Mongabay reporter Karla Mendes has won the 2025 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, announced on July 23. Her investigation in the Brazilian Amazon uncovered a direct connection between the expansion of the cattle industry in Maranhão state and an increase in violent crime against the inhabitants of the state’s Arariboia Indigenous Territory.
Established in 1994, the Oakes Award is considered one of the top prizes in journalism, recognizing exceptional contributions to the public’s understanding of environmental issues. Mendes’s win marks a first for both Mongabay and a Brazilian journalist.
“Mendes’s reporting is an extraordinary achievement of documentation, multimedia and data reporting, mapping, and analyses,” the judges wrote of the award, announced at Columbia University in the U.S. “Mendes risked her life multiple times to report from the ground, moving through areas dominated by the cattle ranchers to reach the Arariboia people in one of the most dangerous areas in the world.”
Mendes’s investigation showed how criminal networks tied to the cattle industry drove a wave of violence and deaths against the Arariboia territory’s Indigenous Guajajara people, particularly those defending their land as forest guardians in the absence of support from the state.
Her reporting revealed that between 1991 and 2023, 38 Guajajara individuals were killed, though no one has been convicted for any of the killings to date and most suspects have never stood trial.
Following Mongabay’s publication of the investigation in a three-part series, federal prosecutors said they will use Mendes’s reporting and video footage as supporting evidence in the trial for the killing of Paulo Paulino Guajajara, a forest guardian slain in an alleged ambush by loggers in November 2019.
“In a rare feat, Mendes both survived and brought back rigorously collected evidence that spurred a groundbreaking series of actions by local prosecutors, government regulators, and local and global organizations to stop the deforestation and systematic killing of Indigenous people,” the Oakes Award judges wrote.
Mongabay’s investigation was carried out with the support of a fellowship from the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.
Banner image: Paulo Paulino Guajajara, from left, with Laércio Guajajara, Karla Mendes and Olimpio Guajajara during Mendes’s 2019 reporting trip. Paulo was killed in an ambush nine months later. Image by Karla Mendes/Mongabay.
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