missionary sister who received death threats after campaigning to defend the Amazon rainforest and subsistence farmers has been shot dead by gunmen in Brazil.
Sr Dorothy Stang, 73, an American-born missionary of the Congregation of Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, was shot six times by two gunmen who arrived at a remote forest settlement while she was meeting a group of local farmers on the morning of
February 12.
The murder has refocused the Brazilian Government’s attention on a largely lawless region where slave labor is rife and illegal logging has eaten away at the rainforest. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva dispatched two ministers and a team of federal police investigators to Pará to track down Sr Stang’s killers and within 24 hours a local judge issued a warrant for the arrest of four suspects. Márcio Thomas Bastos, the justice minister, pledged that the perpetrators would be punished.
On Tuesday Feb. 15, thousands of people converged on the remote Amazon town of Anapu for Sr Stang’s funeral. After an all-night vigil, mourners filed slowly past her simple coffin, covered with a Brazilian flag inside a small shingle-roofed church. Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, Archbishop of São Paulo, said it was the government’s responsibility to protect the lives of people doing vital community work in dangerous areas such as western Pará.
The murder of Sister Dorothy Stang, which coincided with the beginning of the Season of Lent and at the start of our Fraternity Campaign for ‘Solidarity and Peace’, confirms the need for serious national reflection on the causes of violence in out country and how to stop it; the need to increase social solidarity in Brazil by means of policies which promote respect for the dignity and rights of every person and guarantee peace and justice for all; the need to disarm hands and spirits without succumbing to intimidation, making a patient effort to promote a culture of peace.
Brazilian Bishops message of sympathy to Bishop Erwin Kräutler (Bishop of Xingu) who presided at the funeral of Sr. Dorothy Stang
Sr Stang had been receiving death threats since a group of landowners tried unsuccessfully to bring a prosecution against her last year. They alleged she was bringing guns and ammunition into the area, which were used in assaults on their properties and employees.
Brazil has been pushing back its Amazon frontier for decades, building a network of roads deep into the forest. Settlers fleeing drought and famine have been clearing plots of land for subsistence crops, and trying to defend themselves against well-connected loggers and ranchers and their hired enforcers. For many years, the central government’s writ has hardly run at all and local authorities have tended to be in the pockets of powerful businessmen.
Violence is nothing new on this wild frontier: in 1988, a rubber-tappers’ leader, Chico Mendes, whose campaign to protect the rainforest had won him global recognition, was shot dead outside his house in the Amazon state of Acre.
The dangerous work of standing up for the poor settlers and native peoples of the Amazon has fallen largely to the field workers of the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), with whom Sr Stang worked for many years in Pará state, north-east of Acre.
She arrived in the early 1980s, and became involved in sustainable agriculture and forestry schemes, teaching peasants using slash-and-burn techniques to conserve resources rather than exhaust them, and helping them to secure legal titles to land that proprietors and their agents were eager to take from them. Last year she received an honorary citizenship award for her work.
Sr Stang’s work brought her into conflict with commercial interests determined to exploit the forest’s valuable tropical hardwoods and grow soya-bean cash crops for export on the cleared land, or to lay out cattle ranches. Opponents faced intimidation and death if threats were not enough.
“She was willing to do anything for her people,” said Sr Ellizabeth Bowyer, head of the Ohio province of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.
(From The Tablet)