Letícia Duarte, Author at The GroundTruth Project

Letícia Duarte

Letícia Duarte is Report for the World's Latin America Manager.

She's an award-winning Brazilian journalist based in New York and dedicated to in-depth coverage of social and political issues. She has contributed to multiple media outlets, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Revista Piauí. For 13 years, she worked as an investigative reporter for Zero Hora, the leading newspaper in Southern Brazil. She received major national journalism awards, including the Esso Prize for best reporting and the Vladimir Herzog Human Rights Award, for her feature A Son of the Streets, a 3-year-investigation on a Brazilian homeless child trajectory.

Duarte is a recipient of the 2019 Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholars Award/Harper's Magazine Scholarship, for her essay reflecting on her coverage, Refugee Story: in 2015, when she traveled with a Syrian family from Greece to Germany, chronicling their journey to escape civil war through eight countries in seven days.

She started collaborating with The GroundTruth Project in 2019 as a Democracy Undone reporting fellow. Recording podcasts in English and Portuguese, she investigated the effects of rising authoritarianism in Brazil. She is the author of Vaza Jato (2020), in partnership with The Intercept Brazil, about the investigation by The Intercept that exposed wrongdoings inside the so-called anti-corruption Operation Car Wash. The book was a finalist for the acclaimed 2021 Jabuti Prize, the highest literary award in Brazil.

She holds an M.A. in Politics and Global Affairs from Columbia University and an M.S. in Sociology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

Columns

How a Report for the World newsroom is tracking desertification in Brazil

In 1999 Inácio França, then a reporter in Recife, traveled through the Northeast of Brazil documenting the advance...

Jun 14, 2024

Environment

New indigenous territories expand environmental protection in the Brazilian Amazon, but land conflicts remain a threat

Brazil recently recognized six new indigenous territories, a significant move to safeguard ancestral lands and the environment. The...

May 23, 2023

Democracy

A foretold riot: the factors behind Brazil’s insurrection

Jan 12, 2023

Columns

Authoritarianism’s rise and journalism’s fall are intersecting

Editor's note: This column was originally published in The Boston Globe on October 28, 2022 Brazil’s runoff presidential...

Oct 28, 2022

Rights

The risks and challenges of covering the Amazon

The murders of the British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous expert Bruno Pereira during a reporting trip in...

Jul 07, 2022

Special Reports

Democracy Undone: Meet the intellectual founder of Brazil’s far right

Editor's note: This dispatch, published jointly with The Atlantic Magazine, explores another aspect of "Weaponizing Fear," a tactic...

Dec 28, 2019

Season 8 - Democracy Undone |Episode 1

Episode 1: Weaponizing Fear in Brazil

Since taking office in January, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has weaponized the fear of widespread crime, and...

Oct 31, 2019