Impact: Law Group References Center-Supported Project in Demand for Brazilian Officials To Investigate Abrace o Marajó Program

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A progressive law group in Brazil, Prerrogativas, has requested that the country’s Office of the Attorney General open a formal investigation into Brazilian Senator Damares Alves' actions during her former position as the Minister of Human Rights under the Jair Bolsonaro administration from 2019-2022.

The request references a report, published last month by UOL, which revealed how a regional development program spearheaded by Alves used fake news about the Marajó archipelago to justify a process that eventually led to an irregular documentation of the land and unfair advantages for evangelical churches in Pará. The program, named “Abrace o Marajó,” ran publicity campaigns which alleged that the remote group of islands between the mouth of the Amazon River and the Atlantic Ocean was the site of widespread child sexual abuse.

The team from UOL, led by Juliana Sayuri and with support from the Pulitzer Center, traveled to Marajó to assess these claims, but instead found widespread irregularities in land use titles given by the government during the time of Alves’ program. Part of the program granted federal land use permits to riparian community members. This opened a loophole for evangelical churches to ask recipients of the permits for a ‘donation’ of land for the church to use.

The Lula government discontinued the program after discovering irregularities in 2023. But the UOL project has documented the mechanisms of the corruption that generated those discrepancies in the use of government resources.

"Juliana and her team at UOL did what public service journalism does at its finest: They revealed how a government program failed to deliver what it promised on paper,” said Fernanda Buffa, coordinator for the Center’s Environmental Investigations Unit. “Now, organizations are pressuring that this program is investigated."