Barbara Fraser
Journalist
Barbara Fraser is a U.S. journalist who has worked in Peru since 1989.
She worked on several communication and journalism projects until 2003. Since then, Barbara has worked as a freelance journalist, specializing in environmental coverage as well as reporting on public health and indigenous communities.
She has collaborated regularly with Radio Ucamara on the coverage of oil spills in the Marañón basin.
Marilez Tello Imaina
Reporter
Marilez Tello Imaina began her radio career with UNICEF, producing early-learning programming for children.
She has worked at Radio Ucamara for 16 years as a reporter and anchor of a news program.
Leonardo Tello Imaina
Journalist
Leonardo Tello Imaina has been a journalist for 19 years. For the past 12 years he has served as director of Radio Ucamara on the banks of Peru’s Marañón River.
His father is Kukama, a culture that thrived in the Amazon rainforest for hundreds of years before Spanish explorers arrived. His mother is Achuar, a group of indigenous people who live in the Amazon rainforest near the border of northern Peru and Ecuador.
Leonardo is experienced in radio and video production and has been a member of the communication team of the Foro Social Panamazónico (FOSPA).
Ginebra Peña
Fotographer
Born on July 13, 1989 in Barcelona, Ginebra Peña has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, specializing in photojournalism.
She has lived in the Congo River Basin in Cameroon and currently lives in the Pintoyacu River Basin, in the Peruvian Amazon, where she combines work as a freelance photographer with social activism through the Zerca y Lejos and Suyay associations.
She hopes her documentary photography and photojournalism will result in social transformation and will help in the fight for individual and collective human rights.
Eduardo Franco Berton
Editor
Eduardo Franco Berton is an environmental investigative journalist and conservation photographer from Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. In 2016 he founded www.raibolivia.org , a conservation and environmental science news platform that produces content from Bolivia and Latin America.
He has written for National Geographic, Mongabay, Mongabay Latam, O Eco, among other international media. He writes about rainforests, wildlife trafficking, natural resource exploitation, indigenous aspects, as well as other environmental issues in Latin America.
His work has been awarded the Biodiversity Reporting Award, the TOYP (Ten Outstanding Young Persons) of the Junior Chamber International of Santa Cruz, as well as honorable mentions in the Latin American Investigative Journalism Awards ”Javier Valdez” and the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) Awards.
Camera in hand, Eduardo has traveled to five continents to: write about mountain gorillas in Rwanda; photograph penguin colonies in Patagonia; talk to indigenous communities deep in the rainforests; investigate the illegal beetle trafficking in Japan; and film the marine life of coral reefs in the Caribbean, always in search of stories and images that give voice to biodiversity and inspire ecosystem conservation.
Eduardo received a law degree from the Private University of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, he holds a Master’s degree in Climate Change, and has postgraduate studies in Environmental Law, Natural Areas Management and Conservation, and Creative Writing.
S. Lynne Walker
Project Coordinator
S. Lynne Walker is president and executive director of InquireFirst, a nonprofit journalism organization she founded in 2016 to organize Spanish-language journalism workshops and provide reporting grants to Latin American journalists. As part of that mission, she founded Montañas y Selva: Voices from the Andes and the Amazon in 2021.
Lynne is a Pulitzer Prize finalist who spent much of her career reporting from Mexico, where she served as Mexico City Bureau Chief from 1992 to 2008 for San Diego-based Copley News Service.
Her four-part series on a small Illinois town transformed by immigration, “Beardstown: Reflection of a Changing America,” was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. She was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2005 for her outstanding coverage of Latin America.
As executive director of InquireFirst, she has instructed journalism workshops in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador.
Since founding InquireFirst, Lynne has established several reporting programs for Latin American journalists as well as for indigenous journalists in Mexico.
She is the founder of Voces Emergentes an intensive, 6-week diploma program for early-career journalists and university journalism students. In 2020, she founded Bajo la Lupa , a grant program to support investigative reporting in Latin America.
Lynne is also the co-founder of Historias Sin Fronteras , established in 2020 to provide reporting grants to science, health and environment writers in Latin America and she is co-founder of En Común: Conocimiento en Voz Viva , a Spanish-language radio program that reports on science, health and the environment for rural and Indigenous audiences in Latin America. The reporting is conducted primarily by Indigenous journalists in Mexico.
Credits
Jessica X. Valenzuela
Translation to Spanish
Jerusa Rodrigues
Translation to Portuguese
Fermín García-Fabila
Infographics
Radio Ucamara
Videos
Luis J. Jiménez
Web Design
