Death in the rainforest

Sister Dorothy Stang, a champion of the poor and the environment, was shot at point-blank range. Picture / Reuters

The Dominican nun lived among those who wanted her dead. When they finally came she read passages from the Bible to her killers. They listened for a moment, took a few steps back and fired at her from point-blank range. Her body was 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 the number of shops selling chainsaws. Sister Dorothy Stang called it home for more than 30 years and organised her efforts to try to protect the rainforest and its people from disastrous, often illegal, exploitation by logging firms and ranchers. Now Anapu will be known as the place where she is buried.

The 74-year-old activist was laid to rest on Monday after being assassinated by two gunmen on Saturday at a remote encampment in the jungle about 50km from town. Sister Dorothy - the most prominent activist to be murdered in the Amazon since the killing of 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," says Nilde Sousa, an official with a local women's group who worked with her.

The murder has triggered outrage among the activist community, who say she dedicated her life to helping the area's landless peasants and confronting the businesses that saw the rainforest purely as a resource to be plundered and which have already destroyed 20 per cent of its 4 million square kilometres.

It has also highlighted the Brazilian Government's problem of balancing a desire to protect the rainforest with pressure to open tracts of forest to support strong economic growth as the International Monetary Fund demanded after lending Brazil billions of dollars following a recession in 2002.

Such a conflict of interests has hindered attempts to fulfil the promise of left-leaning President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to find homes for 400,000 landless families. The promise is badly off-target and showing no signs of rapid improvement.

The President immediately ordered a investigation into Sister Dorothy's death and dispatched two members of his cabinet to the region, an area notorious for violence, crime and slave labour. Nilmario Miranda, the Government's secretary for human rights, said before setting off: "Solving this crime and apprehending those who ordered and committed it is a question of honour for us. This is intolerable."

Sister Dorothy was in the Boa Esperanca settlement when she was killed. She was travelling with two peasants to a meeting about an area apparently granted to peasants by the federal Government but sought by loggers. The two men travelling with her escaped unhurt.

Arrest warrants have been issued for four suspects - two gunmen, a man who allegedly hired them and a rancher accused of ordering the murder, officials say. No arrests have been made.

Though the local people called her Dora or "the angel of the Trans-Amazonian", loggers and other opponents called her a "terrorist" and accused her of supplying guns to peasants. The Pastoral Land Commission of the Catholic Church, for which she worked, says: "The hatred of ranchers and loggers respects nothing. The reprehensible murder of our sister brings back to us memories of a past we had thought was closed."

Sister Dorothy was originally from Dayton, Ohio. Her beliefs took her to Brazil in the 1960s and it was in the vast Para region, which encompasses large tracts of the rainforest, that she found her calling, despite the obvious dangers she faced.

Just two weeks ago, Sister Dorothy met Miranda and told him of the death threats she and others had received and asked for the Government's help and protection.

Sister Elizabeth Bowyer, a senior nun at the Cincinnati convent, says "she knew she was on the death list. She said she would be protected because of her age and because she was a nun - she was wrong.

"We don't know who hired the gunmen but we know the loggers and ranchers were upset by what she was doing. She was working with the human rights people to protect the small farmers who have been given the right to the land."

The stakes could not be higher. Greenpeace estimates 90 per cent of Para's timber is illegally logged. Campaigners say Para has the country's highest rate of deaths related to land battles. Greenpeace says more than 40 per cent of murders between 1985 and 2001 were related to such disputes.

Brazilian human rights group Justica Global says 73 rural workers were murdered in 2003, 33 in Para. Last year 53 were killed, 19 in Para. "The Government is simply not giving adequate protection," says the group's director, Sandra Carvalho. "We think its actions in the region are extremely weak. The Government put together a programme to deal with these problems but it is being carried out at such a slow pace.

"The Government has not managed to carry out the land reforms it spelled out before coming to power. There is constant conflict with few convictions because there is a culture of impunity. Generally these conflicts involve landowners and landless rural workers. Dora was killed because she stood up to these people."

And yet this fight appeared to energise the sprightly 74-year-old. Samuel Clements, 24, a British student film-maker who spent the summer of 2003 filming Sister Dorothy's work, says she seemed to become more animated once she left dusty Anapu and travelled into the jungle to meet small farmers and peasants. As well as fighting to preserve the rainforest she was encouraging small-scale, sustainable agriculture.

In a letter to Clements, she wrote: "Our forest is being overtaken by the others daily ... Together we can make a difference." Clements believes she may have had a premonition of her fate but still looked for the best in people. "She said once, 'Humanity is like a fruit bowl, with all the different fruit - black, white and yellow - so different and yet all part of it'. She had incredible energy."

Lucio Flavio Pinto, an investigative journalist in the region who produces the weekly newspaper Jornal Pessoal, knew Sister Dorothy since the 1970s. He has campaigned against the same people and has received threats. "There were many people who wanted to kill Sister Dorothy," he says.

Sister Dorothy's body was taken to the state capital, Belem, on Sunday for a post-mortem examination. Dozens of supporters gathered outside the mortuary singing hymns and holding placards calling for an end to rampant crime. Claudio Guimaraes, director of the state's forensic science institute, says it appears the gunmen were about 46cm away from Sister Dorothy when they shot her.

Those who worked with the nun, promise the effort she undertook will continue. "We won't step back even one millimetre from our projects in Para because of this," says Mariana Silva, president of Brazil's National Institute for Settlement and Agrarian Reform. "They want to intimidate us but they won't succeed."

- Independent