Months after a prison massacre in Brazil, inmates’ families are still searching for answers — and bodies

NATAL, Brazil — Guilherme Figueiredo da Silva knew he was going to die. In a phone call from the Alcacuz State Penitentiary, where the 36-year-old was serving a sentence for a drug conviction, he told his father that a rebellion was being planned but that authorities were doing nothing to prevent it. Two days later, […]

Desperation is driving an indigenous tribe in Venezuela to make the trek into Brazil

MANAUS, Brazil — Bergassio Quiñonez knew he had to get his family out of Venezuela when his wife and two young daughters went without eating for four days. Their home in Mariusa National Park, where Quiñonez and his family lived with about 600 other indigenous Warao people, was quickly becoming uninhabitable. Salt water was moving […]

Brazilian authorities move to force drug addicts out of a neighborhood known as Crackland

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — It was 6 a.m. on a Sunday when Rafael Matos da Silva was jolted awake by the repeated crashes of a battering ram against his front door. When he looked out the second-story window, police in riot gear yelled at him to come downstairs. He opened the door, and officers stormed […]

The Syrians starting over in Brazil

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Twelve-year-old Hanan Dacka listens closely as her teacher at Duque de Caxias public school in São Paulo, Brazil, assigns some group work about the Aedes aegypti mosquito and its role in transmitting the Zika virus. Moments later, Hanan slides in between Maria Luiza and Andressa, two new friends she has made […]

In Brazil, tent cities rise to protest World Cup construction

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — When Zezito Alves and hundreds of families from São Paulo, Brazil’s Homeless Workers Movement occupied a vacant lot in the city’s east end neighborhood of Itaquera on the night of May 2, they wanted just one thing. “All we want is proper housing,” Zezito says, two weeks later, as he walks […]

In-depth: The Amazon

AMAZONAS, Brazil — “There’s nothing bigger than ARPA,” says Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF, of the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program. “It’s one of the biggest conservation projects of all time. You hear people all around the world talk about, ‘this park is roughly the size of Belgium’ or ‘roughly the size of […]

Brazil’s protests, on and off the wall

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Not long after 2 a.m. last Sunday, some 30 photographers and friends swept the downtown dust off two walls that closed in a small but busy street near São Paulo’s Luz subway station. They had just slathered glue onto several large photos and were about to paste them onto the walls […]

Jill Langlois

Freelance journalist in Brazil