When I first saw the Pulitzer Center Campus Consortium posting, I instantly knew I wanted to focus my project proposal to highlight one of the less visible issues in Brazilian societies. We were fresh off the 2018 elections and President Jair Bolsonaro’s first semester in office already brought abrupt and controversial changes on Brazil’s health, education and environmental policies. One of the biggest changes Bolsonaro’s government brought forward was the shrinking of the FUNAI (National Indian Foundation) and the loosening of surveillance and protection of federally recognized Indigenous territories.

Thus, I decided to showcase how these new public policy changes were negatively impacting the lives of groups that have been historically persecuted and pushed out of their original territories due to mining, logging and agribusiness practices.

The Pulitzer Center gave me total freedom and control over the direction of my project, even more than I even anticipated. It was an exciting and also quite anxiety-inducing freedom that I learned to manage as my reporting progressed. This project took me from interviewing politicians in the Chamber of Federal Deputies in Brasília to driving by myself through side roads near the Paraguayan border to visit Indigenous settlements, all in a three-week span. The Pulitzer Center empowered me to be self-starting and independent in pursuing my stories.

Additionally, it was especially rewarding to learn and showcase the stories of people, who if not for the Pulitzer Center, I would have probably never contacted my entire life. To some of them, I was the first journalist they have ever encountered. For as much as I knew beforehand that there was an underreported story to be told, I was unaware myself, prior to my reporting, of the invisible struggle that Indigenous people face in Brazil. Born and raised in a very urban setting, I was, without realizing much, a representative of the demographic that I was trying to reach with that story. This project broadened my understanding of the role that journalism has in providing a platform for people and groups that would otherwise go unnoticed by the larger society.

You can find Rafael’s reporting project on the Brazilian Indigenous struggle for land recognition and cultural survival here.