Victor Moriyama is a Brazilian photographer working on : environmental conflicts in Amazon rainforest, violence and pesticide use in Brazil. Throughout his 10-year career he collaborates regularly with newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, El País and Libération, and the news agencies Bloomberg and Getty Images News. He is a Photo columnist at El País newspaper and a photographer for National Geographic Brasil.
In the 1990s train surfers, who risked their lives as they made trips from the center of Rio de Janeiro to the suburbs on top of the wagons dribbling electric high voltage wires, became popular in the Brazilian press. After strong police repression the practice was disappearing from the daily transport.
The political crisis in Venezuela has caused a socioeconomic collapse in the largest oil producer in South America. The country's economy is basically driven by the export of oil that had the price of a barrel halved in 2016, generating an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Currently, 82% of the Venezuelan population lives below the poverty line and the lack of food reaches the same percentage. Waves of violence and protests broke out in the main cities of the country in the year 2017.
Brazil has 17 of the 50 most violent cities in the world, according to the Mexican NGO Seguridad, Justicia y Paz. There are a large number of homicides for every 100,000 inhabitants, in cities such as Belém, Natal, Fortaleza, Aracaju and others. The northeast region of the country concentrates most of these homicides that are the consequence of an armed population added to the war of the criminal factions that dispute the internal and external markets of drug sales. The government public policies to deal with the subject are disastrous and overcrowd in 197.4% the prison system. During the last year I have been documenting the violent reality of poor cities and neighborhoods in the northeast region to investigate the progress of organized crime and its impact on the local population. It is an ongoing project whose images represents the violence in Natal and Fortaleza.