'Brazil is not a no-man's land'

2005-02-23 15:08

Brasilia - Brazil's president says that loggers upset with the government's efforts to save the Amazon jungle from destruction are behind the brutal murder of an American nun, gunned down for defending the rain forest and its poor settlers.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Tuesday blamed loggers for the February 12 killing of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang, who wanted to turn part of the eastern Amazon into a Sustainable Development Project, a protected area that residents could develop only if they preserved the environment.

"It was planned by some businessmen of the logging sector revolted by our policies" in the state of Para, Silva said in a speech in Mato Grosso state.

"We're going to put an end to this practice of businessmen ... hiring gunmen and killing organised rural workers. Brazil is not a no-man's-land," the president said.

So far, three of the four suspects in Stang's murder had been arrested - the two alleged gunmen and the man police said hired them.

Man who ordered the killing still free

Police spokesperson Walrimar Santos said Vitalmiro Goncalves de Moura, the rancher who reportedly ordered the killing, was still at large and that he has been formally charged with murder.

He said police found one of the two weapons used in the murder - a .38 calibre revolver - on a ranch owed by Moura in Anapu, near where Stang was killed. He said the gun would be submitted to ballistics tests.

Moura's lawyers were negotiating his surrender to police, the government news service Agencia Brasil said.

Moura's arrest should close the case, said Nilmario Miranda, the nation's Human Rights secretary.

Stang, a naturalised Brazilian, spent the last two decades of her life living in Para, trying to protect the rain forest and peasants from loggers and ranchers vying for the area's rich natural resources.

"She stepped on many toes," Environment Minister Marina Silva said Tuesday. "She and her Sustainable Development Projects angered many people."

She said Stang's murder was ordered to "intimidate those individuals committed to the sustainable development of the Amazon region."

The head of a congressional investigation into contract killings said Stang was the victim of a private militia.

The Pastoral Land Commission, linked to the powerful Roman Catholic church, said that Para was the site of 40% of the 1 237 killings in land conflicts reported in Brazil in the past 30 years.

The backdrop to the killing is the devastation of the Amazon, the world's largest wilderness that covers more than half the country and sprawls over 4.14 million square kilometres.

Some experts estimated that 20% of the Amazon has been destroyed to make cattle pasture, to plant crops or to log precious hardwoods - mahogany, ipe and massaranduba.

- AP