Brazilian farmer killed in Amazon after reporting illegal loggers (where US nun, Dorothy was killed)

[Judi Lynn]

Source: International Herald Tribune/Associated Press

Brazilian farmer killed in Amazon after reporting illegal loggers

The Associated Press
Saturday, April 26, 2008

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil: An Amazon farmer who received death threats after reporting illegal logging to the government was shot to death as he left his house, Brazilian media reported Saturday.

Emival Barbosa Machado, 50, was shot three times Friday in the eastern city of Tucurui, the Globo TV network said. No arrests have been made.

Machado had often reported illegal logging and shipments of lumber in Para, a largely lawless state where American nun and rain forest defender Dorothy Stang was killed in 2005.

Machado told the environmental protection agency Ibama that locals were forced to deliver wood to loggers and were killed if they refused.



Read more: http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=12364461

---

You may well remember articles on Ohio nun, who became a naturalized Brazilian citizen, when she was killed by ranchers' hitmen who wanted to take the land she meant to protect:

Published on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 by the Independent/UK
The Life and Brutal Death of Sister Dorothy, a Rainforest Martyr
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

by Andrew Buncombe

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.

As with the death of Mr Mendez, a rubber tapper, the murder of Sister Dorothy has triggered waves of outrage among environmental and human rights activists who say she dedicated her life to helping the area's poor, landless peasants and confronting the businesses that see the rainforest only as a resource to be plundered and which have already destroyed 20 per cent of its 1.6 million square miles.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0215-03.htm

[catgirl]

1. Thanks for posting this

[bulloney]

2. When Bush read this headline, he replied, "Brazillian farmer? That's a lot of farmers."

[happygoluckytoyou]

5. GOOD JOKE BUT NOT REALISTIC---WHO IS GOING TO BELIEVE BUSH READS

[Kajsa]

3. Crimes against the environment have now

escalated into crimes against humanity-murder.

Thanks for posting this, Judi.

[Judi Lynn]

11. So little reaches us on these situations.We get almost NOTHING of value from our news sources.

The fact this humanitarian, this martyr was an American is probably the only reason we ever heard about this hideous event.

There have been some hideous other murders of other people doing roughly the same work this brave woman tried to do, and we never really heard about them through our ordinary media which has all the time in the world to shoot photos up Britney whatever's dress when she goes out on the town with Paris Hilton, and all the time you could want hounding Bill Clinton for 8 years, but no time to treat even one important subject with the respect and attention it deserves.

At some point, the entire operation in this country is going to have to set some real priorities, wouldn't you think? Holy smokes.

In the meantime, it still makes one as sad and grief ridden about this assassination as the first time one ever heard about it. What an incredible shame for someone to lose a life simply because some people are so greedy they will KILL YOU if you get in their road.

[Kajsa]

15. That's it in a nutshell, Judi--

Greed!

It's really sad.

:(

[Blue_Tires]

17. +1

[Maestro]

4. Absolutely disgusting.

I hope the people who did this are caught and swiftly prosecuted. Horrifying!

[Judi Lynn]

10. There's good news about the prosecutions. Some people went to prison.

Brazilian guilty of US nun murder
A Brazilian rancher has been found guilty of killing US-born nun and environmental activist Dorothy Stang.
A court in the city of Belem sentenced Vitalmiro Bastos Moura, 36, to 30 years for paying gunmen to shoot the 73-year-old missionary dead in 2005.

Sister Dorothy campaigned for poor farmers' rights and to preserve the rainforest from loggers and developers.

Her murder followed a dispute with ranchers over land they wanted to clear for pasture and she wanted to protect.

'Justice done'

Judge Raymond Moises Alves Flexa imposed the maximum sentence.
(snip)

Prosecutors said Mr Moura had ordered Sister Dorothy's killing because she had sent letters to the local authorities accusing him of setting illegal fires to clear land, which led to him receiving a substantial fine.

The Ohio-born nun had lived in the remote town of Anapu for more than 20 years, helping peasant farmers defend their land.

She was found dead on a muddy track in February 2005, shot six times at close range.

Three men - two gunmen and an intermediary - have already been convicted for the killing, but this was the first trial of someone who ordered it.

Another rancher charged with ordering the killing goes on trial later in the year.

In the past 30 years, more than 1,000 people have been killed in land disputes in Brazil, the BBC's Brazil correspondent Gary Duffy says - more than 770 of those in the state of Para.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6659959.stm



Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura is seen during the second day of his trial at the Justice Tribunal in Belem, northern Brazil, Tuesday, May 15, 2007. Bastos de Moura is one of two ranchers accused of ordering the 2005 killing of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio. She was slain by six bullets at close range on a muddy patch of road deep in Para state in a dispute over land.(AP Photo/Andre Penner)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Brazil Man Guilty in Killing of US Nun
Tuesday May 15, 2007 9:01 PM
Guardian Unlimited

~snip~

During Monday's proceedings, lawyers for Moura accused Stang of inciting poor Brazilians to invade private property and of distributing to firearms to settlers.

``The charges against her are absurd,'' responded Stang's brother David, who flew from the United States with his twin brother Thomas to attend the trial.

He added: ``Her reputation is sterling. When she was alive they tried to called her a gunrunner, a witch, and that's why they killed her, because they couldn't make those charges stick.''

Moura is one of two ranchers accused of ordering Stang's killing in a conflict over land he wanted to log and develop.

``I had no participation whatsoever,'' Moura, told the judge in his opening statement Monday, adding that he did not even know Stang, who had been organizing poor settlers around the jungle town of Anapu for the last 23 years of her life.

Prosecutors and Stang's supporters said they had expected the convicted men to recant.

``They have already been convicted so they have nothing to lose. I believe they made a deal with the defendant but I don't think the jury will buy it because it's obviously a setup,'' said Jose Batista Afonso, a lawyer for the Catholic Church's Land Pastoral who is working as an assistant to prosecution.

Stang, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio, helped build schools and was among the activists who have tried to defend the rights of impoverished and often exploited farmers drawn to the Amazon region. She also attempted to halt the rampant jungle clearing by loggers and ranchers that has already ripped away some 20 percent of the forest cover.

More:
http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=stangtrialupdatemay2007

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Killer: Rayfran das Neves Sales


Amazon nun-killer says he was not paid for killing
By Andrew Hay
Reuters
December 9, 2005


BELEM, Brazil (Reuters) - The confessed killer of a 73-year-old American nun who defended the poor in Brazil's Amazon rain forest told a court on Friday he shot her in self-defense, not in a contract killing.

Raifran das Neves Sales told the court in the Amazon city of Belem that he killed the rain forest activist after mistaking her Bible for a gun, not in a contract killing as he had previously stated.

The ranch hand shot Dorothy Stang six times with a revolver on a jungle track in February. He and his employers had clashed with the activist as she set up a government reserve for peasants on land they claimed was theirs.

Stang worked for 30 years fighting for land rights for poor settlers in the Amazon.

"She said, 'The weapon I have is this,' and reached into her bag," said Neves Sales, adding that he thought Stang was going to pull out a gun when she was actually reaching for a Bible. He said he panicked, and kept on firing at her.

More:
http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1210-stang.html



Raifran das Neves Sales, gold shirt, Clodoaldo Carlos Batista to his left

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Joy at the verdict: 'Dorothy lives!'
Her spiritual legacy inspires good works, invites thoughts of sainthood
By Mary McCarty

Staff Writer

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

May 15, 2007

BELEM, Brazil — The realization sweeps over the courtroom in a cold rush: Someone has gotten to the witnesses.

Prosecutor Edson Cardoso is practically spitting with rage. It is bad enough that the triggerman, Rayfran das Neves Sales, has recanted his previous testimony implicating Bida, the rancher Vitamiro Moura.

His accomplice, Clodoaldo Carlos Batista, takes the stand and follows suit. "There are some things that are not the truth," he says defiantly.

Batista claims he falsified numerous previous statements because two FBI agents tortured him psychologically. The American agents forced the men to implicate Bida, he testifies, "because if they didn't, the American Army would come and get them."
(snip)

http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/content/oh/story/news/special-reports/2007/08/14/ddn081407stanginside.html
(Very interesting account from Dorothy Stang's home state paper)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Amair Feijoli da Cunha

Third man jailed for US nun death

A Brazilian court has sentenced a third man to a jail term for his part in the murder of a Catholic nun and peasants' rights activist, Dorothy Stang.
Amair Feijoli da Cunha, 38, acted as an intermediary between local ranchers and two men hired to kill the US-born nun.

Ms Stang's relatives welcomed the 18-year sentence but called for the two ranchers suspected of ordering the murder in the Amazon to go on trial.

Ms Stang campaigned against ranchers and big logging companies.

The 73-year-old from Dayton, Ohio, had spent the last 30 years of her life in the Amazon. She was found on a muddy track in the rainforest, shot six times, in February 2005.

The death followed a long-running dispute with ranchers over a patch of forest which they wanted to clear for pasture land, and Ms Stang wanted declared a sustainable development reserve.

Rayfran das Neves Sales has already been sentenced to 27 years in jail for shooting the nun. An accomplice, Clodoaldo Carlos Batista, was given 17 years in prison.

Courtroom allegations

During the day-long trial, Feijoli testified he offered money to the two convicted men to shoot the nun on the orders of two ranchers, Vitalmiro Moura and Regivaldo Galvao.

Both have been charged with involvement in the killing, but have yet to face trial. They deny the charges.
The jury rejected claims by the defence that Feijoli had been forced to hire the gunmen after the ranchers threatened his life.

Feijoli testified that:

• Mr Galvao told him: "Until we put an end to this woman, we won't have peace on these lands"
  
• Mr Galvao told him to offer $24,000 (£13,500) to kill Stang
  
• Mr Moura supplied the .38 calibre revolver used in the killing

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4949802.stm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Concerning another rancher,Regivaldo Pereira Galvao:

Suspect in Dorothy Stang murder trial set free
Court frees Stang murder suspect
BBC News, June 29 2006
**MORE NEWS BELOW**

Brazil's Supreme Court has freed a man awaiting trial on charges of orchestrating the murder of a Catholic nun and activist, Dorothy Stang.

In a three-to-two vote, the Court decided keeping Regivaldo Pereira Galvao in custody violated his rights.

The decision has been decried by the family and supporters of Ms Stang, who say he might abscond or try to intimidate witnesses.

Ms Stang spent 30 years campaigning for peasant rights and against logging.

The 73-year-old from Dayton, Ohio, was found on a muddy track in the rainforest, shot six times, in February 2005.

Testimony -

The death followed a long-running dispute with ranchers over a patch of forest which they wanted to clear for pasture land, and Ms Stang wanted declared a sustainable development reserve.

Three men have already been convicted over her murder - two gunmen and one intermediary.

During those trials testimony was given that Mr Galvao, along with another rancher Vitalmiro Moura, ordered and paid for Ms Stang to be killed. Both men have been charged but have yet to face trial.

Mr Galvao has been in custody pending trial since April 2005, but on Thursday Brazil's Supreme Court ruled his pre-trial imprisonment illegal and ordered his immediate release.

The judges threw out a previous ruling that his detention was necessary to preserve public order.

'Insult' -

"I am dumbfounded," Ms Stang's brother David Stang told the Associated Press news agency from his home in Colorado.

"This is a man whose involvement in the killing has been documented in a trial. There's no doubt about his duplicity.

"My sister loved Brazil, she loved the Amazon, she loved the constitution. This decision is an insult to her and to the family."

More:
http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=stangtrialjune06

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More on the other rancher:

~snip~
June 7, 2006 would have been Sister Dorothy Stang’s 75th birthday. This is the second birthday since she was brutally killed in Anapu. As time passes, we continue to fight for justice, following the example she set in the 39 years she lived among her beloved community of Brazilian landless farmers.

We were present when history was written on 26 April in Belém. Amair Feijoli da Cunha (“Tato”), the intermediary in Sister Dorothy’s murder, was brought to trial and received 18 years in prison for having hired the gunmen. We had previously applauded the Pará justice system for the admirable way in which the trial of the hired gunmen was handled in December 2005 and the severity of the sentences meted out. We were profoundly pleased by the April trial, feeling that it represented the dawning of a new day in Pará.

Now, however, we are alarmed at what appears to be the distinct possibility that justice will stall and impunity reign. What will define the presence or absence of impunity in this emblematic case will be whether those who ordered her murder are brought to trial promptly and due process is followed. Regivaldo Pereira Galvão, one of those who ordered the murder, currently awaits a response to his habeas corpus appeal from Minister César Peluzo of the Supremo Tribunal Federal.

If Regivaldo is granted his appeal and released, we feel he will undoubtedly leave Brazil or disappear internally and never stand trial for his role in Sister Dorothy’s assassination. There have been many examples in the past of similar situations and we fear that history will repeat itself. We are gravely concerned that if released, he will use his immense power to intimidate, physically harm, and/or murder the witnesses in the case.

Granting Regivaldo’s appeal will thwart justice and clearly demonstrate that impunity continues unabated in the Amazon. The only solution is to deny his appeal and to try him as soon as possible for his role in the assassination of Sister Dorothy. Brazil has both a moral and legal obligation to ensure that Regivaldo stands trial. There is ample evidence that Regivaldo was directly involved in planning and financing the crime, and certainly enough to keep him in custody pending trial. We heard the evidence in Tato’s testimony, in which he directly linked Regivaldo to the murder.

More:
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:_fk-TTkhJxQJ:www.rfkmemorial.org/legacyinaction/2001_GloboJustice/+%22Regivaldo+Pereira+Galvao%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us

[happygoluckytoyou]

6. leave us alone..... we are liberating brazil..... they will welcome us with orchids and kisses

they would also speak well of us from their podiums.... but they have no wood to build them

[tex-wyo-dem]

7. Thank you for posting this...

Tragic and disturbing. Mr. Machado, Sister Dorothy and Mr. Mendez are all heros in my book, putting their lives at risk for the greater good. May they rest in peace and may their lives inspire positive change for the Amazon.

What's happening in these regions of the Amazon are really no different than what happened in the American West 150 years ago. For instance, in my home state of Wyoming there was a period of time when powerful cattle barons were forcing out farmers and sheep ranchers in order to take over their land. Of course this would often end in murdered farmers and sheep ranchers, which would be used as warning to others to comply, leave, stay out and keep quiet.

As the old saying goes: History repeats itself.

[Judi Lynn]

13. A lot of American history has been swept under the rug, hasn't it?

It wasn't until I was very much beyond legal adulthood that I finally started learning about what REALLY has happened in this country to powerless people.

As it simply doesn't seem important enough to teach in school, all this vast sad heritage must be deliberately learned by individual initiative, as it didn't come with conventional education, not by a long shot.

Really quite the shame.

Books like this should be a great help, America, a Patriotic Primer, by Lynne Cheney, but then I'm clowning around!

[whistle]

8. Who specifically are backing the illegal loggers? Their activity must be

...financed by somebody. Just what are the uses of Amazon timber and trees and who profits? Identify that and we have the true criminals

[MercutioATC]

9. That's not the issue...it's the profit to be gained from illegal logging.

They're not "backed" by anybody, they're just poor...and one tree represents a month's wages for them.

The problem is that the only point at which to catch illegal logging is at the source. There's a legal (and booming) market for tropical hardwoods, and it's impossible to sort the legally-harvested trees (yes, there are tree plantations that do not destroy the rainforest) from the illegally-harvested trees.

[fascisthunter]

16. I Agree

[Acadia Blue]

18. Corporations. Souless evil corporations. They buy the logs. and

don't ask the source.

[Shoelace]

12. so sad, just saw her good works on CNN yesterday

or it might have been the night before. In any case, they showed how she helped introduce ways to get native tribes to make money in other ways besides cutting down trees.
They also showed her after she was shot and I have to say, that was one of the most gut wrenching things I've seen for a long time.
Somebody needs to get in there and stop the madness.

[Judi Lynn]

14. There's a very sad image of this in the lower right corner of the google images page,

http://images.google.com/images?q=Dorothy+Stang&ndsp=18&hl=en&safe=active&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-37,GGLD:en&start=72&sa=N

I'm sure you saw this image, only without the people standing around afterward.

This is absolutely beyond understanding, so far beyond, isn't it? Only a dedicated materialist would put himself first before all other considerations.

[Judi Lynn]

19. Man in Brazil contradicts testimony about gun in nun case

Man in Brazil contradicts testimony about gun in nun case
By MICHAEL ASTOR – 1 day ago

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — The confessed killer of American nun Dorothy Stang contradicted earlier testimony, claiming Monday the gun he used did not come from the rancher accused of ordering her murder.

Rayfran Neves Sales confessed to firing six shots at the 73-year-old nun at close range but denied he had received the gun from co-defendant Vitalmiro Moura, said court spokeswomen Gloria Lima by telephone from Belem, the capital of the Amazon state of Para. Sales said the gun was his own.
(snip)

In May 2007, Moura was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison, but as a first offender sentenced to more than 20 years in prison, he gets an automatic retrial under Brazilian law.

Sales is facing his third trial in the killing. In December, a panel of judges annulled his most recent conviction because two of the jurors had participated in an earlier trial of another defendant in the case. In 2005, Sales had been sentenced to 27 years in prison, a sentence upheld in October and then overturned.

Over the course of three trials and pretrial depositions, Sales has repeatedly changed his testimony, sometimes implicating Moura and at other times seeking to clear him. At his first trial in 2005, Sales stated that he shot Stang after mistaking a Bible she was pulling out of her bag for a gun.

Prosecutors say Sales was offered US$25,000 (euro16,200) to kill the nun because of a dispute over a patch of jungle that she wanted to preserve and ranchers wanted cut down for development. At his last trial, Sales claimed he was acting in self defense.

An accomplice, a middleman and a rancher also have been convicted in connection with the killing.

Another defendant, rancher Regivaldo Galvao, has so far managed to avoid trial through legal maneuvers before the country's Supreme Court.

Stang, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, has evoked comparisons to Chico Mendes, the rain forest defender killed in 1988 in the western Amazon state of Acre.

Human rights defenders say the prosecutions are a key measure of whether those behind land-related killings can be held accountable in Para state, which is plagued by land-related violence.

Land ownership is hard to trace in the Amazon, and powerful ranchers often resort to forged deeds and violence to drive poor settlers away.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gmfFWb8THLOU8A2vEtWvuGdMqGgQD90FM8NO0