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RIGHTS-BRAZIL: State of Para Produces Another ‘Martyr of the Land’

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 14 2005 (IPS) - The murder of U.S.-born Catholic nun and activist Dorothy Stang, which has had international repercussions, highlights the need for a government policy that would effectively reduce the violence surrounding conflicts over land, especially in the northern state of Pará.

This is the view shared by activists like Antonio Canuto, the national secretary of the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), who told IPS that simply arresting and convicting the killers, while treating the case as an “isolated incident”, would do nothing to curb the violence in areas where agribusiness is fast expanding the agricultural frontier.

Sister Dorothy, as the 73-year-old missionary was known in the town of Anapú in Pará, was a native of Dayton, Ohio and a naturalised Brazilian citizen. She belonged to the Congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame, and for four decades was active on behalf of the poor in Brazil’s eastern Amazon jungle region.

Stang, who worked with the CPT since it was founded in 1975, began to receive death threats from powerful local landowners for her work with poor farmers in 1999. But she said she was not afraid of death, and that nothing would scare her away from her work.

“The gunmen would not dare kill an elderly woman like me,” she said in one of her last interviews, with the newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo. But she also said that if she was murdered, she would like to be buried in Anapú – which is where her funeral will take place on Tuesday afternoon.

Stang was shot Saturday morning by two gunmen. She was hit by six bullets from two different weapons, according to witnesses and the forensic report. The local police have already identified the alleged killers, as well as a man who is suspected of ordering the murder, and are searching for them.

The murder will hurt the image of the government of leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was elected in 2002 as an ally of the country’s social movements, including the Landless Workers Movement (MST), which is fighting for faster, more effective land reform.

Just last week, the missionary had asked for protection from the government’s Human Rights Secretary Nilmario Miranda, who along with Environment Minister Marina Silva, travelled to Anapú on Saturday after the killing was reported.

Miranda likened Stang to Chico Mendes, the rubber-tapper and environmental and social activist whose December 1988 murder in the Amazon jungle also caused a national and international outcry.

The Lula administration has shown that it is aware of the gravity of the case. Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos announced that a meeting of “seven or eight” ministers was scheduled for Tuesday to discuss the murder, its negative repercussions, and the need to crack down on the continuing violence against rural activists and peasant farmers.

Pará is the Brazilian state with the largest number of murders involving conflicts over land, according to the CPT, which has documented the violence in the Brazilian countryside since the 1980s.

According to the CPT, 33 of the 73 killings of this kind committed in 2003 occurred in Pará, and in previous years the northern state regularly accounted for more than half of these murders. That is true of last year as well, although final figures are not yet available.

In April 1996, 19 rural protesters were killed in the state in what is known as “the massacre of Eldorado de Carajás”, when the police opened fire on a crowd of peasant farmers who were marching peacefully along the highway.

As in much of Latin America, the latifundium, or great landed estate dominates the Brazilian countryside, and land ownership is heavily concentrated. An estimated 50,000 people own half of the farmland in this country of nearly 180 million, while hundreds of thousands of rural labourers do not even have a small plot on which to support their families.

Murders of rural activists are also common in the states of Mato Grosso and Rondonia, along the southern borders of the Amazon jungle.

These states also form part of the agricultural frontier, where large landowners and agribusiness interests illegally seize public land.

The advance of monoculture farming is largely fuelled by Brazil’s current boom in soy cultivation.

Canuto said the only way to put an end to the murders of peasant farmers and rural and human rights activists would be a change in economic policy, in order to stop encouraging the encroachment on land and illegal logging.

The threats against Sister Dorothy by powerful local landowners intensified with her dedication to the Sustainable Development Project, which involves areas where 600 families make a living from the artesanal extraction of forestry products and farming small plots without resorting to deforestation.

The initiative, which was launched in 1999, occupies part of an area that the government had originally handed over to large landowners in 1970. They were given five years to begin farming the land and producing agricultural products, and if they failed to do so, the property would revert back to the state, Canuto explained.

But many of them merely extracted valuable timber and sold the property, to which they held no actual title, to buyers who are now opposed to the settlement of the land by landless farmers under the Sustainable Development Project.

The offer of government credit to foment agriculture in the region has also drawn many interested agribusiness concerns, aggravating the expulsion of poor farmers and fanning the flames of the disputes over land, said Canuto.

The chaotic land ownership situation along the edges of the Amazon jungle, where “grileiros” – “land-grabbers” who take illegal and often violent possession of the land to sell it to large landowners or agribusiness interests – lies at the core of the conflicts and the unbridled destruction of Brazil’s jungles, say environmentalists and social activists.

Although the government has adopted administrative measures to attempt to solve the problem, an effective solution that would prevent the killing of more “martyrs of the land”, as the victims are described by the CPT, looks like a distant dream, especially in the state of Pará.