Friends of Slain US Nun Vow to Press Brazil Fight
Date: 12-Dec-05
Country: BRAZIL
Author: Andrew Hay
But Stang's supporters said they were now ready to go after ranchers accused of offering the two men 50,000 reais ($22,000) to kill the activist, who blocked their advance on valuable, hard-wood rich rain forest.
"This is just the beginning, we'll be back" said Stang's sister Margaret, as land activists wept and hugged one another after the two-day trial in the Amazon city of Belem, the capital of Para state.
Three ranchers accused of ordering and planning the slaying are fighting their case through Brazil's appeal courts.
"They're going to think twice about threats and assassinations from now on," said Jose Amaro, a Catholic priest and land activist who worked closely with Stang in Anapu, and has received death threats since her murder.
Public prosecutors said the rancher accused of masterminding the murder, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, should face trial in the first half of next year.
Late Saturday, Raifran das Neves Sales was sentenced to 27 years' imprisonment for shooting the 73-year-old Stang as she defended peasant settlers.
Clodoaldo Carlos Batista, an illiterate farm worker, was sentenced to 17 years for acting as an accomplice in the Feb. 12 killing. They had faced maximum sentences of 30 years.
A native of Dayton, Ohio, Stang had spent the last 30 years fighting for peasant land rights and the environment. She died setting up a federal reserve meant to allow poor families to grow crops in the rain forest without chopping it down.
FEW CONVICTIONS
In Para, a rainforest state twice the size of France, 772 land activists have been gunned down in the last 30 years, but only nine killers had been convicted before Saturday. Stang was murdered near the remote town of Anapu.
Para landowners, and their defenders, say the elderly nun was a left-wing militant who encouraged peasants to illegally occupy private property and acquire guns.
Sales said he shot Stang in self-defense after he thought she was going to pull a pistol out of her bag when he and Batista confronted her on a jungle road.
Batista, Sales' co-defendant and a witness, said she pulled out a bible and read verses from Matthew before Sales raised a .38 revolver and shot her six times.
The United Nations and Brazil's federal government hailed the trial as a first step toward ending corruption and impunity that drives Amazon violence.
Many see the ranchers' conviction as the real test of whether Brazil is serious about prosecuting powerful landholders accused of sponsoring assassinations.
A Brazilian Senate investigation into the crime said killings would not stop until the government broke up a support network of citizens, police and judges who allegedly turn a blind eye, or defend extra-judicial killings.
"This is the start, now we're going to get the masterminds," said Senator Ana Julia Carepa of the ruling Workers' Party, who led the probe.
But some still doubted whether the national or state government would go after ranchers and loggers, who drive over half the state's economy.
"The justice system may just stop here and say they've done it, they've got the killers," said Jane Dwyer, a fellow nun who lived with Stang in Anapu before her death
