Tim Lopes - Investigative Journalist

Investigative Journalist

Tim Lopes attended journalism school at the Faculdade Hélio Alonso (FACHA) in Rio de Janeiro and during his career wrote for the Rio newspapers O Globo, O Dia, and Jornal do Brasil. As part of an investigative piece in the 1978, Lopes worked at a construction site on Rio's underground Metro to highlight difficult working conditions in the stifling heat. Lopes won a Brazilian journalism award called the "Prêmio Abril de Jornalismo" in both 1985 and 1986 for feature stories involving soccer in the sports magazine, Placar.

Tim Lopes' journalism colleagues described him as an old-school type reporter who gleaned his stories from researching on the street versus sitting in an air-conditioned office browsing the Internet for ideas. A consistent theme of Tim Lopes' reporting was to show how low income citizens living within Rio's favelas could be subjected to terror and powerlessness under the 'law of the traffickers.’ Lopes felt that the government had ceded control of poor neighborhoods to violent drug traffickers. An example of this was the series he wrote for the Rio newspaper, "O Dia," in 1994 entitled, "Funk: Som, Alegria e Terror," (Funk: Sound, Joy and Terror). The story described certain baile funk run by traffickers (baile funk are dance concerts held in favelas featuring live performers singing a style of rap called Rio Funk).

His first foray into broadcast journalism was for the popular newsmagazine program, Fantástico on the Globo network. During one assignment in 1995, Lopes posed as a street vendor while concealing a camera within a cooler. His aim was to shine a journalistic light on the risks posed to ordinary citizens of Rio of being mugged or assaulted by thieves, as this was a particularly acute reality at that time. During the course of the investigation, Lopes witnessed a dramatic scene which was all caught on camera: A group of teenagers mug a pedestrian couple in Rio's Centro business district, with one of the thieves wielding a large knife. When a taxi driver scares the mugger off by firing a revolver, the boy runs into heavy traffic on Avenida Presidente Vargas and is violently killed when he is hit by a city bus. Several Globo cameras were filming the entire episode from different angles, which was shown during the report (a black bar covered a portion of the frame at the moment the boy was killed). The scene weighed on Lopes' mind for a long time.

Lopes became a producer at Rede Globo in 1996. In 2001 Lopes and his team at Rede Globo received the Prêmio Esso (Brazil's version of the Pulitzer) for an investigative series entitled, “Feirão das Drogas” (Big Drug Fair), in which he used a hidden camera to show dealers on the street openly hawking cocaine to passing pedestrians, yelling out the drug and its price. His footage also captured armed traffickers parading past on motorcycles with AK-47s. This footage was shot in a dense network of favelas in the Zona Norte called the Complexo do Alemão (German Complex); more specifically within the Complexo this particular area is known as the Grota.

One of the reporters working on Lopes' team to collect undercover footage for the same investigative report was Globo journalist Cristina Guimarães. She filmed in the Rio favelas of Mangueira and Rocinha during the same time period. The report was televised in Brazil on the program Jornal Nacional on August 3, 2001. The report got a lot of attention, which in turn caused Rio's political administration to take action. Police crackdowns followed, and dealers in the favela da Grota, and the other favelas featured were prevented from openly selling drugs on the street for a while, and some were arrested. Subsequently, the drug lords of the criminal factions controlling these areas were not happy with the decrease in revenues. (One of the dealers arrested, "Ratinho", would later factor in Lopes' death).

Tim Lopes and his team were awarded Brazil's top journalism prize for the report which was titled, "Feirão das Drogas" (The big drug street fair) – the first Prêmio Esso given for broadcast investigative journalism in Brazil for the report.

In 2002 Lopes started working on a story about caminhoneiros (long-distance truck drivers that traverse Brazil) for Globo TV.