Lúcio Flávio Pinto

For more than 25 years, Lúcio Flávio Pinto has been the one-man editorial team of Jornal Pessoal (Personal Newspaper), a fearless, ad-less 12-page bimonthly that he writes and distributes on the streets of Belém, in the northern state of Pará. Trained as a sociologist and stubborn journalist by conviction, he stormed out of the daily O Liberal in 1987 when it refused to print his investigative piece on the implication of two businessmen in a parliamentarian’s murder. After exposing O Liberal’s murky finances in 2005, he was beaten up by the owner’s son and then the courts prevented him from following their trial on tax evasion charges. But death threats and more than 30 lawsuits have not stopped him from continuing to write about drug trafficking, deforestation and corruption.