Her eyes welling up in the middle of the interview, award-winning journalist Catarina Barbosa asked for a break. The 14 years she had spent reporting on human rights abuses in the Amazon hadn’t prepared her for what she just heard. Visiting a rural settlement in Anapu, Pará to report on attacks on the community by land invaders, she was inside a hut chatting with Maria Júlia, a 7-year-old girl of the community, and her family. The girl was boasting to Barbosa that she wasn’t afraid of spiders or snakes or even the dark. But the thing she was afraid of: “The bad men,” she told Barbosa. “I'm afraid of them because they could set the kids on fire.” Hearing that, Barbosa, who has her own 8-year-old son, immediately froze. “It was painful,” she told me in an interview. “I said, ‘I need a break.’” Weeks earlier, land invaders had burned down the community’s school, where the girl’s drawings hung on the wall. It was the second time they had done so in the span of two years. The community, like several others in Anapu, is an assentamento, a Brazilian land reform designation that allows a plot of land that is not being properly or productively used to be given to landless workers. Despite their legal backing, these settlements are frequently subject to invasions and violence from farmers and ranchers. In Anapu, 29 people were killed in land conflicts between 2005 and 2023. “It’s horrible to conceive that a 7-year-old child has to live with a situation like that, with that kind of fear,” Barbosa told me, with tears again appearing in her eyes. This kind of emotion might not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of an intrepid investigative journalist. But for Barbosa, who is president of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists, personally understanding the pain of her sources is not only unavoidable--it’s also crucial to her reporting. “Some say, ‘the journalist has to be impartial.’ But I ask: how? Only if you’re not human. Because even now just remembering that makes me tear up,” Barbosa said. “People in interviews can see that I’m not oblivious to their pain. And if I’m not oblivious to their pain--and I’m really not, they can tell me things. So as much as I suffer, as much as I become miserable, that’s crucial for me to do this work.” In the interview with Maria Júlia and her family, Barbosa took a minute to remind herself of the story’s purpose, before quickly returning to the interview. “I work on that in my therapy. It’s not my pain, it’s someone else’s, even though I suffer. And so I focus on what I can do. I can write a hell of a text so that everyone knows what these children are experiencing” she said. “I dried the three tears that were there, took a breath and went back to the interview.”
Reporting the Understory
