Tapajós de Fato, an independent journalism website based in the Amazonian state of Pará, has announced it will not cover Brazil's October 2026 elections. The decision follows years of threats against founder Marcos Wesley Pedroso linked to the site's reporting on environmental crimes, Indigenous rights violations, land disputes, and pesticide contamination. The threats include slashed tires on the team's reporting vehicle during the 2022 election, a severed cat's head left with a note naming Pedroso, and a July 2025 incident in which security cameras captured what Pedroso believes was an ambush attempt involving cyclists surveilling his home before a car rammed his vehicle. Police have not identified those responsible for any of the incidents or established whether they are connected. Pedroso decided to go public after years of reporting threats to authorities produced no investigative results. The site will remain online covering environmental issues but will avoid all election-related stories. "We're afraid of dying and of putting our families' safety at risk," Pedroso said. The withdrawal lands in a worsening climate for Brazilian press freedom during the campaign. A coalition including the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism recorded 4,400 online attacks against journalists and media outlets on X and Instagram in just two weeks between 30 August and 12 September — a 67% increase over the preceding fortnight. Legal coordinator Letícia Kleim noted that while it is too early to compare the full cycle to 2022, the structural hostility toward media established under Bolsonaro persists. His family, supporters, and allied politicians continue the agenda of discrediting the press. Bolsonaro himself is under house arrest serving a sentence for his attempted coup after losing the 2022 election and cannot run. But his son, far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, is in a statistical tie with incumbent leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, keeping the political dynamics that endangered reporters very much alive. Pedroso said reporting was even more dangerous four years ago, when Bolsonaro's anti-environmental and anti-Indigenous policies fueled deforestation, a gold rush into Indigenous lands, and increased criminal activity across the Amazon. The broader pattern is well established and lethal. In 2022, British journalist Dom Phillips, who reported for the Guardian from Brazil, and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were ambushed and killed in the Amazon by men accused of links to a transnational criminal network. The Amazon-based NGO Comitê Chico Mendes, named after the environmentalist murdered in 1988, issued a statement: "We cannot normalise an Amazon where fear determines what can and cannot be reported." What makes the Tapajós de Fato case structurally significant is not that a small newsroom faces threats — that is routine and widely documented — but that the mechanism of silencing works through institutional failure. The threats escalated over four years. Police investigated none of them. The state's inability or unwillingness to protect reporters operating in remote, high-conflict areas functionally outsources censorship to whoever is willing to intimidate. The result is identical to a government censorship order, achieved without one ever being issued. Pedroso framed the decision with clarity: "With a great deal of humility and responsibility, I know the role we play in educating and informing many people in the communities around us, but there was no other way. In the end, those are the people who lose out." The communities around the Tapajós River — the 1,992-km waterway the site is named for — lose their primary source of local election information. The extraction is complete: threats silence the messenger, police inaction ratifies the silence, and voters in a region plagued by environmental crime enter an election cycle blind.
