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Brazilian troops trying to quell violence in Amazon About 2,000 Brazilian soldiers headed Wednesday to a lawless Amazon rainforest region where an American nun was shot to death last weekend amid escalating violence between peasants and loggers vying for the area's vast natural resource riches.
The troops were sent to restore order hours after thousands of people converged on this remote Amazon town to bury the bullet-riddled body of Dorothy Stang, the 73-year-old nun who was killed trying to defend the jungle where she had lived for decades.
As mourners paid their last respects to Stang, a peasant and a former union president were found shot to death in the rural state of Para, where Anapu is located.
The soldiers were mobilized by Vice President Jose Alencar, who is also Brazil's defense minister. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva cut short a visit to Suriname to return home and deal with the conflict.
Advocates for poor settlers in the region said the soldiers' presence will probably calm tensions for now. But they warned the violence in Para could easily spiral out of control again without solid steps to resolve the bitter disputes among settlers, land speculators and loggers and ranchers who hire gunmen to eliminate opponents.
"How long are these troops going to stay?" asked Bishop Tomas Balduino, president of the Roman Catholic Church-linked Land Pastoral group, which helps landless farmers throughout Brazil. "As soon as they leave, we'll be back in the same situation."
Hoping to restore order to an area where slave-labor and illegal logging is rife, the troops were to deploy in Anapu, Paraupebas and Altamira, a small city along the Trans-Amazon Highway about 59 miles from Anapu, the official Agencia Brasil news agency reported.
Environmentalists, however, were doubtful that the soldiers alone can solve the region's problems. They were recently angered when the government quietly restored some logging permits in Para after loggers and ranchers staged protests by blocking roads
"It's an emergency and the Army has to go in to guarantee security, but we have to resolve the root problems," said Nilo D'Avila, a coordinator for Greenpeace's Amazon Project.
In the latest attacks, assailants gunned down Daniel Soares da Costa, the former president of Rural Workers Union in Paraupebas, about 210 miles from Anapu. Police said they did not know if there was a connection between his death and Stang's.
In addition, a farmer was found shot to death in an area where Stang had been trying to establish a sustainable development project for poor Brazilians, according to the O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper.
The Amazon, which covers more than half the country, has for centuries been a source of pride and problems for Brazilians as they tried to manage a region where oversight is as difficult as travailing its overgrown and treacherous territory.
Brazil's 1964-85 military government built the Trans-Amazon Highway and gave people free land in an attempt to populate the region. The plan drew settlers from the arid northeast as well as land speculators who took control of much of the timber.
Stang, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio, was attacked Saturday in a settlement 30 miles from Anapu. A witness said she began to read from a Bible before being shot at close range six times by two gunmen.
The Amazon is also a battleground between poor residents and ecologists on the one hand, and the logging companies and wealthy ranchers who have steadily pushed deeper into the world's largest rain forest. Development, logging and farming has already destroyed as much as 20 percent of the Amazon's 1.6 million square miles.
Stang, a Dominican nun, spoke out against the destruction and warned that land speculators were arming themselves.
Police were searching for four suspects in her death: two hired gunmen, an intermediary and the man they say ordered the killing. |
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