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American nun environmental activist shot in amazon jungle { February 14 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/international/americas/14brazil.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/international/americas/14brazil.html
February 14, 2005
Brazil Promises Crackdown After Nun's Shooting Death
By LARRY ROHTER
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb. 13 - An American nun and environmental activist was shot to death in the Amazon jungle on Saturday, heightening tensions between land speculators and peasant settlers in the region and bringing a government pledge to crack down on lawlessness.
The nun, Sister Dorothy Stang, 74, was shot four times in the chest and head by a pair of gunmen while visiting a remote rural encampment near the Trans-Amazon Highway in Pará State. She was renowned throughout the Amazon region for her work with the poor and landless and for her efforts to preserve the rain forest.
Officials view the attack as a challenge to the authority of the government, which has faced resistance from loggers and land speculators in the region over new land-use and ownership regulations.
Immediately after the killing, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ordered two members of his cabinet and a special police investigative unit to the area.
"Solving this crime and apprehending those who ordered and committed it is a question of honor for us," Nilmário Miranda, the government's secretary for human rights, told reporters late on Saturday before heading for the region. "This is intolerable. We cannot permit impunity in a case like this."
A spokesman for the American Embassy in Brasília said officials there were following the case and were awaiting additional information once the new workweek begins and weather improves in the region. "We trust there will be a full investigation by the police," he said.
Sister Dorothy was a native of Dayton, Ohio, and belonged to the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. She had lived and worked in the Amazon region since the early 1970's, focusing on organizing and educating peasant groups about issues that included land tenure and the economic and environmental benefits of avoiding deforestation.
"This is a terrible, tremendous loss," Paulo Moutinho, coordinator of the Institute for Environmental Research in the Amazon and a longtime associate of Sister Dorothy, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. "She was an extremely important person, a spokesman for the sustainable development movement with a capacity for leadership as big as that of Chico Mendes," the internationally known rubber tapper leader killed in 1988.
In an interview late in 2001, Sister Dorothy complained that she was constantly receiving death threats, which she attributed to loggers and land speculators. But she had tense relations with the local police, who viewed her as a social agitator and once detained her on suspicion of inciting violence and supplying guns to peasant groups, and so could not look to them for protection.
Just last week, Sister Dorothy met with Mr. Miranda to discuss a new round of death threats against religious, peasant and environmental groups in the region along the Trans-Amazon Highway, which Mr. Moutinho called "perhaps the most violent in the Amazon." Her Brazilian associates said Sunday that they feared new attacks aimed at intimidating them and crippling their efforts.
"We're all incensed, but at the same time we're also very afraid," Ana Paula Santos Souza, a leader of the Movement for the Development of the Trans-Amazon and the Xingu, a peasant group with which Sister Dorothy worked closely, said Sunday in an interview. "Sister Dorothy was an American citizen and a nun, and even with all that prominence, she was still killed publicly. What does that mean for the rest of us?"
Two male associates traveling with Sister Dorothy were spared by the gunmen and are reported to have identified one of the killers. The suspect's name and background have not been disclosed, but the Pastoral Land Commission of the Roman Catholic Church issued a statement saying the killing could have been ordered only by the powerful economic and political interests Sister Dorothy had always fought.
"The hatred of ranchers and loggers respects nothing," the statement said. "The reprehensible murder of our sister brings back to us memories of a past that we had thought was closed."
Sister Dorothy's killing comes at a time of mounting tension in Pará State. Last month, responding to new government regulation of land use and ownership, loggers blocked highways and rivers, burned buses, threatened to pollute rivers with chemicals and warned that "blood will flow" if Mr. da Silva's government did not suspend decrees they found objectionable.
Early this month, the government acceded to those pressures and rescheduled the timetable for enforcing the regulations. Environmental groups strongly criticized the action, saying it would only encourage more acts of lawlessness in a part of the country where the government's control has always been incomplete and tenuous.
At the moment Sister Dorothy was attacked and killed, the environment minister, Marina Silva, was scheduled to be attending a ceremony to mark the creation of new "extractive reserves" in Pará in which the government put large areas of jungle off limits to ranchers, loggers and land speculators. To some of Sister Dorothy's associates, that suggests that her murder had an even broader political motive.
"The timing wasn't a coincidence, because they could have killed Sister Dorothy anytime they chose," Ms. Souza said. "But they saw they were losing areas, and they wanted to provoke the state and send a warning. Now it is up to the government to defend the principles Sister Dorothy represented."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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