WHO ORDERED THE KILLING?
Politics and the police in the murder of journalists
The Tim Lopes Project is an answer by Abraji to violence against journalists, especially outside the largest cities of the country. It is structured in two stages. In the first stage, reporter and writer Bob Fernandes covered the scenarios of some of the most symbolic crimes against journalists in recent years. Partnering with documentary filmmaker Bruno Miranda – from João Wainer’s team – Fernandes collected information about the killings, the investigations, and the consequences of these deaths for the community. The material was released in July 2017.
The second stage was launched in the second half of 2017 and consisted of the creation of a fast response network to crimes against journalists. Whenever a communication professional is killed in small or medium-sized cities of Brazil, and there is evidence of a connection between the killing and his or her journalistic work, Abraji coordinates the trip to the scene with a team of journalists from different outlets. The main objective is setting up an intensive investigation and disclosing the material collaboratively by all media vehicles involved in the project. In addition to covering the crime itself, reporters seek to show which work or works carried out by the victim were the possible cause of the murder.
In this second stage, we divided the work on two fronts: the setting of a network of traditional media partner vehicles and independent websites and the sending of an Abraji team to the crime scenes. Formed by the program coordinator, Angelina Nunes, and then intern Rafael Oliveira, the team traveled to two locations – Edealina, in the state of Goias, and Braganca, in the state of Para, in 2018. They produced the first report and collect information for later reports on the murders of Jefferson Pureza and Jairo de Sousa. The articles were later disclosed in the partner outlets.
The Tim Lopes Project is carried out by Abraji with funding from the Open Society Foundations. The name of the project is a tribute to the reporter Tim Lopes, murdered in 2002 while producing a piece for TV Globo, in Complexo do Alemao, in Rio de Janeiro.
