“You can’t fight corruption from a moral point of view. The opportunity that exists in the relationship between organizations and society is there independently of people. You attack corruption by reducing the possibility of the public official carrying out the act.” The phrase was uttered by Cláudio Weber Abramo, economist, pioneer of data journalism in the country and executive director of Transparência Brasil for 15 years, during an interview on Roda Viva on September 13, 2004. At the time of the program, he was four years into his post, which he held until 2015. The son of journalist Cláudio Abramo, the former director had a degree in mathematics from USP and a master’s degree in philosophy of science from Unicamp. He was economics editor of Folha de S. Paulo and executive secretary of Gazeta Mercantil.

Abramo joined TB in 2000, first as executive secretary, alongside the director at the time and president of the Board of Directors, Eduardo Capobianco, and took over as director the same year. A critic of myths about corruption, he strongly defended the systematic collection of public administration data and its accessible dissemination, in order to provide the administration itself and society with information about how it works.

According to Capobianco, their mission at the head of the organization was to seek out and standardize public data so that the press and the population could understand important information about the country. “The [TB] model has served other organizations. But it’s not a simple job. You have to be persistent and believe in what you’re doing,” Capobianco recalls.

The belief in working for the public interest was one of the characteristics of Abramo, who learned to program and perform data scraping at the age of 60, according to former TB project coordinator Fabiano Angélico. The former director spread his rigor and persistence in the search for facts and empirical data, creating a legacy in Transparência Brasil’s working method.

“TB’s approach to this phenomenon [of corruption] was never moralistic, it was always based on data and evidence. And Cláudio was obsessed with going after data,” says Angélico.

Under Abramo’s direction, Transparência Brasil won the Esso Journalism Award in 2006 with the Excelências project. The avant-garde initiative mapped the profile of parliamentarians in office, centralizing data such as the evolution of their assets and the legal cases to which some of them were liable or for which they had been convicted, at a time when this information was not easily accessible to society.

TB’s fundamental role in ensuring that the Access to Information Law (LAI) was approved and applicable to all levels and powers took place under Abramo’s direction, as he himself recounted in 2009. In an article for Folha de S. Paulo, former coordinator Angélico and current TB board member Marcelo Issa highlight the former director’s role as “decisive in articulating, proposing and defending the need to organize the opening up of information held by the State”, at a time when Brazil was one of the few countries without legislation.

In 2018, in fact, the mathematician predicted that the General Data Protection Law (LGPD) would be distorted in order to promote setbacks in public transparency – an issue that TB has often focused on.

Cláudio Weber Abramo died on August 12 of that year. In honor of his fight for access to information and his pioneering role in data journalism, the Cláudio Weber Abramo Data Journalism Award was created, which encourages the use of data in journalistic productions in the country. The award has been held since 2019 by the Open Knowledge Brazil Data School, with support from TB and Abraji.

“Cláudio was a very important partner and a very intelligent person,” says Eduardo Capobianco, chairman of the board of Transparência Brasil, who is also one of the organization’s founding members. “When you bring in intelligent people to work on important issues, everything becomes easier, right? Things grow,” he says.

Abramo’s words on Roda Viva in 2004 live on. In its 25-year history, Transparência Brasil has maintained its legacy of denying moralism and easy solutions to the fight against corruption and fighting for the public interest.