses" deployed by the elites of "an archaic state" who "haven't adjusted to democracy and justice." "They solve their conflicts through financial means and through force because they cannot solve them through writing or through reason and democratic means," he says.

Despite its severely limited resources, Jornal Pessoal regularly breaks news that appears in no other Brazilian media. As one example, Pinto points to a story explaining how a temporary stoppage at an Amazon hydroelectric plant several years ago caused a temporary surge in aluminum prices on the London stock market, because Brazil was allowing a Japanese-Brazilian aluminum consortium to buy hydroelectric power at government-subsidized rates.

To cover the Amazon properly, Pinto says, a reporter must know about environmental issues, business, hydroelectrics, accounting, physics, chemistry and water management (which Pinto studied in Holland). "A journalist's only merit is to ask the right question," he says. "The primary raw material for a journalist is doubt."

The region must develop, he believes, if it is to shed its centuries-long status quo of poverty and backwardness. The question is, how? But first, he says, the world must relinquish its delusion that the Amazon "is the place of Original Sin," a lost Eden that somehow can be restored.

He's suspicious of contemporary bromides about "sustainable development," which he regards as "no more than an ideology until now, used to sugar the pill, smooth the international public opinion" and soothe the consciences of what he calls the "colonial" consumers, both in and outside Brazil. Enabling humans to learn "how to use" the Amazon "without destroying it" is the region's greatest challenge, he says.

Helping his readers to grasp these complexities is what keeps Pinto writing, and fighting in court. And if his mission at times seems a touch quixotic, he suggests that it's his opponents, not him, who fail to confront reality.

"The attitude of one who doesn't want to face the facts and truth is many times compared to the ostrich," he says. "I didn't believe that, either, so I did a little research and I found out that an ostrich sticks its head in the sand not so as not to face the facts but because of its very high sensitivity" -- so it can determine the direction that danger is coming from.

"I dive my head into the earth, just like an ostrich, because I want to know what's going on."

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reed.johnson@latimes.com