American Nun brutally murdered

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news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=611216

The life and brutal death of Sister Dorothy, a rainforest martyr
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 **On the lawless fringe of Brazil's Amazon jungle - where illegal loggers have devastated the rainforest - the American nun Dorothy Stang defended the poor. Then the gunmen came for her. Andrew Buncombe reports**

 	 **15 February 2005**

    [ The life and brutal death of Sister Dorothy](http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=611216) 

[ 'Passion for her cause shone out'](http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=611215) 

[ Sister Dorothy Stang: Obituary](http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=611179) 

   Sister Dorothy Stang lived among those who wanted her dead. When they finally came for her she read passages from the Bible to her killers. They listened for a moment, then fired. Her body was found face down in the mud, blood staining the back of her white blouse.
The town of Anapu, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, is most notable for the dust that clogs its streets and for the number of shops selling chain-saws. It is also the place that Sister Dorothy called home for more than 30 years and where she organised her efforts to try to protect the rainforest and its people from disastrous and often illegal exploitation by logging firms and ranchers. Now Anapu will be known as the place where Sister Dorothy is buried.

The 74-year-old activist was laid to rest yesterday morning after being assassinated by two gunmen on Saturday at a remote encampment in the jungle about 30 miles from the town. Sister Dorothy - the most prominent activist to be murdered in the Amazon since Chico Mendez in 1988 - was shot six times in the head, throat and body at close range. “She was on a list of people marked for death. And little by little they’re ticking those names off the list,” said Nilde Sousa, an official with a local women’s group who worked with the nun.

Sister Dorothy was in the Boa Esperanca settlement when she was killed. She was travelling with two peasants to a meeting to discuss a settlement for the area, which has apparently been granted to peasants by the federal government but which is sought by loggers. The two men travelling with her escaped unhurt and may be able to identify the killers to police, reports suggest.

While the suspects’ names have not yet been released, Sister Dorothy’s supporters say there is little doubt as to who was responsible. While the local people called her Dora or “the angel of the Trans-Amazonian”, loggers and other opponents called her a “terrorist” and accused of supplying guns to the peasants. The Pastoral Land Commission of the Roman Catholic Church, which she worked for, said in a statement: “The hatred of ranchers and loggers respects nothing. The reprehensible murder of our sister brings back to us memories of a past that we had thought was closed.”

Sister Dorothy was originally from Dayton, Ohio, where she attended Julienne High School. It was while she was a student that she decided to become a nun and when she left school she joined the convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Cincinnati…
Sister Dorothy may have had a premonition of the fate that awaited her and yet she still looked for the best in people. “She said once ‘Humanity is like a fruit bowl, with all the different fruit - black, white and yellow - so different and yet all part of it’. She had incredible energy even though she was fighting incredible battles,” he said.

Lúcio Flavio Pinto, an investigative journalist in the region who produces a weekly newspaper, Jornal Pessoal, knew Sister Dorothy since the 1970s. He has also been campaigning against the same people she was taking on and has also been on the receiving end of threats. “There were many people who wanted to kill Sister Dorothy,” he said yesterday, speaking from the city of Belem, the state capital.

It was to Belem that Sister Dorothy’s body was taken on Sunday for a post-mortem examination and where dozens of supporters gathered outside the mortuary singing hymns and holding placards calling for an end to the rampant crime. Claudio Guimaraes, director of the state’s forensic science institute, said it appeared that the gunmen were about 18 inches away from Sister Dorothy when they shot her.

In Ohio she was remembered at a series of services which recalled her dedication and courage. “Sister Dorothy in her ministering to the poor remained faithful. We honour those who die for their faith,” said Father Dennis Caylor, pastor at St Rafael church in the suburb of Springfield.
 
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen.
May her soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.
 
Tantum ergo:
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen.
May her soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.
Amen Tantum. Couldn’t have said it better.
 
csmonitor.com/2005/0216/p05s01-woam.html

Death of nun shows peril of Amazon activism

Dorothy Stang was one of almost 1,400 people killed in the Brazilian jungle over the past 20 years.
By Andrew Downie | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
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 **RIO DE JANEIRO** - The weekend murder of an American nun who spent almost 30 years denouncing powerful logging and farming interests in the Brazilian Amazon has turned the spotlight on the unheralded and sometimes dangerous life of activists there.

 Dorothy Stang, a 74-year-old Catholic nun from Dayton, Ohio, was killed on Saturday morning as she made her way to a gathering of peasant farmers near Anapu, a remote jungle town in the Amazonian state of Para.

 "She was practically ambushed," Jose Geraldo da Silva, a deputy from the state and a friend of Stang's for more than a decade, said in a telephone interview from the area. "They planned it in advance, walked up to her on the street, and when she answered back [two men] shot her."

 Mr. da Silva says Stang was targeted because she had spoken out against big landowners who were battling over land with small farmers in the notoriously lawless rural region of Para. Commercial farmers and loggers often dispute land ownership with local peasants. Much of the land is without title, and when the government does award deeds they are rarely respected.

 Stang was a champion of the poor and their efforts to live and farm in the Amazon through sustainable methods. She dedicated her life to helping peasant farmers organize against powerful local interests, and didn't back down even when told she would be murdered if she continued to speak out. "She was a leader," da Silva says. "She was killed for defending families with no land."

 Stang's death focuses attention on the struggle over land in Brazil, a country where the 37 biggest landowners own more land than the 2.5 million smallest ones. The Pastoral Land Commission, a Catholic group that Stang reported for from Para, says 1,379 rural workers have been killed in land conflicts in Brazil since the commission began keeping records in 1985. A sizable portion of them occurred in Para, a huge and largely undeveloped state on the eastern edge of the Amazon that is a magnet both for small farmers seeking land and big developers and loggers drawn to the timber-rich forests. According to Greenpeace, the international environmental organization, two-thirds of all illegal deforestation in Brazil takes place in Para.
Of more immediate concern is the lack of an effective justice system or a responsible police force capable of investigating and stopping the violence, Mr. Canuto says. Over the past 20 years, only 80 people have been convicted on charges stemming from the killings.
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 "That statistic tells you everything," says Canuto, a retired priest. "These big guys feel like they are able to do what they want without worrying over the consequences, and that includes killing. They are exempt. It's frightening."

 Lula has sent two ministers to oversee the inquiry and handed control of the investigation to federal agents. Police have issued arrest warrants for the two suspected gunmen, as well as an intermediary and a rancher who is believed to have ordered the killing. No arrests have been made thus far.
 
npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4500672

Funeral Held for Murdered Rainforest Advocate Stang

[npr.org/chrome/icon_listen.gif](javascript:getMedia(‘ATC’, ‘15-Feb-2005’, ‘16’, ‘RM,WM’)😉
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             	                       	  					  						 												  						 						 *[All Things Considered](http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=2), *February 15, 2005 ·  Mourners gather in Brazil for the funeral of Sister Dorothy Stang, who spent more than two decades in the Amazon jungle supporting peasant farmers against encroaching loggers and ranchers. The American-born Stang was murdered at age 73 over the weekend. Melissa Block talks with Sister Mary Alice McCabe of the order of Notre Dame de Namur about her friend and colleague.
abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=502783

Thousands Attend Nun’s Funeral in Brazil

Thousands Attend Funeral of U.S. Nun Killed in Brazil As Battle Over Amazon Development Grows

By MICHAEL ASTOR

The Associated Press

Feb. 15, 2005
- Thousands of people, from peasants to politicians, converged on this remote Amazon town Tuesday to bury the bullet-ridden body of an elderly American nun killed in the struggle to protect the Amazon rain forest and its poor residents from loggers and ranchers.

After an all-night vigil, mourners filed slowly past the simple, flag-draped coffin holding the remains of Dorothy Stang in the small, shingle-roofed church of Anapu, the jungle town of 7,000 residents that Stang adopted as her own.

“I feel like a river without water, a forest without trees. It’s like losing a mother,” said Fernando Anjos da Silva, who said Stang helped him get medical care after a logging accident that left him in a wheelchair.

Stang, 73, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio, was attacked Saturday in a settlement 30 miles from Anapu, where she worked helping some 400 families survive in the rugged jungle.

A witness said that when two gunmen approached her, she pulled out a Bible and began to read. Her killers listened for a moment, took a few steps back and fired, he said. Coroners said she was shot six times at close range by two guns.

“Dorothy’s last words were the only words she knew: the word of God,” said Mary Alice McCabe, a nun from Connecticut who has lived in Brazil for 34 years.

“Dorothy was completely dedicated to those people, to the land, to the whole of the Amazon and what the Amazon is: Nature, people looking for the right to sustain themselves on the last frontier.”

Colleagues said Stang helped develop sustainable development projects to benefit poor residents of Anapu, which is on the southern edge of the rain forest. Development, logging and farming already have destroyed as much as 20 percent of the Amazon’s 1.6 million square miles.

Stang had received death threats and warned that land speculators were arming themselves, but she received no protection and little response from the government.

“Gunmen loose! Loggers cutting! … The federal police is nowhere to be seen in Anapu,” Stang wrote last year in a letter to the federal government and Congress.

Still, the brazen way Stang was slain showed that the killers believed they would escape justice.

“I think the large landholders have become bolder,” said the Rev. Henri des Roziers, a French priest and lawyer. “They want to send a sharp message to the government to stay away. I think they figure and they’re probably right that even if they catch and try the killers, no one will ever be punished.”
 
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AmyS:
This is awful… She is in my prayers…
And I hope the other 1,399 dead.

May they all rest safely in the palm of Gods hand.
 
I went to an SSND High School and have the highest respect for the order and the work that they do. I had an art teacher who was an SSND and she decided to do mission work in Sierra Leone in Africa where there was a lot of civil unrest. I was in awe of her fearlessness to do go over there to do her good work.
 
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