A dashboard to explore how brazilian congressmen spend their legislative amendments in their electoral bases.
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We found out that almost half environmental embargoes in Brazil have no name on it, meaning that the government didn't know who was responsible for deforestation in that area. By cross-referencing public datasets, we were able to identify some of these agents.
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This story explains how tracking illegal cattle in the Amazon is possible through GTA, a document issued by state agencies, and why they try to hide those documents from civil society.
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This significant concentration of environmental infractions in a small fraction of the region highlights critical areas of concern in the Amazon. The data reveals patterns and hotspots of environmental violations, offering insights for further investigation and policy action.
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We investigated how, with the support of politicians, individuals are invading Brazil's conservation units, deforesting, and profiting from the sale of plots in the Distrito Federal, near the Congress and Palácio do Planalto.
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This investigation, written in Portuguese, uncovers a scheme in the Amazon region called "agropó" that combines land grabbing, illegal mining, and international cocaine trafficking. The investigation reveals that wealthy landowners, such as Janio Oliveira, have been involved in this lucrative criminal network.
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A 1-year cross-border series of articles that mapped the presence of organized crime groups in the Amazon region and reported on the field about the impacts of their actions. Data Fixers coordinated the data analysis and obtained the documents needed for the stories.
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An International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)-led cross-border investigation exposes how a lightly regulated sustainability industry overlooks forest destruction and human rights violations when granting environmental certifications. Data Fixers coordinated the data analysis and obtained the documents needed for the Brazilian stories.
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In partnership with NGO Global Witness, Data Fixers has investigated how government agencies use several strategies to withhold data about the cattle chain in Brazil, making it harder to investigate companies.
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The Brazilian magazine Piauí has published a profile on Altino Masson, a man who has ilegally seized 458,000 hectares of public lands, an area equivalent to three times the size of the city of São Paulo. This story is based on a data analysis conducted by Data Fixers and the Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA), which used data from the Cadastro Ambiental Rural (CAR), as well as Ibama's environmental fines data and other sources.
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This story was supported by Earth News Network/Internews. Brazilwood is being driven to extinction by an industry not often associated with organized crime: classical music. Known for its density and strength, the wood is crafted into bows that are used to play stringed instruments such as violins and cellos around the world. Forensic tests on a sample of the confiscated wood, obtained by reporters, show it was logged in the Pau Brazil National Park.
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A 2-month cross-border investigation in the US, UK and Brazil about a group of bowmakers suspicious of trafficking an endangered brazilian wood to make violin and cello bows.
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An investigation about how environmental fines disappeared from Brazil's environmental agency office, Ibama, helping several environmental offenders save money and continue deforestation in the Amazon.
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A story Data Fixers found through a database of expired fines. Brazil's Federal Court of Accounts released a report mentioning the same documents and conclusions revealed in this story and recommended policy changes to the environmental agency a few months later.
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This story was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in the Explanatory Journalism category. The Washington Post used our expired fines dataset and support to investigate how Brazil is struggling to enforce environmental crimes. Their reporter praised the project on his Twitter.
Read the storyData Fixers has been mentioned as source more than 100 times by several news organizations
Fostering public transparency in Brazil
Global Investigative Journalism Conference - Gothenburg/Sweden (Sep.23) - presentation about Data Fixers and public records Held in English.
Filecoin Foundation for the Descentralized Web/#FilLisbon2022 (Nov.22) - presentation about Data Fixers in Lisbon/Portugal in a tech conference. Held in English.
Jornal da Cultura - interview (Dec.22) - Our founder Luiz Fernando Toledo was interviewed by Jornal da Cultura, a traditional TV show in Brazil, to explain how Brazil can improve transparency policies in 2023. Held in Portuguese.
Observatório de Justiça e Conservação - interview (Mar.17 2023) - Founder Luiz Fernando Toledo and the investigative journalist Allan de Abreu were interviewed by this Youtube channel to explain stories they have published about environmental crimes, including a cross-border project about greenwashing with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Data Fixers was selected among a pool of global candidates to receive a US$ 100,000 Magic Grant fund from The Brown Institute at the Columbia Journalism School.
Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA). Data Fixers was hired by this European non-profit organization in 2023 and is currently managing some of their data needs and freedom of information requests about environmental issues.
NED. Several tools, including a chatbot and a dashboard, have been developed through their Reagan-Fascell program. Read more here.
Muckrock/Document Cloud (via Filecoin Foundation). Data Fixers received funding to use DocumentCloud as a platform to share documents and investigate public records for stories. Read more here.
Global Witness. A non-profit organization that investigates and exposes environmental and human rights abuses. Data Fixers supported their work in 2022 and 2023.
UOL. Supporting their investigative stories with data since January 2023.
Revista Piauí. Supporting their investigative projects since 2022.
About Data Fixers
Data Fixers is a data-driven journalism and consulting project created at the The Brown Institute for Media Innovation – a joint initiative between Columbia University and Stanford University. This project received a Magic Grant to find data and public records to support investigative journalism in Brazil and is coordinated by journalist Luiz Fernando Toledo (Master of Science in Data Journalism 2022). Data Fixers was awarded twice in 2023 by the Open Knowledge Foundation (Brazil) as the best Brazilian open data project and also for the best investigative project of the year (Amazon Underworld). Read more about the project in this article by Muckrock and here at the Brown Institute's website. Contact: lta2119@columbia.edu
