Gabriela Sá Pessoa

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Gabriela Sá Pessoa is a Brazilian journalist based in São Paulo. She is currently a news researcher for The Washington Post. She has been working with the paper's correspondent in Brazil, Terrence McCoy, on stories about the Amazon focused on human rights violations and environmental crimes. For example, a report about child labor in the açaí harvest and a story about the construction of a highway pushing up deforestation in a pristine rainforest region. In the past decade, Gabriela has worked for two of the most influential media outlets in the country: Folha de S.Paulo, covering local and national politics, and UOL, where she was first assigned to the coronavirus coverage and later joined the investigative desk. At UOL, she was part of the team thrice awarded for investigations regarding president Bolsonaro's family, publicized in 2021. These stories uncovered evidence of an alleged decade-long illegal scheme in Jair Bolsonaro's office while he served as a congressman in the Chamber of Deputies. In 2015, she won the Roche Prize for Health Journalism in Latin America from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for a New Ibero American Journalism for an investigation of the flaws in the public service of legal abortion. The story, published by Agencia Publica, had real-life consequences: federal prosecutors opened an investigation based on the report, which led to a national campaign on the rights of sexual violence victims. In 2019, Gabriela was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the City of New York, with a scholarship granted by Ling Institute to promising Brazilian journalists.

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