THE SECOND DEATH OF DOROTHY STANG

[Judi Lynn]

Emboldened by Bolsonaro, Land-Hungry Ranchers Are Destroying a Pioneering Project to Help the Poor and Save the Amazon

Sílvia Lisboa
November 24 2019, 11:01 p.m.

ON THE MORNING of February 12, 2005, American missionary Dorothy Stang was walking by the side of the road in the Brazilian Amazon when she was approached by two gunmen. She was alone. But she shouldn’t have been.

Doti, as she was known, had been receiving death threats since the early 2000s. The 73-year-old Catholic nun, born in Dayton, Ohio, arrived in Brazil in 1966. At the time of her death, she was fighting for a program that set aside land for poor families, giving them a guaranteed income so long as they preserved the forest. The settlements, known as Sustainable Development Projects (or PDS, their Portuguese acronym), prospered for a decade after Stang’s murder. But now, the program runs the risk of collapsing, with the forest and settlers under threat and undefended by the Brazilian government. The situation has worsened under President Jair Bolsonaro, who, since taking office this January, has set about dismantling Brazil’s forest protection programs as part of an all-out assault on the environment.

Bolsonaro’s hostility to environmental efforts has quickly become his signature. In its first eight months, his government suspended agrarian reform efforts, paralyzed IBAMA — the agency in charge of enforcing laws against deforestation — and canceled an international preparatory meeting for COP25, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. His minister of foreign affairs is a climate change denier, and his minister of agriculture is notorious for loosening regulations on dangerous pesticides. This summer, the world watched, appalled, as fires — some of them started by ranchers and loggers who support Bolsonaro — laid waste to swaths of the Amazon.

Yet long before Bolsonaro’s rise, Stang’s philosophy clashed with the local culture in the Brazilian Amazon, where powerful ranchers view deforestation as the only path to economic prosperity. They see trees as valuable lumber and soil as space for cattle and soybeans. Stang wanted to counter the false dilemma presented by agribusiness, by offering an alternative economic model for the forest. But today, clear-cutting, land-hungry ranchers occupy the PDS settlements she founded and are pushing to terminate the entire project.

The ranchers have found ways to invade the lots set aside as PDS settlements, circumventing monitoring mechanisms and packing government agencies with political allies. “Land-grabbers,” or grileiros (a term that comes from an old practice of storing fake deeds in a box with a cricket, or grilo, whose feces would stain the papers yellow and make them look authentically aged), threatened Stang before her death and continue to menace those who are trying to uphold her legacy. Last year, Stang’s successor, Father José Amaro Lopes, was jailed for three months on charges that his supporters say were aimed at silencing him and his work on land rights and forest protection.

On February 11, 2005, the day before Stang’s encounter with the gunmen, she had a meeting with settlers at PDS Esperança (“hope” in Portuguese), one of the projects she helped create. The site is next to a highway and known for its abundant cocoa production. She should have been accompanied by police or officials from the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, or INCRA, the Brazilian agency responsible for managing areas dedicated to land reform. At the last minute, however, INCRA didn’t send anyone with her. Stang decided to attend the meeting anyway.

More:
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/25/amazon-bolsonaro-dorothy-stang-brazil/