Died on Monday (28), in Rio de Janeiro, at the age of 74, journalist Marcelo Beraba, who influenced generations of reporters by commanding major newspaper newsrooms in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasilia over more than 50 years of career. 
Berab discovered brain cancer in March this year and was even operated at the Copa D’Or Hospital, where he was hospitalized, but could not resist the complications of the disease.
The journalist was the creator, founder and first president of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji), Responsible for the organization of the largest journalism congresses in the southern hemisphere. He was an advocate of press freedom and promoter of investigative journalism as an essential tool for strengthening democracy.
“Without Berab there would be no Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism. Without Beraba, Abraji would not have grown and consolidated as one of the world’s largest investigative journalism organizations, going far beyond what its founders imagined that December 2002,” said the director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, Rosanta Calmon Alves.
Beraba leaves his wife, Elvira, two daughters, two stepchildren and three grandchildren. The funeral will be this Wednesday, (30), at Memorial do Carmo, from 12:30 to 15:30.
Trajectory
Marcelo José Beraba was born in Rio de Janeiro on April 29, 1951. He studied at Santo Inácio College, traditional Jesuit school in Botafogo, in the South Zone of Rio. Catholic, he spent almost four years in a seminar, first in Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, and then in Mendes, in the interior of Rio de Janeiro.
In late 1970, he returned to Rio and took the entrance exam to the UFRJ School of Communication. And it passed first.
In 1971, before classes start at college, Marcelo Beraba got his first job as a reporter trainee in the newspaper The globe. Beraba also became an ethical and professional reference in major Brazilian newsrooms, such as those of S.Paulo Folha, Jornal do Brasil, TV Globo and The State of S.Paulo.
In 2002, after the murder of journalist Tim Lopes, killed by traffickers while doing an investigative report in Vila Cruzeiro, Rio, Beraba led a group of colleagues from different newsrooms that began to meet with the objective of forming an association of journalists who could be a tool for the defense of press freedom, expression and the formation of better investigative journalists.
In one of these first meetings, at the headquarters of the Rio de Janeiro Journalists Union, the embryo of what would later be the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism, Abraji. Abraji was founded that year and Berab was its first president.
