Amazon nun-killer sentenced to 30 years in Brazil

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Amazon nun-killer sentenced to 30 years in Brazil
mongabay.com
May 15, 2007

Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, a Brazilian rancher charged with ordering the killing of Dorothy Stang, an American nun, in the Amazon rainforest in February 2005, was convicted today of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Moura and another rancher were charged in April 2005 with hiring gunmen to kill Stang, 73, because of her work helping the rural poor defend their land from ranchers and loggers in the Amazon state of Para in Brazil.

Stang, an Ohio native who spent more than 30 years fighting for land rights for poor settlers in the Amazon, was shot six times with a revolver by Raifran das Neves Sales, a farmhand. Das Neves Sales confessed to his crime and was convicted last December. He, his partner and another man convicted of hiring them are in prison in Para.

Dorothy Stang, 1931 - 2005

Stang, a member of the Order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, was working with the Pastoral Land Commission, a Catholic Church group that lobbies for land reform in Brazil and fights for land rights for the poor, when she was gunned down.

Stang's murder came to be a tipping point in the heated battle between the rural poor and large landowners in the state of Para. The federal government responded to her killing by sending several thousand armed troops into the state. Later Brazil established several protected areas in contested forests and proposed a land-use permit system for selling concession to loggers who agreed to set side land for settlers and indigenous groups, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The Amazon is Earth's largest rainforest. Some scientists estimate that perhaps 30 percent of the world's land species are found in the Amazon. The bulk of Amazon rainforest is found in Brazil, which today houses about one-third of the world's remaining rainforests.

Rayfran das Neves Sales, is seen in a video which shows how he killed nun Dorothy Stang during a trial at Justice Tribunal in Belem, Brazil, on Friday, Dec 9, 2005. Rayfran das Neves Sales and Cloadoaldo Carlos Batista will be the first of five men accused in the killing to stand trial for the Feb. 12 killing of 73-year-old nun gunned down in the remote corner of the Amazon rainforest in a dispute over land. Dorothy Stang spent the last 30 years of her life defending poor settlers in the Amazon rain forest. She was shot near the remote jungle town of Anapu in a dispute over a patch of forest that a local rancher wanted to cut down.(AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

An area almost certainly exceeding 600,000 square kilometers (232,000 square miles), or about 15 percent of its total surface area of 4,005,082 square kilometers, has been cleared in the Amazon since 1970, when only 2.4 percent of the Amazon's forests had been lost. The increase in Amazon deforestation in the early 1970s coincided with the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, which opened large forest areas to development by settlers and commercial interests. In more recent years, growing populations in the Amazon region, combined with increased viability of agricultural operations, have caused a further rise in deforestation rates. Since the close of the 1990s, annual deforestation rates of primary forest cover in Brazil have climbed by more than a third, though since 2004, deforestation rates have fallen by more than half thanks to government initiatives and economic forces.

This article used information from Bloomberg, Reuters, the Associated Press, and previous mongabay.com articles.

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CITATION:
mongabay.com (May 15, 2007). Amazon nun-killer sentenced to 30 years in Brazil. http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0515-stang.html

Tags:
illegal logging rainforest destruction threats to the rainforest timber logging cattle ranching Amazon Deforestation poverty alleviation rainforests deforestation agriculture brazil Environmental Law environmental heroes environment green

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