A man who admitted gunning down the American nun Dorothy Stang on Friday told the court in the Amazonian city of Belem he was ordered to "kill the old woman" by a local farmer.
Stang, a 74-year-old activist who dedicated her life to defending the rural workers of Para in northern Brazil, was shot six times in February near the town of Anapu.
About 1,000 rural workers crowded outside the court on Friday morning as two men accused of the murder went on trial. Rayfran das Neves Sales, accused of firing the shots that killed the nun, told a packed courtroom how Amair Feijoli da Cunha, a farmer also known as Tato, had pressured him into the execution.
Prosecutors believe the pistoleiro (hired gun) and his sidekick Clodoaldo Carlos Batista -- who yesterday appeared at the court wearing bullet-proof vests -- were offered 50,000 Brazilian reals (US$22,354) to assassinate the American nun. They say local farmers, who opposed the nun's attempts to claim land for impoverished rural workers, were behind the murder.
If found guilty by the seven jurors, Sales and Batista face up to 30 years in jail.
The verdict was expected yesterday.
Activists fear those the suspects allege were really responsible for the murder -- the powerful farmers said to have contracted the killers -- may never face justice.
Colleagues say Sister Dorothy constantly denounced the violence against rural workers and human rights activists to Brazil's public prosecutor and government officials. Two weeks before her death she told Nilmario Miranda, then Brazil's human rights minister, of the death threats activists were receiving in Para.
Jax Pinto, a coordinator from the Catholic church's Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) who had worked with Stang for the past six years, said: "We need to prove in this trial that it was a contract killing and that there was money involved."
"If we don't do this we will never manage to convict the [crime's] real authors," he said
He pointed out that over the past 30 years only six landowners have been brought to trial for similar crimes.
The trial comes amid growing concern over levels of rural violence in the region.
As the UN representative Hina Jilani arrived in Brazil this week to assess the situation of human-rights activism in the country, a new report claimed 772 rural workers and human-rights defenders were killed in Para over the past 30 years. The CPT study named 51 people on the hit-list of the region's landowners. Eighteen people have been killed in the region this year as a result of land disputes.
"Unfortunately nothing has changed [since Stang's death]," Pinto said.
"There are others who are now being threatened and as long as the question of land is not resolved this will continue," he added.
Pinto described parts of Para as a "no-man's land."
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS