A martyr for the Amazon

LATIN AMERICA

Dorothy Stang

Feb 17th 2005 SÃO PAULO
From The Economist print edition

The land battles behind a murder

“DO YOU know what a sobbing monkey sounds like?” Dorothy Stang once demanded of a group of state legislators. She knew, because she had heard monkeys screaming as their habitat was being burnt down. Sister Dorothy, an American nun, had befriended the forest, its wildlife and, especially, poor migrants eking out a living in the Brazilian Amazon. She thus made enemies of loggers and land grabbers, for whom nature and the poor are obstacles. On February 12th she was murdered in Anapu, a district along the Trans-Amazon highway in Pará state where she had worked for 20 years.

Her death has provoked as much shock and grief as the slaying in 1988 of Chico Mendes, who led a struggle by rubber tappers to be able to harvest the forest without destroying it. Yet the Amazon produces an incessant flow of martyrs, most quickly forgotten. Of the 1,349 deaths in land conflicts in Brazil between 1985 and 2003, more than a third were in Pará, according to the Comissão Pastoral da Terra, a group linked to the Catholic Church.

Behind the violence is a toxic mixture: land is cheap but potentially valuable, its ownership uncertain and the state impotent. In Anapu, for example, in the 1970s the then-military government, eager to develop the Amazon, doled out land-use rights. Most did nothing productive, so the government reclaimed the land. In the 1990s Anapu attracted poor migrants, some fleeing land wars in southern Pará. These became Sister Dorothy's flock. She campaigned to obtain land for them and preached that earning a livelihood and conserving the forest could be reconciled.

They were making progress. Some 400 families had settled on land that INCRA, the federal land-reform agency, has earmarked for “sustainable development projects”, in which 80% of the land would stay as forest. But the former beneficiaries, or people who thought they had bought the rights from them, continued to covet an area that is flat, stocked with high-value timber and close to a main road. There were at least ten disputes over land ownership in the settlement where two men shot Sister Dorothy.

Stung by accusations that it had ignored death threats against her, the federal government promised to punish the killers (a rare event) and sent 2,000 troops to the area. But that does not amount to the steady rule of law needed to curb violence and rampant deforestation. Federal and state governments lack both the determination and the resources to supply this. Roberto Smeraldi, of the Brazilian branch of Friends of the Earth, detects “a lot of goodwill” but “very little” action in the two years since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became Brazil's president.
The government roused itself late last year, suspending logging licences and demanding that landholders prove their title, an attempt to bring order to the Amazon's Wild-West property market. Loggers and land-grabbers mobilised, blocking a main road and threatening to poison rivers. This month the government retreated, reinstating the licences and lifting the deadline for re-registering property.

But Sister Dorothy's murder may have been, in part, a backlash against progress. Two “extractive reserves” of the sort championed by Chico Mendes were recently created near Anapu, one of them the “largest area of sustainable use on the planet”, says Nilo D'Avila of Greenpeace, an NGO. And land reform is at last taking hold in Anapu. Land-grabbers “were feeling cornered,” thinks Ana Paula Santos Souza of Fundação Viver, Produzir e Preservar, an NGO in Pará. Sister Dorothy's work may yet outlive her.

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