Brazil: Suspect in US nun's killing ordered jailed

[Judi Lynn]

Brazil: Suspect in US nun's killing ordered jailed
2/4/2010, 6:28 p.m. EST
The Associated Press

(AP) — RIO DE JANERIO - A Brazilian court has ordered the jailing of a rancher accused of masterminding the 2005 killing of an American nun in the Amazon.

The court on Thursday denied a writ of habeas corpus for Vitalmiro Moura. He is one of two ranchers charged with ordering the murder of Dayton, Ohio, native Dorothy Stang over a land dispute.

Moura was convicted in 2007, but was acquitted on an automatic retrial in 2008. That acquittal was overturned on a technicality last April and Moura has been free pending the habeas corpus ruling.

His next trial is expected sometime this year.

More than 1,100 land activists across Brazil were killed in the last 20 years over land disputes.

http://www.silive.com/newsflash/international/index.ssf?/base/international-24/126533120863820.xml&storylist=international



Vitalmiro Moura

http://andressole.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2008/07/dorothy_stang.jpg http://marianist.com.nyud.net:8090/nlimages/stang-dorothy-v5-02.jpg

http://vocation-network.org.nyud.net:8090/images/cms-images/articles/2006/dorothy_stand_%20lead_3.jpg

Dorothy Stang

http://www.clubeletras.net.nyud.net:8090/blog/images/DorothyStangmorta.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com.nyud.net:8090/images/2005/02/13/international/brazil.184.1.jpg
Dorothy Stang Wikipedia:

Dorothy Mae Stang (July 7, 1931–February 12, 2005) was an American-born, Brazilian sister of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur order, who was murdered in Anapu, a city in the state of Pará, in the Amazon Basin of Brazil. Stang was outspoken in her efforts on behalf of the poor and the environment, and had previously received death threats from loggers and land owners.

~snip~
On the morning of February 12, 2005, Dorothy and Ciero woke up early to walk to a community meeting to speak about the rights for the Amazon. Ciero, the farmer Stang invited to the meeting, was going to be late because of some interruptions. As Ciero was a couple minutes away from Dorothy, he was able to see her but hid within the bushes from the two armed men. She progressed on and was blocked by the two men, Clodoaldo and Raifran. They asked if she had any weapons, and she claimed that the only weapon would be her bible. She then read a passage from the Beatitudes, "Blessed are the poor in spirit..." She continued a couple of steps but was suddenly stopped when Ciero called her, "Sister," as she was held at gun point by Raifran. As Clodoaldo approved of discharging at Dorothy, Raifran fired a round at Dorothy's abdomen. She fell face down on the ground. Raifran fired another round into Dorothy's back, then fired all four rounds into her head.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Stang

[Peace Patriot]

1. This is one of the saddest and most horrible stories from the movement to save the Amazon forest.

Sister Dorothy was one incredibly courageous woman!

Sister Dorothy (of the of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur order), born in Dayton, Ohio, USA, but a naturalized Brazilian citizen, worked as an advocate for the rural poor beginning in the early 1970s, helping peasants make a living by farming small plots and extracting forest products without deforestation. She also sought to protect them from criminal gangs who were after their land. Dot, as she was called by her family, friends and most locals in Brazil, is often pictured wearing a t-shirt with the slogan, "A Morte da floresta é o fim da nossa vida" which is Portuguese for "The death of the forest is the end of our life."

“I don't want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest. They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment." --Sister Dorothy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Stang

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I didn't know that 1,100 other land activists like Sister Dorothy--environmental workers and advocates of the poor in the Brazilian Amazon--had also been murdered.

The Amazon forest is one of our last bulwarks against catastrophic climate change--some of the last in tact forest cover on earth. The trees process CO2 out of the atmosphere. It is also one of richest pools of remaining biodiversity on the planet. This, in other words, is one of the last remaining remnants of the matrix of life from which all of us emerged, and that the hugely accelerated industrialization of the planet, over the last century, has placed in great peril. The very font of life on earth is being denuded and poisoned by our own thoughtless but understandable "progress." We love houses and bridges and great works, and cars and computers and refrigerators. And we are extremely clever at making these things and at manipulating the material world to our purposes. I pretty much love civilization myself. It is an awesome spectacle and one of the great talents of our species to reconfigure the elements of the earth and organize ourselves into places like Paris or Hong Kong. But it will all be over soon if we don't heed martyrs like Dorothy Stang. The World Wildlife Fund gives us 50 years, at current levels of pollution and consumption--50 years to the DEATH of Planet Earth! And that prediction was about ten years ago.

40 years! We have only 40 years to save ourselves, and our marvelous civilization and the few remaining critters and ecosystems that have survived industrialization thus far. We owe a great debt to the rare persons among us who have perceived this terrible truth, and have tried to warn us and have devoted their lives to doing something about it. Sister Dorothy doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would want vengeance for her murder. She saw justice in much larger terms. But in so far as specific justice for this crime helps deter other such crimes, and benefits the Amazon forest and its indigenous people, I hope it succeeds at accurately identifying and convicting the murderers and rehabilitating them--giving them every chance to redeem themselves--or, if that doesn't work, keeping them in jail to prevent them from harming others. As a Catholic nun, Sister Dorothy believed in redemption--for everyone. I hope the justice process in Brazil honors her beliefs. And I hope to God that her death continues to resonate throughout the world as a cry of alarm for the danger that we are all in from our own thoughtless destruction of Mother Earth.