Luiz Fernando Toledo

Understanding State Secrecy and Promoting Transparency in Brazil

Mr. Luiz Fernando Toledo is a director at the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism (Abraji), where he works to increase the transparency of public records and help reporters use them more effectively. A journalist by training, he has more than a decade of experience reporting for such outlets as the Organized Crime and Reporting Project (OCCRP), CNN Brasil, and TV Globo, Brazil’s largest television channel. In 2022, Mr. Toledo was awarded a Magic Grant by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, sponsored by Columbia University and Stanford University, to develop a data journalism project called DataFixers.org, which collected data on deforestation in Brazil. Previously, he was a fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford (2021) and at the International Center for Journalists’ Emerging Media Leaders Program (2018). During his fellowship, he is conducting a comparative analysis of state transparency policies and regulations and plans to use his findings to write a series of articles enhancing Brazilians’ public awareness of state transparency. Additionally, he will use public records of information requests in Brazil to build a chatbot and easy-to-navigate data platforms that can provide Brazilian journalists with information they need to write their stories.