Our team

Gabriela Verdezoto Landívar

Investigation

I am a journalist with 15 years of experience and a geological engineer specializing in sustainable development. I also have a Master's degree in creative writing.

I am a member of ConnectasHub and I write for media such as GK, Connectas, La Barra Espaciadora, Ecuador Chequea and Revista Mundo Diners. I was a finalist for the Excellence in Journalism Award of the Inter-American Press Association in 2022 in the interview category for my interview with an activist who fights the commercialization of shark fins.

I was also a finalist for the Eugenio Espejo National Journalism Award, 2022 edition, in Ecuador for a story about the death of a river in the Amazon due to pollution caused by mining. It had a great impact on public opinion because it tells the story of indigenous communities in the Amazon and how they are forced to rely on rainwater due to the pollution of their only source of water - the river.

Eduardo Franco Berton

Project editor

Eduardo Franco Berton is an environmental investigative journalist, conservation photographer and documentary producer 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 contributed independently to National Geographic, Mongabay, Mongabay Latam, O Eco and other international media. He writes about tropical rainforests, wildlife trafficking, natural resource exploitation, indigenous affairs, 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 World) 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.

For the past 13 years, with 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 beetle smuggling in Japan, and film the marine life of coral reefs in the Caribbean, always looking for stories and images that tell about biodiversity and inspire the conservation of ecosystems.

Eduardo studied law at the Private University of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and has a Master's degree in Climate Change from the European University of the Atlantic. He has postgraduate studies in Environmental Law, Management and Conservation of Natural Areas, and Creative Writing.

S. Lynne Walker

Executive director InquireFirst

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 grants to Latin American journalists. As part of that mission, she founded Montañas y Selva: Voces de los Andes Amazónicos in 2021.

Lynne is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and spent much of her career reporting from Mexico, where she served from 1992 to 2008 as Mexico City bureau chief for Copley News Service, which was based in San Diego.

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 for National Reporting. She received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (New York) in 2005 for her outstanding coverage of Latin America.

As executive director of InquireFirst, she has conducted Spanish-language journalism workshops in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador. Since she founded InquireFirst, Lynne has established several programs for Latin American journalists, as well as for indigenous journalists in Mexico.

She is the founder of Voces Emergentes (Emerging Voices), a six-week intensive diploma program for beginning journalists and undergraduate journalism students. In 2020, she founded Bajo la Lupa, a grant program to support investigative journalism in Latin America.

Lynne is also co-founder of Historias Sin Fronteras, (Stories Without Borders) established in 2020 to provide reporting grants to science, health and environmental writers in Latin America and is co-founder of En Común: Conocimiento en Voz Viva, a Spanish-language radio program on science, health and the environment for rural and indigenous audiences in Latin America.