María Ronderos

For more than 35 years, María Teresa Ronderos has been a pathbreaking Colombian investigative journalist, editor, and entrepreneur. Three years ago, she started her most ambitious and far-reaching project yet, as the co-founder of the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP). CLIP leads cross-border collaborative investigations that seek to hold transnational powers to account, whether they be corporations, drug cartels, human traffickers, polluters, or religious institutions.

Maria Teresa is the first person to build a Latin American virtual platform for collaborative work – the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism – which helps to identify, connect, and coordinate groups of journalists from different countries to jointly report multinational issues. At the same time, CLIP provides safe access to sensitive and relevant information, which in turn allows journalists to reveal the interconnections of criminal webs with cases of international migrations, and how the tentacles of these dark networks have already spread across several countries. To fully report on these activities through traditional journalism methods, which are normally limited by country borders, would be extremely expensive and not always as in depth.

María Teresa understood, from her own work, that investigative journalism often covered common issues occurring in several countries, but the news reports were seldom linked. She began to strengthen her own network and form diverse teams of experienced investigative journalists in other countries and from different media outlets, in order to jointly work on different stories that were taking place across borders. Each collaborative work has been drawn up by groups of journalists from different media outlets, and all together so far, they have written 35 pieces. It is a flexible method, which looks for the professionals and media outlets that specializes in a specific issue to work together; and, it is always looking to add new voices. Through CLIP, Maria Teresa initiates, coordinates, and/or supports journalistic collaborative investigations across borders, working with diverse teams of journalists and different media outlets, often including civil society organizations as well.

Maria Teresa’s methodology breaks traditional models of macro-organization, and together with local journalists, has developed a collaborative journalism methodology that reduces investigation costs, supports publication in small media (allowing journalists to maintain their author’s rights), and in some cases, supports media outlets with direct funding; thus, also promoting the structure and supporting financial sustainability of local agencies. Maria Teresa supports the organization and advises on how to present and publish materials in order to provide a coordinated effort and generate a bigger impact on public opinion, reducing the risk for local journalists, who now start to be interconnected within a wider network of peers from around the world.

Corruption, environment deterioration, curtailment of freedoms, human right violations (including human rights that guarantee human dignity), misinformation and information manipulation are some of the most urgent challenges that every Latin American country is facing nowadays.

None of these problems are isolated within each county’s borders. As an example, money stolen from one country might be hidden or laundered in the neighboring one; the contamination of a river can swim downstream from one country to poison the waters of the next country; weapons used to kill in a civil war are later recycled to be used in another armed conflict within the region; drug traffickers who assassinate social leaders of one country are funded by the criminal organizations from another country as a way to avoid legal repercussions; bots used to misinform and mislead social protests in one country are later leased to another country when protests start arising there. Likewise, for better or for worse, companies, banks, churches, workers’ unions, human rights organizations, political parties, as well as criminal organizations already operate across borders, working on a multinational level.

However, most media outlets in Latin America operate under a local-focus methodology. They report on these multinational phenomena, but only from the optic of what happens within their country borders, providing an incomplete picture of the situation. One clear example of this can be easily seen with the Odebrecht scandal, where a Brazilian conglomerate was revealed to have paid millions in bribes across Latin America. By the time media outlets went outside their borders to contact journalists from other countries to break the story, the whole case of corruption had passed its zenith. If investigative media had started to collaborate across borders sooner, they would have noticed that Odebrecht was obtaining biddings and contracts not just in one country, but that it was systematically done across the whole continent; they could have opened the lid on this information before so many public resources were lost.

María Teresa has created a new way to do investigative journalism in Latin America. Thanks to her lifelong work designing international strategies on freedom of expression abroad as well as an entrepreneur on independent media outlets in her home country, Maria Teresa built a virtual platform which, together with a collaborative work methodology, allows her to work simultaneously with teams from different countries in a coordinated manner, enabling them to tell the stories happening in our multinational reality, without borders blocking the way for journalists to report the news as truthfully and completely as possible.

María Teresa returned to Colombia in 2018, following a broad trajectory with international recognition as the Director of the Independent Journalism Program from the Open Society Foundation (OSF), where she worked for five years, supporting around 140 media outlets from 42 countries and media freedom projects in Africa, Latin America, and Europe. María Teresa finished her period at the OSF and returned to Colombia with a strong will to continue doing journalism. Together with her colleagues, she started working on collaborative journalism to promote the rights of the people and reveal power abuses committed in the region, ultimately signing alliances with 37 different media outlets in different countries. In 2020 they worked on six different investigations.

Maria Teresa did not want to follow the old model used by investigative reporters and traditional media outlets in which the public is seen as passive recipients of information. Instead, with CLIP she envisioned the creation of a network of at least 10,000 strong community voices who contribute to CLIP’s work and who benefit from the light which CLIP shines on dark actors, networks, and money. These voices go beyond investigative reporters to include activists, academics, NGOs, pro-environmental groups, public sector employees, and even employees of corporations, many of them working not only as part of the local network but also contributing to the wider multinational network.

Maria Teresa built a collaborative journalism platform – which at the time was the first and only in Latin America – giving it a formal structure that allowed this collaborative practice to have continuity and permanence. This allows CLIP to provide the means to follow the international paths of crime, corruption, and/or political and economic decisions that have an impact on the lives of many vulnerable communities. Maria Teresa uncovers intertwined stories that go on beyond city limits and country borders, causing an impact on the public opinion from the countries they touch; in some cases, it has influenced law drafting projects. For example, the investigation “Transnationals of Faith” revealed evidence of religious abuse of LGBT youth with “conversion therapies” that resulted in torture; this was used for a Law Project in Peru. Another example occurred in Panama where the investigation on “Migrants from another world” was presented to an audience in the Court because they were not complying with the human rights treatment of migrants.

María Teresa has been asked to work on projects from Honduras to Venezuela. She has worked with 37 investigative journalists’ teams from different countries. She has also shared reports for publication to media outlet allies from several countries such as Colombia, USA, and Costa Rica, who have joined forces to publish these reports. Currently she is collaborating with different organizations in Brazil, Argentina, Perú, Ecuador, Panamá, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and México. For example, in Brazil, she is working with the public agency Folha de Sao Paulo, with TV Globo, and Abraji and in the US, she has worked with Univision and Open Contracting Partners. Additionally, she has worked with OCCRP, Bellingcat, Forbidden Stories, and Fundación Avina.

CLIP works on a wide range of topics. It has published Multinationals of Faith, a collaboration of 15 media outlets in 13 counties, on the political power of Christian groups in the region – mostly evangelic – and their connections to Trump’s administration and the impact this has had in the region. Another example is the Miroslava Project, a work that took almost two years of investigations on the judicial operation of the murder case of journalist Miroslava Breach in 2017. The investigation was first done by a team of Mexican journalists who were not able to publish it as they lacked the safety and the platform to do it. Maria Teresa’s CLIP was the perfect platform to publish it, to give them a voice and the means to find international allies to increase the impact. The report was then reported by almost the entire Mexican press. According to several media, the journalistic investigation helped influence the sentence of one of the murderers. In 2020, under the direction, edition and coordination of Maria Teresa, CLIP published Migrants from Another World; 18 media outlets joined forces to reveal for the first time the migration pattern of Asian and African people through the continent heading north, denouncing human trafficking and indolent policies in place. In yet another alliance with 10 different media outlets, CLIP is publishing investigations that aim to put a lens on public decisions and extraordinary measures that have arisen as a response to Covid-19, called Covid-19 Sentinel.

In order to effectively produce data that ensures public information, protects the environment, defends human dignity, expands freedoms, and reveals information manipulation, even beyond borders, and that properly adapts to the globalized world we live in, María Teresa has developed a completely new collaborative method between the different media outlets of the region. Supported by a virtual platform, a public database for Latin America (NINA) allows and promotes the investigative work between journalists, providing information from 10 countries within the region, where documents, videos, interviews, audios, and data can be accessed in an orderly manner that enables content sharing. Investigative journalists and social researchers in the region can revise the data to analyze trends and discover links and connections that might suggest suspicious practices. On its first stage, it integrates State purchases and has developed algorithms so NINA can communicate with other databases (previously separate) from different organizations in Latin America (including Abraji with CrusaGrafos, T-DataSketch with Monitor Ciudadano, amongst others).

The objective is in five years to be able to provide wide access for journalists, offer publishing services (method development, project coordination, investigation management, protection strategies and physical and digital safety, and ethical consultancy) and technological services (access to the collaboration platform, as well as improvements to the quality of journalism in Latin America, to increase the impact of reports made in favor of public interest and human rights). The aim is eventually to fully expand to the whole of South and Central America and the Caribbean and beyond to include the communities of Latin American people living in the USA.

María Teresa was born in Bogotá, Colombia where her father was an entrepreneur and her mother an artist. Raised in the city, she was sent to Scotland at age 16 to learn about diverse cultures. She returned to Colombia to attend university, where she discovered her love for journalism and social issues. She was the leader of the university newspaper, where she reported on human rights violations. While still young, she emigrated to the USA where she worked closely with Latin American migrants in the country. However, it was in Argentina during the post-dictatorship time, where her career and her first work began. She reported on the trials of the previous military dictators and their horrific crimes, planting the seed for her vocation to defend and promote human rights.

On her return to Colombia, after living for five years in Argentina, she wrote and directed an investigative 60 Minutes style TV show. She became the first female editor of the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo and covered drug terrorism in Colombia. She was a reporter, and then became the editor of Colombia’s leading, hard-hitting news magazine Semana. After studying digital media at Stanford University, she opened the site www.LaNota.com, a Latin-American business website. She helped strengthen the Colombian Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP), the foundation she presided over ad honorem for eight years. She also developed www.votebien.com, an alliance between media outlets and civil society, to provide more critical coverage of election campaigns. This website was operational for 10 years. María Teresa had early experiences with collaborative investigative journalism across borders when she took part as a member of the International Consortium of Journalist Investigations (ICIJ) on their first collaborative investigations on the issues of tobacco contraband and water privatization from 1999 to 2002.

In 2008 she created a specialized website www.verdadabierta.com, which was the first of its kind, covering the armed conflict in Colombia, providing evidence from victims of the conflict so they could get their rights recognized. The website led to two prestigious journalism awards for Latin America (the Maria Moors Cabot award from Columbia University in New York and the King of Spain award). This project was the foundation for her fourth book Recycled Wars, a story of paramilitarism in Colombia, which has been widely recognized as the definitive and authoritative book on Colombia’s civil war violence. The book was added to public libraries nationwide due to its historical value, showcasing her career as an entrepreneur and a human rights journalist, and how she has worked and created collaborations amidst adverse environments.

In 2015, she left Colombia to lead the Open Society Foundation’s Independent Journalism Program, which supports more than 130 media and freedom of expression organizations around the world. While on one of her whirlwind trips, she and two journalism friends had dinner in Prague and began dreaming and brainstorming about one day creating a network of key, knowledgeable people to focus on transnational problems that go well beyond the borders of a single country, like drugs, dark money, immigration, human trafficking, and much more. They called their dinner the “Prague Pact” and agreed that one of them should somehow start the organization one day. In 2018, this promise became a reality: after María Teresa left her job in OSF she founded CLIP. In 2019, she returned to Colombia to create an active community. Maria Teresa is a member of the board of director of the Gabo Foundation created by The Nobel Prize for Literature Gabriel García Márquez, where she contributed with the quality of journalism in the region.

In two short years and in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic, CLIP has already carried out 15 major investigations, each of which has included tailored articles in 5-10 countries, on topics ranging from trafficking of nurses to Latin America from Europe and Asia during the pandemic; following COVID-19 aid money in four different Latin American countries; studying how migrants from Asia and Africa go through Latin America trying to reach the US; and, how evangelical Christians in the US have collaborated with the White House to influence Presidents and other leading politicians, from numerous Latin American countries, to push their anti-abortion and LGBTQ agendas.