{"id":1389,"date":"2012-02-12T05:42:16","date_gmt":"2012-02-12T12:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kairosphotos.com\/blog\/?p=1389"},"modified":"2020-06-03T08:30:06","modified_gmt":"2020-06-03T15:30:06","slug":"brazil-remembering-dorothy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/brazil-remembering-dorothy\/","title":{"rendered":"Brazil: Remembering Dorothy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Antonia Silva Lima lives in a place called Hope. She came to the Amazon rainforest more than two decades ago, like hundreds of thousands of other migrants fleeing from poverty in other parts of Brazil. The settlers moved deep into the forest and cut down the trees to grow subsistence crops, only to be chased off their small plots by gunmen at the hire of wealthy, government-sanctioned land grabbers. And then eight years ago Lima and her family joined a small gathering of peasant farmers committed to living sustainably in the middle of the jungle without cutting it down. She was encouraged to join the project by Dorothy Stang, a sister of Notre Dame de Namur from Ohio who gave the village its name: Esperan\u00e7a<\/em>\u2013the Portuguese word for hope. At that place called Hope, Sister Dorothy was assassinated seven years ago today\u2013on February 12, 2005\u2013by opponents of the pioneering jungle experiment.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy thought of the name, and although they killed her, we still have that hope that we can one day make this what Dorothy dreamed of, where the forest still stands, where nature is preserved, where we\u2019ll earn enough to support our families by living in harmony with nature. That\u2019s what Dorothy wanted us to do, and I believe her spirit is alive among us today. We\u2019re achieving her dream, bit by bit,\u201d Lima told me when I went to Brazil in 2008 in order to write about Stang\u2019s life and death and legacy.<\/p>\n

The Amazon where Stang died is a region under assault. In the last four decades, almost one-quarter of the rain forest has been cut down, and the future looks bleak for a region that provides one-fifth of the world\u2019s fresh water and remains an untapped treasure trove of biodiversity. Yet amidst the chain saws and bulldozers and the growing fields of mechanized monocrops that are steadily replacing ancient stands of vine-draped mahogany, the innovative project championed by Stang challenges the dominant slash-and-burn culture with a vision of peaceful coexistence between humans and the forest.<\/p>\n

That vision remains inconvenient, however, for those who profit from the rainforest\u2019s destruction, and they\u2019re on the attack against a church that sides with the poor and nature. Those responsible for killing the feisty 73-year old Stang are not deterred by the on-again, off-again functioning of Brazilian justice which has convicted five men linked to the killing. They\u2019ve threatened other church activists and even offered half a million dollars to kill a meddlesome bishop. On soil literally fertilized by Stang\u2019s blood, the church has made a stand for all of God\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Contrary to idealized conceptions of the Amazon as a vast stretch of uninhabited wildness that some foreigners want preserved in U.S.-style national parks, the region has always been populated. \u201cTo defend the forest we have to defend the people of the forest, because the forest has always had people living in it,\u201d says Felicio Pontes, a crusading federal prosecutor in Belem, the capital of the northern state of Par\u00e1, who was one of Stang\u2019s closest friends and allies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe historians who described life here in the 1500s were surprised by the number of people living in the jungle. But these people knew how to live with nature, how to survive from nature. So in Brazil we can\u2019t talk about some foreign concept of pure ecology without people, but rather try to understand the Amazon in socio-environmental terms.\u201d<\/p>\n

The region suddenly started getting crowded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Brazil\u2019s military government, worried about losing sovereignty to neighboring countries, opened up the Amazon to poor families fleeing poverty in the northeast and south of the country. An escape valve designed to ameliorate discontent, the government advertised the jungle as \u201cland without people for people without land.\u201d The Trans-Amazon Highway was built to provide access, and like an open vein it carried the desperately poor into the harsh region where some perished, some prospered, and some returned from their failed quest to join the burgeoning rings of misery around the country\u2019s large cities.<\/p>\n

The opening of the Amazon also represented a unique opportunity for the wealthy and unscrupulous, who took advantage of abundant subsidies and lax oversight to stake often-competing claims for vast swatches of thousands of acres. An entire industry of corruption flourished; the landrobbers were dubbed grileiros<\/em> after the common practice of artificially aging falsified land titles by putting them in a drawer full of grilos<\/em>\u2013crickets\u2013for several days, after which they\u2019d take on the look of old, legitimate property certificates. As grileiros<\/em>, loggers, cattle ranchers and miners flocked to the region, the poor who got in the way of their ambitious projects were frightened off, enslaved, or simply eliminated by pistoleiros<\/em>\u2013hired gunslingers\u2013who found abundant work on the frontier.<\/p>\n

Attempts by the poor to organize to defend themselves were made difficult by the fact that they had migrated to the Amazon from so many places, and thus lacked a common history. The church was often the only institution they had in common, and it helped build community among people who didn\u2019t necessarily trust one another, providing a focal point for common resistance to the violence of the wealthy. The Comiss\u00e3o Nacional da Pastoral da Terra<\/em> (CPT)\u2013the Pastoral Land Commission of the Brazilian bishops\u2013was established in 1975 to support the poor in their struggles for land, and together with activist Christian base communities in the area quickly earned the church a reputation as a troublemaker standing in the way of \u201cprogress\u201d\u2013understood as unbridled exploitation. The military labeled the church activists subversives and launched a campaign of torture, disappearance, and killings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe church had long been on the side of the ranchers and the rich, and when it switches sides it has to be shut up. Even if it\u2019s necessary to use a bullet to accomplish that,\u201d said Father Jose Amaro Lopes de Sousa, the parish priest in Anap\u00fa and a close collaborator of Stang.<\/p>\n

Still clad in her habit, Sister Dorothy arrived in Brazil in 1966 after a 13-year stint in Arizona where she taught school and assisted migrant families. In Brazil she and the other Notre Dame sisters learned Portuguese, studied liberation theology, and were soon sent to the north of the country where the heat convinced them to cut up their habits to make reasonable clothing. These were heady years in the wake of Vatican II, and Stang threw herself happily into organizing schools for children and base communities for adults, encouraging the poor to believe in themselves. Such work wasn\u2019t appreciated by all, and as colleagues began to be picked off by the pistoleiros or military, several times Stang had to lay low to avoid being tortured or killed herself.<\/p>\n

Stang felt a calling to accompany those at the margins, and as the Trans-Amazon Highway pushed people deeper into the jungle, she went to Altamira in 1982 and presented herself to Erwin Kr\u00e4utler, bishop of the prelature of the Xingu, one of the world\u2019s largest dioceses\u2013and perhaps the most dangerous.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy came to me asking only to serve here with the most poor of the poor. I remember saying to her, \u2018You don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about, because the poorest of the poor live in misery, and it\u2019s impossible for a North American to live without any comfort.\u2019 But she insisted, and began her work along the Trans-Amazon with the poor. She traveled several times to the States to visit her family, but always came back to the poor. She didn\u2019t make incursions into poor communities. She lived with the poor. And because of her love for the poor and their cause, and her defense of the environment, she was killed,\u201d Kr\u00e4utler told me.<\/p>\n

As Stang worked with the poor along the serial potholes that form the Trans-Amazon, she increasingly became a champion of their right to have land of their own, even though that meant facing down the wealthy and their hired guns. Her reputation grew.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter hearing about her, we came looking for her because we wanted land to work. We asked her how we could get land, how we could confront the land grabbers, the landlords. We small farmers had no power, no experience, and we were afraid of confronting them. We were afraid of getting killed. Even Jesus was afraid of dying, so what about us? We were afraid of confronting them by ourselves,\u201d Lima said. \u201cDorothy was a person of faith, courageous and willing to face difficult battles. And she took our side.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stang\u2019s preparation for those difficult battles usually involved lots of papers, including detailed maps of jungle and photocopied sections of obscure agrarian reform regulations. She carried them with her Bible, wrapped in plastic inside the cloth bag she carried everywhere, and was quick to pull them out and\u2013squinting at the printing because macular degeneration was causing her to slowly go blind\u2013start lecturing anyone who would listen about how the poor were being screwed by those who ignored the law.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy was extremely legalistic. If I mentioned a law, the next time we met she had read it and understood it, and we talked about its implementation. She wanted justice for the peasants, and she knew that the law wouldn\u2019t work if it only stayed on paper. It had to make a difference in the life of the poor,\u201d said Pontes. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t against the laws. She argued for their implementation, and she provided a bridge between the law and the groups which had no voice. She became the voice of those people in Brazil who had no voice. As an educator, she could explain\u2013much better than us\u2013how the justice system worked for people who often couldn\u2019t read or write because they\u2019d been excluded from the education system all their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a popular advocate, Stang could be relentless in making reluctant bureaucrats pay attention. After an official in the government\u2019s agrarian reform agency in Belem kept putting her off, telling her he\u2019d see her soon but really hoping she\u2019d leave, Stang spent the night sleeping on an office couch\u2013driving her colleagues, worried that she\u2019d been disappeared, to launch a city-wide search. And when another government bureaucrat denied having received her repeated letters documenting grievances of the poor, she walked to his file cabinets and started searching until she found her correspondence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis wasn\u2019t your grandmother\u2019s nun. She made things happen,\u201d said Michael Astor, an Associated Press reporter in Rio de Janeiro who covered Stang\u2019s murder. \u201cYou can cut through a lot of crap by breaking the rules and acting like an American. But sooner or later it will come back to get you. And that\u2019s why they killed her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Beatriz<\/a><\/p>\n

For many in the Amazon, Stang is a hero, a martyr, a saint. At the end of a meeting of the \u201cDorothy Committee,\u201d an ecumenical group based in the offices of the Conference of Women Religious in Belem which works to ensure that justice is done in Stang\u2019s case, Sister Margarita Maria Pantoja, a Missionary of Saint Teresinha, pulls out a glass container of blood-soaked soil from the site where Stang was killed. I join the group in laying our hands on the bottle. \u201cSister Dorothy lives!\u201d shouts Pantoja. \u201cForever! Forever! Forever!\u201d we respond.<\/p>\n

Yet there\u2019s an alternative view of Stang. According to the attorney for several of the men convicted of her murder, the U.S. nun was a violent instigator of armed struggle. During the 2007 trial in Belem of a rancher convicted of ordering Stang\u2019s killing, Americo Leal complained about U.S. government-instituted violence from Hiroshima to Guantanamo, then argued that Stang \u201cshares this DNA of violence, the DNA to kill.\u201d He told the court that Stang was a secret U.S. government agent who was killed in legitimate self-defense because the U.S. nun had 50 armed peasants backing her up.<\/p>\n

In an interview in his office in Belem, Leal told me Stang\u2019s killers acted only after the nun told them that she would burn them alive inside their thatched hut.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe had a history of giving guns to peasants who were invading land, of giving weapons for the massacre of landowners,\u201d Leal said, citing a 2003 case where Stang had been accused of complicity in a shootout on a contested farm outside Anap\u00fa in which one pistoleiro was killed. Stang\u2019s supporters, from Pontes to her congregation\u2019s headquarters back in Ohio, claimed she was innocent, the victim of harassment designed to intimidate her into silence.<\/p>\n

Leal, famous in Par\u00e1 for defending his wealthy clients with flair and exaggeration, even compared Stang to a pedophile. \u201cWhen there\u2019s someone who wants to sexually molest children, they often move from the cities to the little villages where there is less vigilance. I think that Dorothy came from North America to the little towns of our region in order to give in to her impulses to arm the peasants,\u201d he said with a straight face.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy was unique in the Catholic Church. I come from a Catholic family, and I know the church well. Its people never behave like Dorothy. The priests, the nuns, they stay in the church and on Sundays they have Mass, but they never take up arms,\u201d Leal said.<\/p>\n

Stang\u2019s colleagues told me she never touched a gun, and that far from urging civil or violent disobedience, the murdered nun counseled patience and civil obedience to the state, which Stang believed could be a motor for social change in the region. For someone who has been labeled as a \u201cradical nun,\u201d Sister Dorothy was in many ways conservative.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt times some of us thought that she was too naive, because she felt that if we could just get the government to do its job, then the agrarian reform would work,\u201d said Julia Depwig, a Notre Dame de Namur sister in Belem.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy believed in the system. She wanted it to do what it said it would do,\u201d said Notre Dame Sister Rebeca Spires, who worked with Stang for years along the Trans-Amazon. \u201cI don\u2019t think she knew how deep-seated the corruption was in INCRA [the government agrarian reform agency], or how strong organized crime is within the Amazon. I\u2019ve learned a lot about this since Dorothy died. I\u2019ve spent a lot of time with the police, and realize now how hard a time the good police officers have doing their job. There are a lot of people on the take.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stang was nonetheless growing weary of the government\u2019s repeated failures to do its job. In the last months of her life, when she sat down with Sister Jane Dwyer for morning devotion, Stang would get particularly excited by readings from the Psalms where God intervenes to make justice happen for the poor.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy loved those Psalms where God is the God of Sinai, the powerful one. They would fill her with hope. The days she was most animated were the days when God was taking charge, believing, \u2018If I can\u2019t do something, then God will take care of them,\u2019\u201d Dwyer said. \u201cDorothy had become the bad witch for the wealthy landowners, the butt of all their anger, but she kept wanting to trust. She kept pushing the public agencies, expecting that they would change, although they never did. We don\u2019t believe that. You have to speak up, but we\u2019re not as easily deceived as she was.\u201d<\/p>\n

If her hope in the government was wearing thin, Stang remained optimistic about the ability of individuals to change. When traveling the back roads of the Amazon or commuting to Belem to pester some government official, Stang would often hitchhike, at times accepting a ride from one of the wealthy land barons in their big pickups. \u201cShe\u2019d get in, ride with them for a couple of hours, preaching the whole way, and the next day she\u2019d tell us that she thought she really got through to them,\u201d said Kathryne Webster, a Notre Dame de Namur sister in Anap\u00fa.<\/p>\n

That optimism lasted until the day she was murdered. Cornered along a muddy path in the forest by the two men hired to kill her for $25,000, a sum that was never paid after the work was done, Stang pulled out her maps to try to convince them they were on the wrong side of a legal dispute about who owned the land. Failing to convince them with the map, she pulled out her Bible and, according to the testimony of one of the killers, read to them from the Beatitudes.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy didn\u2019t raise her voice, even in her most angry moments,\u201d Spires said. \u201cShe believed in the good in every person. She loved every person. When she talked to [the two men who killed her] she called them \u2018My children, my sons.\u2019 She said, \u2018God bless you.\u2019 She was not angry with them. She knew they had just burned the house of Luis [a community member], had threatened him and were planning to kill his whole family from the children up. She knew how cruel they could be, but she wanted to redeem the good that she knew was there in them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Devastation<\/a><\/p>\n

In a dramatic series of trials and retrials and appeals that still continue today, five men have been convicted so far in the crime: the killer, his accomplice, an intermediary, a rancher, and a wealthy rancher, Regivaldo Pereira Galv\u00e3o, who is popularly known by his nickname of \u201cSleazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The triggerman, Rayfran das Neves Sales, originally said he was supposed to be paid for killing Stang. Yet under intense pressure (his accomplice changed his story after being severely beaten in prison), Sales also changed his tune and has tried to claim the two did it on their own initiative. Stang\u2019s friends and colleagues discard the new version. Some even see Sales as a product of the Amazon\u2019s vicious class conflicts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe gunman is also a victim of this structure of injustice. He comes from a poor family, a family at the margins. This crime had a hierarchy, but it\u2019s difficult to get justice for the people high up in that hierarchy,\u201d said Luisa Virginia Oliveira Moraes, an activist with the Dorothy Committee.<\/p>\n

Church leaders and government prosecutors told me the hierarchy goes even higher than Sleazy. They say a meeting was held in the Augustus Hotel in Altamira one night in January 2005 where several wealthy ranchers and politicians from the area were present, and in which plans were made to get rid of Stang. The group is referred to as \u201cThe Consortium,\u201d and is believed to be behind failed attempts to kill both Bishop Kr\u00e4utler (an attempt that killed an Italian priest riding in his car) and de Sousa, the priest in Anap\u00fa. (His parish has inherited Stang\u2019s white VW Beetle, which now has \u201cDorothea\u201d painted on the sides and is laden down with loudspeakers used to announce meetings in the town of church and small farmers\u2019 groups.)<\/p>\n

The Consortium\u2019s interests are varied, and activists have also angered the group with their opposition to the Belo Monte Dam, a giant hydroelectric project that will flood indigenous reserves and kill off native fish species. Kr\u00e4utler earned their ire once again when he denounced a ring that was abusing children. According to a conversation overheard in an Altamira bar, the price on the bishop\u2019s head had gone up to half a million dollars at the time of my visit. As a result, the federal government insisted that the prelate have bodyguards, and so Kr\u00e4utler was accompanied everywhere by two bulky federal police officers. I had to walk by them to enter the bishop\u2019s office. Kr\u00e4utler wasn\u2019t happy about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the government, it\u2019s easier to give me bodyguards than to fully investigate and find out who is responsible for the threats,\u201d the bishop said.<\/p>\n

The threats were also a convenient distraction, giving people something to talk about other than the continued unbridled exploitation of the rainforest and its people by the wealthy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really don\u2019t want to publicize the threats against the bishop and the others,\u201d Dwyer argued. \u201cIt just gives it more publicity. And while everyone is worrying about bishops and sisters and priests, the people are dying. They\u2019re dying because they\u2019re being murdered, they\u2019re dying because of hunger, they\u2019re dying because they don\u2019t have land, but this is all forgotten when we get distracted by the threats against Father So and So and Sister So and So. It\u2019s true that our lives are threatened, but the people have been threatened all of their lives. Is one life worth more than the others?\u201d<\/p>\n

Everyone knew there were serious threats against Stang, who had taken to wearing a t-shirt that said A morte da floresta \u00e9 o fim da nossa vida<\/em>, \u201cThe death of the forest is the end of our life,\u201d but many refused to believe it could really happen.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d had information for four or five years that these groups wanted to kill Dorothy, but I didn\u2019t think it would happen. I thought the repercussions would be too great. I didn\u2019t think anyone was capable of killing a 73-year old religious woman from the U.S.,\u201d Pontes said.<\/p>\n

Bishop Kr\u00e4utler, who colleagues say pulled back some from Stang after the attempt to kill him, repeatedly warned Stang to be careful. \u201cAs a bishop, many times I said to her that she was threatened, but she thought that being a religious woman, and so old, and a little for being a North American, that nothing would happen to her,\u201d he told me. \u201cOne time a group of ranchers chartered an airplane to come see me, and warned me that I had to put the brakes on her. I told them that if they could prove that the land legitimately belonged to them, I would be the first to defend their rights. Otherwise, I wouldn\u2019t do anything to stop Dorothy. They left mad at me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Vanesa<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Eight-year<\/a><\/p>\n

What seems to have been the last straw in setting the stage for Stang\u2019s murder was her appearance, just nine days before she was killed, at a public hearing in Belem, where she told a federal panel about the constant grileiro<\/em>-sponsored violence faced by the residents of Esperan\u00e7a, and the complicity of government agencies in the intimidation. INCRA officials promised her, however, that a lingering dispute over land ownership had been resolved in favor of Stang\u2019s people. And the police commander in the state capital promised her that police in Anap\u00fa would provide protection.<\/p>\n

After her public appearances, Stang was tired, yet she ignored the entreaties of her fellow sisters who tried to convince her to stay on in Belem for a few days. She said she had to get back to Esperan\u00e7a to call a meeting to explain to the community their new legal status. She made the journey back, arriving in Esperan\u00e7a on February 11. On the way she stopped at the police station in Anap\u00fa to pick up the armed escort that had been promised her. The police said they were too busy. The next morning Stang was killed as she walked along a jungle path to the community center where she had called the meeting. Her body lay in the rain for hours until the police finally arrived, her blood soaking into the red soil of the rainforest.<\/p>\n

The same day as the murder, the federal minister of the environment, Marina Silva, another friend of Stang\u2019s, was also in Par\u00e1, in the city of Porto de Moz, to inaugurate the \u201cForever Green\u201d Extractive Reserve\u2013another sustainable alternative to letting the grileiros destroy the rainforest. Pontes and others had encouraged Stang to go to the ceremony with them, but Stang had insisted she had to get back to Esperan\u00e7a. According to an investigation by a government intelligence agency, the assassination of Stang was a \u201cmessage\u201d to Silva and other activists in the government, warning them to back off from implementing environmental and agrarian policies that would threaten the hegemony of the Consortium. The message may have had an effect. Silva, increasingly frustrated over the capitulation of the ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores <\/em>to huge agribusiness interests, resigned her post in 2008 and joined the Green Party. She ran for president in 2010, garnering almost 20 percent of the vote in the first round.<\/p>\n

Those close to Sister Dorothy report that in the days leading up to her murder, she knew the stakes were higher. The day before her murder, she called her brother David, a former Maryknoll missionary in Africa, at his home in Colorado, even though it was 4:30 am there. She quickly briefed him on the situation and then said, \u201cI\u2019m really nervous this time.\u201d She\u2019d never admitted to her brother that she was concerned for her own safety. \u201cI\u2019d visited her in December and witnessed several people come up to her to say they\u2019d heard of the threats. They told her to be careful, but she never showed any concern herself. Until that last morning she called,\u201d David Stang told me.<\/p>\n

According to Spires, Sister Dorothy accepted the increasing danger as the price of being faithful to her calling. \u201cShe knew she was threatened. Yet she did all the right things. She was not reckless. She did all the things we\u2019ve all been asked to do when threatened. She knew there was danger, but she was thinking more about the people. She worried there would be an armed conflict between the pistoleiros<\/em> and the farmworkers, and that others would be killed. She was afraid, and she didn\u2019t deny the fear. She walked right over it. That\u2019s what courage is. It\u2019s not not being afraid. It\u2019s being afraid and going anyway,\u201d Spires said.<\/p>\n

Stang\u2019s last moments were consistent with her four decades of ministry in the Amazon, Spires believes. \u201cWhen she stopped and talked to the two men, I don\u2019t think she thought they were going to kill her then. But when Rayfran pulled the gun and she read the Bible to him, I think she was very aware that this was it. And so the last words from her lips were from the Bible. And that\u2019s a beautiful way to go,\u201d Spires said. \u201cThey say that later, when the police arrived and they turned her body over, she had a smile on her face. She did what she was supposed to do, and she was satisfied by that. Just as the Gospel says that Jesus, as he died on the cross, said that he was satisfied. I\u2019m sure it had to be terrible for her, but as terrible as it was, I\u2019m sure that she was happy, that she was satisfied. In the deepest way possible, she had real joy. She gave her all. Which is what she did every day. If Dorothy is important, it\u2019s not because of how she died, but because of how she lived, and her death was just a continuation of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Two-year<\/a><\/p>\n

The murder of an elderly nun from the U.S. was big news, and the Brazilian government was forced to respond. Hundreds of soldiers occupied Anap\u00fa. Log trucks were stopped. Promises rained down that those responsible for the crime would be punished, that the Esperan\u00e7a lands would be properly titled, that the illegal depredation of the rainforest would cease.<\/p>\n

Seven years later, it seems the initial response was nothing more than \u201changing a few people for the English to see,\u201d a popular Brazilian expression.<\/p>\n

Although the killers didn\u2019t hang, as Brazil has no death penalty, they did get long sentences, but judicial shenanigans have meant new trials, which means those who demand justice continue their vigil. The nuns pass the hat and the residents of Esperan\u00e7a crowd into buses for the journey to the courthouse in Belem, which can take anywhere from 15 to 72 hours, depending on the rain. A police escort makes the trip with them.<\/p>\n

Accompanying the judicial process takes a lot of time, pulling the sisters in Anap\u00fa away from their work of trying to help the settlers in Esperan\u00e7a consolidate their gains. \u201cIt\u2019s a terrible distraction,\u201d said Dwyer, \u201cbut we can\u2019t dismiss the trials as simply the show that they are, because of the issue of impunity. We can\u2019t betray the hundreds of other people who\u2019ve been murdered and haven\u2019t even had a day in court.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some 800 farmers and human rights activists have been murdered in land-related struggles in Par\u00e1 in the last three decades. Stang\u2019s killers are the only ones in jail.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe state of Par\u00e1 is a champion of killings in the countryside. Seventy percent of these crimes aren\u2019t even investigated by the police. In the other 30 percent, it takes an average of ten years for it to come to trial. The only cases that get to a jury are those with international or national repercussions. And there\u2019s no guarantee that even those found guilty will end up in prison. Ranchers simply never go to jail. If anyone goes it\u2019s only the pistoleiro,\u201d said Jos\u00e9 Batista Gon\u00e7alves Afonso, a lawyer and member of the national coordinating team of the CPT. \u201cImpunity is a license to kill. A rancher can send a pistoleiro out to kill someone, and they both know nothing will happen. Impunity is an official guarantee that you can continue committing crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

The region where Stang was killed has a lot in common with John Wayne movies, but the good guys usually don\u2019t win in the end.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy was working out on the frontier, where just like in your cowboy movies, anything can happen. She was out in the Wild West, and tried to establish her sustainable project where there was no support and no security,\u201d said Thomas Mitschein, president of the Program on Poverty and the Environment in the Amazon, based in Belem at the Federal University of Par\u00e1.<\/p>\n

Mitschein said Stang\u2019s murder has changed things some. \u201cIn political terms the situation is calmer. The bad guys don\u2019t have the courage to do now what they were doing before to destroy these sustainable initiatives. But we shouldn\u2019t have had to lose Dorothy to get that. She was the soul of this development work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Bishop Kr\u00e4utler lambasts the country\u2019s leaders for responding superficially to demands for change. \u201cThe politicians were all present on the day of our sister\u2019s burial. Anap\u00fa never saw so many state and federal senators and deputies. Today I am convinced that the majority of those present at the funeral came because of the media coverage of this sad event,\u201d the bishop said in his homily at a Mass celebrating the third anniversary of Stang\u2019s murder. \u201cThe authorities who cried at the side of the coffin wanted to show to the world that they did not concur with death and violence in the Amazon. But they have not given one single example of courageous or valiant action to change that reality. They were not converted. Their idea of development for the region continues being merely economic. They think only of immediate profits and intentionally ignore the irreparable damages being caused. They delegate to future generations the task of dealing with the disgrace caused in these times.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rate of deforestation throughout the Amazon did drop for a couple of years following Stang\u2019s killing, yet the development seems more a product of market conditions than any shame over the murder. By late 2007, with soy and beef prices rising, the trees began to fall faster than ever. Widely-publicized government crackdowns on illegal logging in the Amazon seem at best symbolic resistance to the renewed rape of the rainforest.<\/p>\n

With increased deforestation, other sins are also on the rise in the Amazon. As we talked in his office, Prosecutor Pontes pulled up a map on his computer to show where deforestation is heaviest, and then clicked to maps that showed reports of extrajudicial killings and reports of slavery. They were the same areas. \u201cDeforestation is a signal of where violence is focused. It\u2019s not just about cutting down trees. Where they cut down trees, they also kill people. Deforestation is the beginning of social decomposition that ultimately leads to the death of persons,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"Maria<\/a><\/p>\n

The jungle settlement where Sister Dorothy Stang died is an innovative experiment designed to equip formerly landless peasants with the skills and tools to survive in the jungle without destroying it. The Esperan\u00e7a Sustainable Development Project (PDS) brings together 250 families, giving each 100 hectares of land. They can use 20 percent for farming, but the remaining 80 percent is managed collectively\u2013and sustainably. That means the rainforest remains intact. Limited harvesting of trees is allowed, but under strict controls to guarantee the forest remains viable.<\/p>\n

The plans for such a project had long existed in theory, some bureaucrat\u2019s idealistic dream to thwart the steady destruction of the Amazon. Stang\u2019s genius was making it work.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy\u2019s dream was that everyone should have their own piece of land, and she discovered in INCRA [the agrarian reform agency] this plan for Sustainable Development Projects. It wasn\u2019t Dorothy\u2019s idea, it already existed on paper, but INCRA had forgotten it in a drawer somewhere. I still don\u2019t know how she found out about it, but Dorothy said, \u2018Let\u2019s try it. Let\u2019s make this work.\u2019 The government wasn\u2019t very excited about it, but Dorothy\u2019s determination and tenacity could wear people out. Or make them angry,\u201d said Depwig.<\/p>\n

The Esperan\u00e7a project particularly angered land barons who illegally claimed some of the jungle where the project was cited. They wanted to burn the forest and plant pasture for cattle. Stang wanted the land for the poor with whom she\u2019d been working for four decades, and whose dream of a small plot of land she had adopted as her own.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy was obsessed with finding land where the poor could live and grow their crops. It was the only alternative for the people who continue to migrate here, families who come here with nothing. What other future do they have? If they don\u2019t make it here, they\u2019ll move to the periphery of the cities and face hunger and violence and misery, their kids will go to the streets and get involved in prostitution and crime. Dorothy worked day and night to find them an alternative,\u201d said Gon\u00e7alves Afonso, the CPT lawyer.<\/p>\n

The Amazon is about 60 percent of Brazil\u2019s territory, but contributes only about 5 percent of its GDP, according to Mitschein. While the Amazon is seen as a vital environmental resource by ecologists abroad, he said that in Brazil it\u2019s difficult to generate the political will to fund the essential infrastructure\u2013schools, roads, marketing assistance\u2013that projects like Esperan\u00e7a desperately need in order to develop the region in a sustainable manner. \u201cTheir problem isn\u2019t just that they face devils who are trying to destroy the project. Yes, there are devils, but there\u2019s also a structural problem. They don\u2019t have the technical and financial resources they need. And they need public institutions which can act quicker to provide the legal and economic context in which they can flourish,\u201d Mitschein said.<\/p>\n

Over recent decades, the Amazon hasn\u2019t necessarily suffered from a lack of government investment. The problem has been that state subsidies flowed into the bank accounts of the wealthy land grabbers, not into projects that would equip the poor to survive in a global economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy had a prophetic vision of how to carry out authentic agrarian reform. But what she dreamed of doing needs support from the government. The loggers and cattle ranchers didn\u2019t come to the Amazon without state resources. They were financed by government banks. The Brazilian government financed the destruction of the Amazon. If the peasants had the money today that the loggers and ranchers robbed from the state over the years, we\u2019d have an Amazon where the poor would live a much better life. But the poor never get any resources from the government,\u201d said Pontes, the federal prosecutor.<\/p>\n

According to Bishop Kr\u00e4utler, Brazil is giving away the Amazon\u2019s future to companies like Cargill and ADM, all in the pursuit of short-term profits. At the time of my visit, he blamed the country\u2019s president, Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, who embraced the rush to chop down trees to grow soybeans for export to China and sugar cane to fuel Brazilian cars. (Lula was succeeded in 2010 by Dilma Rousseff, also from the PT, and she has shown herself to be a dependable friend of the Amazon’s enemies<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government\u2019s Program of Accelerated Growth promotes an understanding of development that\u2019s merely economic. Lula understands growth as more soybeans, more exports, as making the country more attractive to foreign capital. He doesn\u2019t care about future generations, and cares even less about the indigenous. He doesn\u2019t mention them much, and when he does he refers to them\u2013along with environmentalists and the attorney general\u2019s office\u2013as obstacles to development,\u201d Kr\u00e4utler said.<\/p>\n

\u201cLula worries a lot about Brazil\u2019s image, so he has to talk about the Amazon, because the whole world is watching. But the reality on the ground is something else. The ministry of the environment doesn\u2019t have the resources it needs to do its job. The log trucks carry trees out of here day and night, and when the environment officials are in one place, the log trucks simply take a different road,\u201d Kr\u00e4utler said.<\/p>\n

Yet Mitschein believes the blame goes farther. \u201cEveryone in the whole world is co-responsible for the destruction of the Amazon. International ecologists can\u2019t say, \u2018You have to preserve the Amazon,\u2019 if they don\u2019t explain how to change the workings of the international financial system. People like Dorothy, in our own local context, suffered the consequences of an international scenario that\u2019s pushing us toward destruction instead of sustainability. International solidarity is critical. But people have to understand that the Amazon can only be preserved and saved from within the Amazon. You can\u2019t do it from New York or Berlin or London. But you can help. You should help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Esperan\u00e7a is one of two PDS that Stang helped establish. Scores of others were later established by the government in a flurry of fashionability, but so many of them were fronts for loggers that the government finally cancelled the rest.<\/p>\n

Esperan\u00e7a\u2019s families have grown tired of waiting for the government to respond to their needs. Despite a flurry of promises after Stang\u2019s murder, much of their land remains in legal limbo; they have no titles. Yet residents have built their own temporary houses and schools, carved their own roads, started a project to manufacture hardwood furniture, installed water systems, learned to use a computer and mastered the technical skills needed to be good stewards of the rainforest.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis community is an act of faith. There\u2019s nothing in this world that says to us that we should believe this is going to happen. But the people aren\u2019t going to give up. They\u2019re still there. With all their weaknesses and with so many forces against them, they\u2019ve done amazing things. They can\u2019t read or write but they\u2019ve learned to use GPS to manage the forest in a responsible way,\u201d said Dwyer. \u201cWe just help and encourage them. Don\u2019t put me out in the forest; I will get lost. But they know how to do it. They\u2019ve learned. And they will battle to the end. These people aren\u2019t saints, and they have difficulty maintaining their journey at times. But they\u2019ve got nothing to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Edna<\/a><\/p>\n

In the wake of Sister Dorothy\u2019s killing, there has been more interest than ever in joining the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. By the time I visited, a majority of the congregation\u2019s 19 sisters in Brazil were native born.<\/p>\n

Maria de Fatima Borges is one of them. In her late 20s, she spent a year working with Stang, and in 2007 took her vows. She says her parents worry about her safety, but she shakes off such concerns. \u201cIf the people who killed Dorothy thought they were doing away with her dream, they were very mistaken. It only increased our desire, our will to continue. And the new women who are joining encourage us even more. Dorothy hasn\u2019t left us. She walks with us today,\u201d Borges told me.<\/p>\n

The older members of the congregation claim that Stang\u2019s legacy is a renewed commitment to the poor as the locus of God\u2019s intervention in the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe often discussed with Dorothy where change would come from. We had very different points of view, but Dorothy was very determined, and she had a lot of experience. She was the first one of us to come here. The reason this place exists is because of Dorothy, who came and began working among the first pioneers who come here. She helped them see other possibilities of coming together and organizing. That\u2019s what makes this place still viable for the poor today. And her death reminds us that the world is only going to change when the poor, who have no vested interest in anything but life, bond together to build a new life. Dorothy has helped us believe even more strongly that the impetus for the journey has to come from the people themselves,\u201d Sister Jane Dwyer said.<\/p>\n

\u201cDorothy\u2019s killing takes us back to our source, the Gospel, the belief that it\u2019s the small seed, the people organizing together, that will make a difference. You can have good people in the government who want to do something, but the structure is bigger than any one person; it\u2019s not a life-giving structure for the poor, but rather for the rich. There was tension with Dorothy because she believed in those structures. Dorothy struggled to make INCRA morally responsible. She believed that they could be, and that if they only did what they should do, then things would be different. She believed that with all her heart. That\u2019s why she had so many friends. And why she had so many enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Portions of this post appeared in the <\/em>National Catholic Reporter<\/a>.
\nAn excellent film about Stang and her murder, narrated by Martin Sheen, is <\/em>They Killed Sister Dorothy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Antonia Silva Lima lives in a place called Hope. She came to the Amazon rainforest more than two decades ago, like hundreds of thousands of other migrants fleeing from poverty in other parts of Brazil. The settlers moved deep into the forest and cut down the trees to grow subsistence crops, only to be chased […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1421,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[41,34,22,42],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1389"}],"version-history":[{"count":47,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3682,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389\/revisions\/3682"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}