Two weeks ago, on Tuesday August 23, Brazil’s Supreme Court decided that rancher Regivaldo Pereira Galvão has the right to freedom until his appeal is heard. He left prison the following day.
Galvão is one of five men convicted in the assassination of Sister Dorothy Stang, a Catholic missionary who worked in the Anapú region of Brazil.
I had never heard of Stang before seeing her name mentioned briefly in an assigned reading about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, but one story I read compared her to Chico Mendes, a Brazilian rubber-tapper murdered in 1988. On the day of her death, she was working to save the Amazon rain forest by encouraging poor farmers to grow food on small plots of land, something she spent some 40 years doing. Large-scale ranchers hoped to purchase the land from the poor farmers, who were also dealing with fires and vandalism to their property.
On February 12, 2005, Stang was stopped on a pathway by Rayfran das Neves Sales and Clodoaldo Carlos Batista. She was returning home after delivering supplies to small farmers whose homes had just been burned down. She reportedly pulled out her bible and began reading passages from the Beatitudes.
They shot her six times.
das Neves Sales confessed to the shooting and was sentenced to 27 years in prison twice. (According to various sites, in Brazil, sentences longer than 20 years entitle convicts to a second trial.)
Clodoaldo Carlos Batista is serving out a 17-year sentence in which he sleeps in prison but works during the day.
In early testimony, das Neves told the courts that he received $25,000 from rancher Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura and a gun from rancher Regivaldo Pereira Galvão. His boss, Amair Feijoli da Cunha, was convicted as a middleman and will spend 18 years of nights sleeping in jail.
Vitalmiro Moura was convicted to 30 years.
Galvão was sentenced to 30 years in April 2010. He was freed after sentencing, when his lawyers filed an appeal. He was jailed again in 2011 after a state court ruled that he had to begin serving his sentence before the appeal process was finished. That’s the decision turned over by the Supreme Court last month.
Some 26,000 people are registered for the Sustainability Course I’m taking with https://www.coursera.org/, so Stang’s name is likely to become more familiar to many in the coming days.
If you’d like more information about Dorothy Stang, refer to the following sites:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/08/activists-alarmed-at-release-of-dorothy-stangs-murderer/
For information on deforestation in Brazil, refer to:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/09/landsat-captures-impact-of-def.html
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Deforestation_in_Amazonia
