Dorothy Stang had worked in the region for 30 years as an activist protecting the land rights of the poor and the environment. The two gunmen, Rayfran das Neves and Clodoaldo Batista, have already been tried and sentenced to 27 years and 18 years, respectively.
According to Tato’s testimony, he made the payment on orders from Regivaldo Galvão, aka "Taradão," (Big Pervert) and Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, aka "Bida," both of them local landowners who had had problems with the law because of illegal deforestation.
They had paid fines after Dorothy Stang denounced them to authorities. It also seems they were interested in taking possession of rural properties that Stang was trying to protect from land-grabbers, just like Taradão and Bida.
In Wednesday’s, April 26, trial, farmer/landowner, Feijoli da Cunha was sentenced to 18 years in prison for intermediating the murder of Stang.
According to Tato, Taradão and Bida wanted Stang killed because she had denounced them for illegal deforestation. Taradão and Bida have still not been tried.
Prosecution was hoping for a 30 year sentence, but as Feijooli cooperated with the investigation, he was given an 18 year term.
The Stang family is satisfied with the conviction, but will not rest until the two ranchers are also behind bars. "We do not want revenge, but only justice, and it will come when those guilty are imprisoned," said David Stang, brother of Dorothy.
Agência Brasil
]]>Stang was an environmental activist involved in the fight for land rights in the Amazon River basin. She was killed in February of this year.
Supporters of Stang, including two of her brothers, said they were satisfied with the court’s decision.
The mother of Rayfran das Neves, who confessed that he participated in the crime, said that her son did not tell the whole story and that he was taking blame for someone else and being used as a scapegoat.
ABr
]]>A jury in the Brazilian city of Belém, capital of the Northern state of Pará, Saturday, found the defendants Clodoaldo Carlos Batista and Rayfran das Neves Sales guilty of murdering Sister Dorothy Stang, 73.
Sales, who shot Sister Stang six times, was sentenced to 27 years in prison, while his accomplice, Batista, was sentenced to 17 years.
Sister Dorothy’s 68-year-old brother said the sentences represent justice for his sister and the poor of the Amazon.
But observers say the real test will be if Brazil tries the ranchers who are alleged to have paid the men about US$ 20,000 to kill the nun.
Three defendants remain accused of ordering and financing the murder. According to the prosecution, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, a farmer accused of planning the murder will be put on trial in the first semester of 2006.
"This is just the beginning," said Margaret, a sister of Dorothy Stang while embracing activists who worked with Stang, after the sentence was announced. She came from the United States to follow the trial,
A Brazilian Senate commission has concluded the crime was part of a wider problem and urged a strong government crackdown on such extra-judicial killings.
In the last 30 years in Pará, 772 activists fighting for land have been killed. Until Saturday only nine of them had been sentenced to jail.
VoA
]]>Social movements and human rights groups suffered yet another defeat this month at the hands of the local and federal government authorities regarding the murder case of Sister Dorothy Stang.
Two hired gunmen shot and killed Stang on February 12, 2005. Stang, an American religious sister, had been working with the poor and environmental concerns, often conflicting with large landowners and loggers in the area.
Several times she went to local authorities to denounce death threats against her and the leaders of the communities with whom she worked.
The justice system in the state in which she was murdered, Pará, is notoriously slow and corrupt when it comes to bringing the rich and powerful to justice.
This is the same state in which only two out of over hundred police officers were convicted for the 1996 Massacre of Eldorado dos Carajás in which 19 rural workers were killed and many others wounded.
The trial of the two officers was only completed last year. Less notorious trials of the rich and powerful get held up for years and rarely end up in convictions. Because of this, human rights lawyers pushed for the case to be moved to a federal arena.
On June 8, the request was denied. The federal judges said that in this case, the state authorities acted in an efficient and timely manner, arresting the suspects in record time.
The human rights lawyers state that this was only because of the international attention that the case received and the fact that their was a motion for the case to be heard before federal judges.
Now, various entities are going to analyze other cases which have been held up for years, and bring them to authorities to make them federal cases.
Meanwhile, repression continues against landless workers in Pará.
At the beginning of this month, the governor of the state, Simão Jatene, ordered the expulsion of 20,000 landless workers off land located in the southern part of the state.
A police force of 280 burned houses, destroyed crops, beat several workers, and made death threats. They did not even give the families time to gather their belongings nor food that they had just harvested.
SEJUP – Brazilian Service of Justice and Peace – www.sejup.org
]]>The landowner, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, arrested on Sunday, March 27, may not be the sole author of the assassination of the American missionary Dorothy Stang, shot six times on February 12, in Anapu, state of Pará, Brazil.
This is one of the main conclusions of the external Senate commission formed to accompany the investigations into the crime.
The commission’s report refers to the existence of a possible consortium in Pará to pay for the murder of those opposed to the illegal extraction of wood and land squatting in the region.
Although it praises “the speedy clarification of the homicide” and the joint effort by the Federal, Civil, and Military police of the state of Pará – which “had a decisive influence on the success of the investigations” -, the commission’s final report emphasizes that this effort should extend beyond the arrest of the four suspects accused of the crime.
“The clarification of the crime, with the arrest of the perpetrators and a mastermind, does not imply the unraveling of the entire chain of authors of the crime and of a network that backs criminal activities contrary to the preservation of the forest and sustainable settlements,” the report states.
The report was approved today by a unanimous vote, 42 days after the work of the commission began.
For the president of the commission, Senator Ana Júlia Carepa, from Pará state, at least six other individuals are involved in the crime.
Without naming names, she said that “the history of these individuals is linked to violence against workers, and they need to be investigated.”
In her view, clarification of these items is essential for there not to be impunity and to make it possible for other, similar crimes to be averted.
“The report contains important points, such as the need to continue the investigation, so that we can dismantle this consortium once and for all. The way we see it, it contributed to the death of Sister Dorothy, but, unless it is dismantled, it will go on killing all those who oppose illegal exploitation of the Amazon, of our natural resources in a predatory manner.”
The external Senate commission held over 10 meetings, including five public hearings at which appeared Ministers and other representatives of the federal government, state officials, representatives of the Federal Public Interest Defense Ministry, members of the Land Pastoral Commission (CPT), and people connected to associations of rural producers, loggers, and rural workers in the region.
Translation: David Silberstein
Reporter – Agência Brasil
]]>Brazil’s Minister of Justice, Márcio Thomaz Bastos, affirmed that the investigations into the murder of the missionary, Dorothy Stang, serve as an example of the efforts of the Federal Public Safety System ( Susp).
Inaugurated at the start of President Lula’s Administration, the Susp provides for the integrated management of information and public safety systems, police training, valorization of expert examinations, and the prevention of violence in the country.
“The crime was exposed by the joint efforts of the Federal Police and state police forces in slightly more than 12 days, and, yesterday, March 27, with the arrest of one of the authors of the crime, all that is left is to reveal his relations with other individuals in order for the crime to be deciphered once and for all.”
The Minister was referring to the arrest of Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, nicknamed “Bida,” the landowner accused of having ordered the slaying.
Moura turned himself in yesterday in Altamira, state of Pará and was transferred to the state headquarters of the Federal Police in Belém, Pará’s capital city, where he will testify.
Bastos participated in the ceremony to inaugurate the new building of the National Institute of Criminalistics on the occasion of the 61th anniversary of the Federal Police.
Translation: David Silberstein
Reporter – Agência Brasil
]]>
The murder of Dorothy Stang, a 73 year-old American nun who helped peasants engage in sustainable agriculture in the Amazonian rain forest, comes as oligarchic interests and the parliamentary right are on a political offensive against the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
This takes place as fissures are opening up within Lula’s governing Workers Party while social organizations are mobilizing to demand the implementation of reforms Lula aligned himself with before he became President.
“This is a low-point of Lula’s presidency,” says Marcos Arruda of PACS, a political and social research institute based in Rio de Janeiro. “There is no excuse for his failure to implement major social reforms, especially land redistribution, as he continues to follow the neo-liberal recipes dictated by the International Monetary Fund and Washington.”
The government has maintained budget surpluses of 4% or more each of his two years in office to pay off international debts. The IMF alone has received over $40 billion in interest and principal repayments under Lula on a loan package of $58 billion initiated in 1998.
Sister Dorothy’s assassination by two hired gunmen reflects the continued assault by landed and logging interests on those who stand in the way of their plundering of the Amazon.
Stang, a naturalized Brazilian citizen, worked in the Amazonian state of Pará with 600 families involved in cultivating native fruits and vegetables while tending dairy cattle that feed on local forage. During the past year in Pará alone more than 20 people have been murdered in land disputes.
Lula did respond dramatically to Stang’s assassination. He established a cabinet level task force, set aside two huge preservation parks, declared that large “land usurpers” in the Amazon would not be tolerated anymore, and sent over 2000 Federal police to pursue the assassins and their backers.
While this scene was unfolding, an upheaval took place in the elections for the president of the lower house of the Brazilian Congress.
In the previous two years, Lula’s Worker’s Party had secured the post by pasting together a coalition of parties. This year, however, the Worker’s Party itself was deeply divided between those backing Lula, and those who were fed up with the slow pace of social reforms.
As a result the right wing, along with the centrist parties, maneuvered to put their own candidate in the presidency, Severino Cavalcanti. He is known as “the king of the lower clergy” because of his alignment with right wing oligarchic and religious interests. One of his first actions was to increase congressional salaries and extend vacation times.
This takeover comes as a campaign is taking place to roll back even the limited reforms of Lula’s early years. A few paltry taxes were levied on the rich, and a modest, and some would say “very meager” anti-hunger program was launched.
Headlines in the right wing dominated press now scream about the high taxes that Brazilians supposedly pay while proclaiming that the Brazilian government, unlike the rest of the world, is not in lockstep with neo-liberalism by cutting back on “wasteful” and “corrupt” federal spending programs.
Within the Workers Party, the dissidents are divided. A limited group is opting to abandon the party and calling for the formation of a new political organization. Most believe a struggle should be waged within the party to reclaim its historic agenda of fighting for the poor, the workers and the dispossessed.
The largest social organization in Brazil, the Landless Workers Movement with strong links to the Workers Party going back to the 1980s, is following the second strategy. It has not broken with Lula but is engaged in a process of mobilization from below.
At present, over 200,000 landless people are camped out along the major highways in Brazil, demanding access to idle lands. Francisco Meneses, who sits on the National Council on Nutrition and Food Security, proclaims:
“If Brazil really wants to deal with hunger, the best solution is to undertake an accelerated agrarian reform program. The landless movement has very effective approaches that draw on past agrarian reform experiences from Latin America and the world in order to carry out sustainable development.”
The Landless Workers Movement is calling for an “April Offensive.” Starting in mid-month landless people and their sympathizers from divergent parts of the country will launch a massive march on the capital of Brasília.
Marcos Arruda, a friend of Lula’s since the 1970s who numbers among the dissidents fighting within the Workers Party, says: “We can’t give up to the opportunists surrounding Lula who are only interested in power. They are cutting deals just like any other traditional party in Brazil.
“A really visionary and sustainable agrarian reform program can transform the country in memory of Sister Dorothy and the other martyrs. There is no excuse for our party and country to be aligned with the same power brokers who are traumatizing the world with conflict, repression and economic policies that ravage the earth.”
Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. For his most recent books see, www.globalalternatives.org.
]]>
There are cadavers and cadavers, isn’t it true? Some are sacred. Others aren’t worth a penny. Killed February 12, in Anapu, state of Pará, was the American Sister Dorothy Mae Stang.
The Nation’s President, not only sent two thousand Army troops to the region, but also created natural environment preservation areas and a crisis office that will concentrate actions from ministries and federal agencies in the interior of the state of Pará – tells us Friday’s edition of the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
An interim measure, six decrees, and a bill proposal make up the package. Only in the state of Pará, two forest preservation units covering approximately 9.4 million acres – area equal to two Sergipe states.
Behind all this, the fear of the Nation’s President before the international press.
When the tupiniquim (a common term in Brazil, which refers to native Tupiniquim Indians, often used in a self-deprecating, mocking context) press published interviews in which he spitted out his affection for cachaça (Brazil’s potent national liquor), no restrictions toward the reporters.
As soon as The New York Times picks up what amounted to no secret to anyone, and President Lula displayed his “arrest and beat up” side, demanding the expulsion of the journalist from the country.
History repeats itself. If a Brazilian cop is killed while performing his duties, not a single reaction from the Planalto (the President’s official quarters). If a foreign activist is killed and this crime occupies the front pages of the international press, Lula transforms himself into a generalissimo and turns a police operation into a war theater.
In the same edition of the Folha, a photo in three columns shows us the ridicule that our Armed Forces undergo in an effort to support the presidential charade. Two helicopters land on a soccer field, under the watch of dozens of soldiers lying on the turf with cocked rifles.
It even seems like we are in Vietnam of the 70s or in Iraq during the war. As if the nation was threatened by a powerful guerilla force, when it is common knowledge that the nun was killed by two gunmen. To pose for the press, the so-called glorious national Army has no qualms in contributing to “Lulesc” theatrical production.
The American religious had as mission in Brazil the disappropriation of public properties controlled by grileiros (crooked rural area dealers and brokers), the settlement of families in small farm units, and the promotion of police actions as mediators of conflicts.
Say what you may about her, but she is just another of so many foreign activists who chose Brazil as their utopian lab.
Let us invert the situation. Imagine, the reader, a Brazilian woman attempting to disappropriate land in the US or settle families. At best, she would be deported the next day. Here, in the backyard, the Yankees command land invasion, condemn government policies, and still pose as martyrs.
But the role of Chica Mendes of Anapu was not entitled to regional unanimity. On April 30, 2003, Town Council declared the missionary persona non grata, “as an act of repudiation of the people in response to her disaggregative actions.”
The document was sent to the President’s office, ministries of Environment and Justice, Congress, the state government of Pará, Ibama (Brazilian Institute of Environment), Incra (National Institute of Colonization and Land Reform), and the Federal Police – and ignored by all. Today, from what we read in the papers, her cadaver only emanates odors of sanctity.
To general Jairo Cesar Nass, Operation Pacajá commander, aimed at arresting Sister Dorothy’s killers, “the nun’s killing is only the tip of the iceberg.” For the sagacious general, there are organized gangs in the region that in an insolent fashion carry on their business, outside the law, and are used to solving their matters through intimidation and murder, creating difficulty for the security of the region.
“These gangs are made up by individuals from other areas, acting on the interest of loggers and others involved in the fight for land and illegal gold mining,” he said. They created representative bodies and armed groups that have no scruples to reach their goals.”
So broad is the general’s perspective that he doesn’t see where he is sitting, on top of this immense iceberg with so many emerged edges that already constitutes terra firma, the Landless Movement.
Not just organized gang, but organized nationally, with financial, legal, and logistic backing from the Brazilian government itself; and not just the Brazilian government, but also from international institutions that fund their land invasions, productive or not, their destruction of highway pay-tolls, their taking of hostages, their evasion of funds, and even their crimes.
Gang with free access to the highest offices of government and the press, that creates schools to form new partisans. With the applause from the so-called Human Rights advocates and the national intellectualia.
The American religious is beginning a very promising career as saint. Within a few months, we’ll have foundations and streets under her name, not to mention pilgrimages to her grave. Another year or two, some miracles to her résumé. Soon after, the beatification process.
Saint Dorothy Mae Stang, the saint of two nations: sounds good and certainly will make the movies, and of tear-dropping kind. The Amazon, with its wealth, promises a bountiful harvest of saints and martyrs in the coming years.
As to Luiz Pereira da Silva, this poor devil killed in Quipapá, state of Pernambuco, now, him no one remembers. He was tortured and murdered on the Saturday of this past Carnaval, by members of this gang so immense that general Nass can no longer get a view of, so enormous are its dimensions.
Obscure military cop, he was tortured and killed by the men from the Landless movement, while fulfilling his duties. He didn’t deserve a single mention by the President, not even a word of compassion from any minister, nor gigantic operations by the Armed Forces, nor a mass at Sé Cathedral, much less front pages throughout the international press.
Total silence from the troops that combat torture. He is Brazilian, not worthy of tears or honors. His murderers likely will not be indicted. As a member of the Landless movement already said, “in a crowd, it’s hard to know who pulls the trigger.”
Blood from the left is sacred and demands punishment. The cadaver of a cop, so dumb as to carry out his obligations in this land where all the honors and glory are bestowed on those who break the law, is not worthy of even a mass.
Janer Cristaldo—he holds a PhD from University of Paris, Sorbonne—is an author, translator, lawyer, philosopher and journalist and lives in São Paulo. His e-mail address is janercr@terra.com.br.
Translated from the Portuguese by Eduardo Assumpção de Queiroz. He is a freelance translator, with a degree in Business and almost 20 years of experience working in the fields of economics, communications, social and political sciences, and sports. He lives in São Paulo, Brazil. His email: eaqus@terra.com.br.
]]>Sister Dorothy Stang, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur from Cincinnati, was assassinated on Saturday, February 12, 2005 in Anapu, Pará. Sister Dorothy was 74 years old and lived in Brazil for more than 30 years. She was a member of the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission and worked with the Association of Ecological Solidarity in the Amazon area.
At the time of her death, Sr. Dorothy was on her way to a meeting about a project of small scale sustainable agriculture in Boa Esperança (Good Hope), an area that had been granted to landless peasants by the federal government.
She was accompanied by two rural workers when she was shot and killed. The two witnesses who escaped are suffering death threats and three more people have been killed in the area since Saturday.
The judicial system in Pará has ordered the arrests of four suspects in the case: Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, the landowner who is accused of ordering the assassination, as well as three of his private security guards, two of whom carried out the assassination.
The town of Anapu, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, is the place where Sr. Dorothy worked in trying to protect the rainforest and its people from disastrous and often illegal exploitation by logging firms and ranchers.
The area is notorious for violence, crime, and slave labor. Greenpeace estimates that 90% of the timber in Pará is illegally logged. Pará also has the country’s highest rate of deaths related to land battles.
Just a few days before her death, Sister Dorothy had met Nilmário Miranda, the Brazilian Government’s Human Rights Secretary, and told him of the death threats that she and others had received and asked for the government’s help. According to Miranda, “She always asked for protection for others, never for herself.”
The missionary received a number of awards for her work, including the “Human Rights Award” from the Bar Association of Brazil on December 10, 2004.
She truly lived the mission statement of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Cincinnati to “take our stand with poor people, especially women and children, in the most abandoned places. Many manifestations against the nun’s assassination have occurred throughout the country.”
The Brazilian federal government sent 2,000 military troops from the army to the area to quell the tensions. According to Bishop Tomás Balduíno, the president of the Pastoral Land Commission, “the presence of the army is palliative. We do not think that this social problem will be resolved with a police or military base. The military dictatorship tried to do this.”
Joanne Blaney is the editor of Sejup.
SEJUP – Brazilian Service of Justice and Peace
www.sejup.org
Brazilian representatives of non-governmental organizations, the landless, performers, lawmakers, and intellectuals met in the center of Rio de Janeiro, February 18, to protest the murder of the American-born, naturalized Brazilian missionary, Dorothy Stang, who was shot to death on February 12 in the state of Pará, in northern Brazil.
Dressed in white with a black band symbolizing mourning over the death of the nun and rural laborers, the demonstrators called for an end to rural violence.
In the note released by the organizers, they demand, among other things, punishment for those responsible for the murders, the transfer of investigations to the federal justice system, the repossession of illegally occupied public lands, and federal intervention in the state of Pará.
The president of the Human Rights Movement, the actor, Marcos Winter, who promoted the demonstration, called for sterner measures from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in search of solutions to end agrarian disputes.
In Winter’s view, the government lacks political will. Another actor, Osmar Prado, who also participated in the protest, blamed the explosion of violence on the lack of agrarian reform.
According to data from the Catholic Church’s Land Pastoral Commission, in the past 20 years over 500 people have been the victims of violence practiced by lumber companies and landowners in the state of Pará.
Translation: David Silberstein
Agência Brasil