Baudó AP: a river of stories

What is a river? A river can be a story, a photo, a comic, a community dialogue. Baudó means river of coming and going. It is located in the Colombian Pacific and is also the name of a journalistic agency that sees itself as an actor for social transformation.

Six and a half years ago, on a 12-hour trip down the Caquetá River in the Colombian Amazon, Laura Sofía Mejía and Víctor Galeano began to question the future of journalism. Both were doing photography and video coverage, and they were dissatisfied with the form and business model of the media, where the journalist, due to time constraints, usually carries out an “extractive process” of information, obtaining the data they need without dwelling on the repercussions it may cause the community. They wondered how they could do it differently, how they could establish a respectful process where the people of the territory are not seen as a distant source, but as the main voice of the story. It was on that river that they promised to conjure their own methodology and started this project together.

They thought of everything with names related to rivers: the tributaries (streams that flow into a river) would be the short chronicles, illustrations, and social media content; the effluents (currents that emerge from the river) would be the innovative journalistic coverage projects; and the confluences (where different currents of water meet) would be the community laboratories with indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and peasant peoples.

A year later, the Baudó Public Agency was constituted as a non-profit organization that is critically, collaboratively, and transparently committed to facing the problems that threaten human rights in Colombia.

Journalism for Social Change

The first large project they embarked on was titled One Part Per Million, an interactive map that shows the social consequences of the indiscriminate use of mercury in gold mining. This report brought together an interdisciplinary team of 16 professionals, in 6 departments, who documented the destruction of water sources and health effects on Afro and indigenous peoples.

“It was a very ambitious leap of faith; this special had audiovisual production, chronicles, photographs, and 360 video,” says Laura Sofía.

To know Baudó is to let yourself be guided by the immersion of their reports. It is feeling part of a territory and valuing leadership in a community. Their web platform is the repository where new questions originate, which give clues about social effects and possible responsible parties. This is what the report Glyphosate, Who Responds After Spraying?, a collaboration between Mutante and Cuestión Pública, two other independent media outlets, reveals the irrationality of the failed war on drugs, at a time when the Government intended to reactivate aerial spraying.

Baudó AP works mainly with three thematic axes: gender and inclusion; memory, peace and conflict; and the environment. On the latter, they published a great photographic project titled All Leaves Are of the Wind, which makes visible the efforts of forest restoration by the families of the Brasilar village, in the municipality of San Jacinto (Bolívar). This dialogue with the magic of the forest reflects the sense of belonging of the families in one of the most threatened ecosystems in Colombia.

Another environmental report, which resulted in a nomination for the Gabo Award 2023 in the Image category, was called The Traces of Climate Change, which brings together stories in Chile, Peru, Brazil, and Colombia, where people who still think that climate change does not exist and that it is an invention are answered with images.

Photo: Víctor Galeano, co-founder of Baudó AP

Community Listening

The success of Baudó AP is not measured by clicks, nor by likes on social networks, but when they return to the communities and show the research. They organize focus groups and listen to see if people felt identified. That is their main promise: to have a positive impact, amplifying voices, and maintaining a long-term relationship with people and territories.

This community listening extends to training spaces, where they have found that in every place they visit there is a born communicator, someone who has wanted to dedicate themselves to communication. From that understanding, Chagra was born, a network of independent storytellers who create content about the issues that affect their communities of origin.

The first cycle of visual storytellers brought together empirical journalists from 14 departments. They opened a scholarship where they chose 7 projects made up of 10 storytellers and held a face-to-face meeting in Pereira. In that space, they named a mentor for each project and identified the type of support they would need to produce and disseminate the story. They made their knowledge in design and programming available to enhance each story.

Today, Chagra is a permanent commitment of Baudó AP, with more than 66 storytellers made up of rural, Afro-Colombian, and indigenous populations.

A Public Agency

For Baudó AP, the free dissemination of information is a key value within the journalistic profession. That is why they consider themselves a public agency, since they do not charge national or international media for using fragments of their content in their own investigations. In this way, they amplify voices and allow for greater democracy and plurality in access to information.

“We do not believe in objective journalism, we stand in a human rights position that we are not afraid of,” emphasizes Laura Sofía. And this critical journalism is in turn rigorous, balances sources, and does not lie to benefit particular interests. Hence also their forms of financing. Baudó proposes journalistic coverage projects and seeks their economic viability, without this interfering with the editorial line. This is fundamental for them, since this thematic independence allows for a decentralized approach to information. “We Latin Americans have been narrated by Americans or Europeans. We believe that our own vision is very valuable in communication, and we have a consensus on that in the territories.”

In order to expand their sources of income, they are aiming for self-financing with a fundraising project called Navigators, which allows them to financially support the coverage of reports and actively contribute to community journalism and informational diversity, which ultimately strengthens democracy.

Baudó is ultimately a communication commitment that allows communities to narrate themselves, using the diversity of formats and voices in favor of social change. The narrator manifests as an ally against disinformation, while empowering communities and allowing them to actively participate in the outcome of the story. By putting communities at the center, a forceful message is sent: that of a society that refuses to continue writing a single story.