The lives of journalists who expose the criminal activities of the powerful are never easy, no matter where in the world they work. But Latin America too often produces cases that surpass even magical realism.
As a journalist, I’ve grown accustomed to all kinds of attacks – from targetted social media smear campaigns to physical assaults in the street and even in-person death threats. Yet a recent incident went beyond conventional forms of harassment, serving as a warning to fellow journalists, both in Brazil and abroad.
On 7 June, São Paulo police stopped my car at gunpoint as I was heading to work at UOL, Brazil’s largest news website. They demanded my ID and asked me a series of questions, some of them nonsensical. After a while, they let me go.
Five minutes later, more police cars surrounded me, rifles and submachine guns pointed at my head, shouting at me to step out with my hands up. They searched me for weapons while radioing in to verify my documents.
The officer in charge informed me that my CPF – a taxpayer ID number, our most important and nationally unified identifier – was flagged in the database as belonging to a convicted murderer on the run. There was a nationwide arrest warrant out for a woman from Paraná, another state and my ID number had replaced hers in the system. At that moment this made me a wanted man across the entire country.
São Paulo’s street surveillance cameras had picked up my license plate, which is linked to my CPF, triggering an alert that a fugitive killer was on the move. The police advised me to stop using my car, as I would keep getting pulled over, and to be cautious even on foot, since facial recognition cameras could flag me again.
There was no innocent mistake. A CPF is an 11-digit number – and mine was completely different from the fugitive’s in every single digit.
Realizing the switch, authorities in São Paulo scrambled to remove me from the wanted list, a process that took some days. When they finally did, they admitted the situation could have ended in tragedy – standard police protocol in such cases is to keep fingers on the trigger.
Imagine if this had happened at night, on the city’s outskirts, with me wearing flip-flops and shorts – instead of a suit, in broad daylight, in the city centre? What if I were Black, in this country where structural racism and police violence are the norm?
Thanks to investigative work by fellow journalists, we discovered that the Paraná court system had submitted my CPF to the National Council of Justice’s database. The number had seemingly been entered by the state’s police force and then, through either incompetence or complicity, was never corrected by the judiciary.
In other words, anyone with malicious intent can input a false number into the system, putting someone hundreds of miles away at risk of death, without ever dirtying their own hands.
My legal team has initiated court action demanding an investigation into who was responsible. Pushing for a resolution has been easier because I’m a public figure. But how would an ordinary citizen fare?
The truth is, we have no idea how deep this technological dystopia goes.
