Fumaça and CES are organising a group listening session to listen to an episode together, followed by a discussion with Ricardo Esteves Ribeiro, co-founder of Fumaça.

Fronteira do Medo begins on the night of a police intervention in a segregated neighbourhood in Lisbon, where a Black man is arrested on charges of resisting an officer and accuses the officer who arrested him of police brutality. The series follows the legal proceedings for both parties, but shows that this story is much bigger than just one night. Over the course of 14 episodes, dozens of police officers and residents in areas considered “Sensitive Urban Zones” describe how they police what they call “places of exception”; the series analyses how the concept of the “troubled neighborhood” was constructed in the political and media spheres; it scrutinizes working conditions and training within law enforcement agencies, as well as the reform strategies proposed by successive governments; it documents a pattern (admitted by the officers themselves) of document falsification and the cover-up of acts of brutality; and it examines the judicial and disciplinary handling of crimes committed by and against police officers.

This investigation is the result of hundreds of hours of interviews, the review of dozens of documents, and lengthy legal battles with Portuguese security forces to gain access to information that had previously been considered confidential.

Registration required

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: During this listening session, we will be using Avantree wireless earbuds with individually adjustable volume. If you have any concerns or hearing difficulties, please contact us so we can ensure the best experience for you. This episode contains explicit descriptions of violence.

Bio note
Ricardo Esteves Ribeiro. At the age of 17, whilst dreaming of studying Political Science or Philosophy, I convinced myself that applying to study Business Management was the quickest route to one day not having to work for anyone else. It took me no more than three months to realise that the degree meant nothing to me. So I dropped out. I worked for tech companies in Lisbon and Milan - Uniplaces, WalletSaver, Unbabel (of which I am a minority shareholder against my will) - but the dream of reading, listening to and telling stories has always been with me.

In blogs written under a pseudonym, in novels left unfinished because I couldn’t cope with the fact that so many people write better than I do. So, I read. And the books found their way into my home, piling up on the shelves until they spilled over onto the desk, the floor and the chairs. I’ve probably never left a bookshop without a book. And the more books I read, the more restless I feel, knowing for certain that I’ll never manage to read everything I want to.

In 2016, I co-founded Fumaça with a group of friends. After seeing, reading and hearing about so many other independent journalism projects abroad, I asked myself: Why isn’t anyone telling these stories in Portugal? Why isn’t anyone asking these questions? Why isn’t anyone listening to these people? As Eduardo Galeano once said: “What I would like to achieve through my writing is to be able to look at what is not looked at, but which deserves to be looked at. The small, the tiny things of anonymous people, of the people whom intellectuals tend to look down upon.”

From then on, the hours of sleep, which had always been few, were squeezed even further – one simply cannot sleep with injustice staring one in the face. Today I live in Pitões das Júnias, a small village on the border between Trás-os-Montes and Galicia.