Pará - Business as Usual

This article by Larry Rohter is distressing:

At the jungle hamlet called Good Hope, faith in a better, safer future is fading. Seven months after the American nun who organized the settlement was shot to death, the conflicts over land ownership that led to her killing not only remain unresolved but are intensifying, Roman Catholic church leaders and peasant residents here maintain.

Dorothy Mae Stang, 74, born in  Dayton, Ohio, who belonged to the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, is buried at the spot on the rutted road where on a Saturday morning in February gunmen opened fire, shooting her several times in the chest.

But the Brazilian government's pledges to make land distribution fairer while it establishes its own authority in this violence-ridden corner of the Amazon have proved hollow.

Though army troops sent here after Sister Dorothy's killing still patrol the region, they are doing little to protect peasant settlers from the ranchers and loggers who are trying to push them off valuable land.

The government's own land-reform agency complains of being handcuffed and still short of money and personnel, and local Catholic church leaders contend that even the legal proceedings in Sister Dorothy's case have failed to apprehend several of those involved.

"Everything continues as if nothing had happened," said Bishop Erwin Krautler of the Xingu, as this region straddling the Trans-Amazon Highway is known.

Early this month, representatives of an army unit sent in August to survey the boundaries of every plot of land in the region by year's end met here with leaders of peasant and religious groups. Gabriel Domingos do Nascimento, a leader of the local peasants' union, asked that the army be more assertive in going after the hired guns who since the 1980's have killed more than a dozen priests, nuns and community leaders and driven scores of peasant families off the small plots of land they have carved from the jungle. "It's been like this for 30 years, and we can't stand it any more," he said. "We're desperate. Even with the army here, the land invasions and the deforestation continue."

The state of Pará is, to put it mildly, a cesspool of corruption and a hotbed of coronelismo. Rich landowners rule with impunity, peasants are massacred and as recently as last month, 79 people were liberated from debt slavery.

It was disgraceful enough that it took the death an American nun to get the Brazil's federal authorities motivated to do something about the situation in Pará, but unless things change in Pará, Dorothy Stang's death will surely have been in vain.