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.”
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Barbosa’s article, “The seven-year-old girl who fears being burned alive by ‘bad men,'" was published by independent journalism outlet Sumaúma and recently received honorable mention in the text category of the Vladimir Herzog award, the highest honor in Brazilian journalism.
More important however was the response from the government, which, after the school was burned, had the kids attend a different school miles away instead of rebuilding it. But soon after Barbosa’s story was published, the municipal government arrived to rebuild the one-room wood structure.
Barbosa, who also won a Herzog honorable mention last year for reporting on the lack of protection offered to citizens who defend the Amazon from deforestation, says she’s able to report these painful stories and understand the suffering of her sources because of her ancestry.
The daughter of a woman from a rural river community on Marajó Island in the Amazon river who moved to Bélem to become a domestic worker, Barbosa grew up hearing stories about her mother’s community, its connection to the land and the violence it faced from farmers and ranchers.
She said that that enables her to connect with the sources most news outlets never seek. “I’m able to make connections like: ‘Oh, in my mom’s territory they also do that. Wow, my mom cooks just like that.’ It’s a relationship of identification… as if I were meeting relatives.”
She believes it’s her personal background that allows her to see not only the challenges of these communities, but also the hope and dreams. In her story about the community in Anapu, Barbosa revealed that despite her fear, Maria Júlia still dreams of being a doctor. When Babosa herself was a girl growing up in Belém, she dreamt of being a fiction writer, spending time reading and writing and inventing grand stories with imagined characters.
“So I grew up in the city and education brought me to where I am today. I think that many of my experiences are in some way or another in the Maria Júlia story,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I can understand that those children are more than just suffering,” she said.
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To report the story, Barbosa and a photographer traveled the 2.5 hours each way from Altamira, where Sumaúma is based, to the settlement in Anapu everyday for a week. It wouldn’t have been safe for them to stay there overnight.
One day, their car got stuck for three hours on the dirt road near the settlement, a dangerous situation considering the cattle ranches surrounding them. “If the gunmen discovered that a journalist was stuck in the middle of the place, it could have been fatal for everyone. But in the end, it was alright.”
In the community, she interviewed each family for two to three hours, sometimes more than once, and the children were crucial participants of these conversations, Barbosa said. “I don't like to remove children from conversations,” she said. “So motherhood also affects me here. It makes me perceive the child as a being, as an agent that impacts the world and is impacted by it.”
Catarina spoke with several other children of the community in addition to Maria Júlia, including a girl that dreams of being a police officer to put the bad guys in jail and two brothers who race to school everyday as a game but also as practice for what they would do if the bad men showed up.
But she didn’t use her time in the community just to interview. She also stayed silent for long stretches, observing, listening, looking, smelling. She noted that the smell of burnt wood was still there, even though the school had been burned a month before. She heard the birds still singing as if nothing had happened. She looked through the remains of the school to see if any part of the kids’ drawings had survived. (They hadn’t.)
“I also learned to write about what is not said, because when you do interviews about sensitive topics…you have to learn to listen to what is not said and for you to do that you need to be very concentrated,” Barbosa said.
Even after the interviews she could hardly endure, the hardest part of the process was the writing, Barbosa said. The story is full of short sentences that are gut-wrenching in their simplicity, like “Maria Júlia knows the bad men” or “Yet the fear is real.” Barbosa said the pain those sentences evoke matches the emotional difficulty she had while writing.
“I was unwell. I became unwell. I must have stayed really unwell for two weeks. I’m in therapy so I took this gigantic anguish to my therapist.” But as her therapist told her, there is no other way to do the journalism she does. “She said, ‘You write texts the way you write, precisely because you don't allow yourself to become numb.’”
So over the course of months of writing and rewriting, of rearranging passages and quotes, of listening to heart-wrenching recordings, Barbosa embraced her anguish. As she put it, she “took that pain and transformed it into words.”
Reporting the Understory