Nuns face guns, impunity in trying to save Amazon

While hundreds of activists trying to save the rain forest have been murdered, only one killer has been imprisoned

By Bradley Brooks
AP , CARLINDA, BRAZIL
Sunday, Apr 04, 2010, Page 9

The gunmen arrived in the Amazon dusk, circling the house where Sister Leonora was hiding, rifles and pistols poking out the windows of three muddy pickup trucks.

A violent death was meant for the diminutive 64-year-old Roman Catholic nun, who has spent decades defending poor, landless workers — and collecting countless threats from ranchers she blocked from stealing Amazon land.

Leonora Brunetto faced the fate of Brazil’s renowned rain forest protector Chico Mendes and US nun Dorothy Stang, whose accused killer is scheduled for retrial on Wednesday in the jungle city of Belem.

But before the gunmen could put her among the 1,200 activists, small farmers, judges, priests and others killed over preserving the rain forest since Mendes’ murder in 1988, a car full of landless workers pulled up to defend Brunetto ...

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2010/04/04/2003469702

When I read the article, it sounds more like a dispute between landless poor trying to use the land and rich farmers trying to take it for themselves. I don't believe either would be good for the Amazon; although it's easy to understand poor people being more concerned about their own survival than the survival of the Amazon.

nor is it as if the process of land appropriation that began with the conquest had been completed long ago

The wounded, the losers, the robbed sing their tales

There have been people there who used the land in non-"modern" ways and have been dispossessed: it is not as if no one ever farmed this land in the past; temporary farming of small plots is ancient

The power of industrial civilization, including its mass-produced weapons and technology that allows thoughtless and complete annihilation of the forest through resource extraction, is brought against people who cannot simply walk out and be heard in corporate boardrooms or in the councils of government, who have no control over the media or the military, who cannot buy themselves a voice because they do not really own any sector of the economy