PHA-Exchange> Brazil declares forest havens after nun's killing

[Claudio]

>Saturday February 19 2005
>The Guardian
>
>The Brazilian government has ordered the creation of two vast conservation areas in the Amazon, only days after an elderly American nun who tried to protect the region from soybean farmers and loggers was shot dead.
 It has taken last weekend's murder of Dorothy Stang, 74, and the international outcry that followed to make  the conservation area to be declared.  It is an area coveted by loggers and ranchers.  
>
>Sister Dorothy, of the order of Notre Dame de Namur, was an activist with the Catholic church's Pastoral Land Commission, CPT, which campaigns to stop violence against peasants in the many land disputes that have followed the opening up of the Amazon region.  
>
>Her killing caused public outrage, but it was only one of 125 murders of peasant leaders and activists since President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office three years ago.  
>
>Many Brazilian non-government organisations and social movements have increased pressure on the government to take a stand against the "criminal groups" seizing public lands in the Amazon and to put official plans for environmental protection into practice.  
>
>There is evidence that the predatory expansion into the Amazon is being fuelled by growing demand for Brazilian timber, beef and soybeans on the international market.  
>
>The result of this continuing push into the Amazon has been a steady increase in deforestation. The carbon emissions from forest fires have transformed Brazil - which signed the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas controls, and has traditionally relied on hydroelectric power - into one of the world's top 10 polluters.  
>
>President Lula da Silva has reacted swiftly to Sister Dorothy's murder, flying in federal troops. However, one local cattle ranchers' leader, Francisco Alberto de Castro, described the elderly nun as an "agitator" who created problems and who was "to blame for her own death". 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://phm.phmovement.org/pipermail/phm-exchange-phmovement.org/attachments/20050220/4f87c766/attachment-0001.html>