Team leaders

Eduardo-Franco

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.

Lynne-Walker

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.

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