Letícia Duarte

Letícia Duarte is an award-winning Brazilian journalist based in New York and dedicated to in-depth coverage of social and political issues. She has contributed to multiple media outlets, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Revista Piauí. For 13 years, she worked as an investigative reporter for Zero Hora, the leading newspaper in Southern Brazil. She received major national journalism awards, including the Esso Prize for best reporting and the Vladimir Herzog Human Rights Award, for her feature A Son of the Streets, a 3-year-investigation on a Brazilian homeless child trajectory. Duarte is a recipient of the 2019 Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholars Award/Harper's Magazine Scholarship, for her essay reflecting on her coverage, Refugee Story: in 2015, when she traveled with a Syrian family from Greece to Germany, chronicling their journey to escape civil war through eight countries in seven days. She started collaborating with The GroundTruth Project in 2019 as a Democracy Undone reporting fellow. Recording podcasts in English and Portuguese, she investigated the effects of rising authoritarianism in Brazil. She is the author of Vaza Jato (2020), in partnership with The Intercept Brazil, about the investigation by The Intercept that exposed wrongdoings inside the so-called anti-corruption Operation Car Wash. The book was a finalist for the acclaimed 2021 Jabuti Prize, the highest literary award in Brazil. She holds an M.A. in Politics and Global Affairs from Columbia University and an M.S. in Sociology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.