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."
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