🌳 Remembering Sister Dorothy Stang

If you have any questions about this newsletter, or topics you’d like to see covered in future issues, you can reach us at [email protected]

The unfinished struggle of Sister Dorothy Stang

Twenty years ago this week, 73-year-old Catholic nun Dorothy Stang was murdered in broad daylight in the remote town of Anapú, in the Brazilian Amazon. She was killed for defending the rainforest and fighting for land rights, a cause that remains as urgent as ever.

In remembrance of the 20 years of her death, Sister Dorothy has been included in a memorial for modern martyrs in Rome's Basilica of St. Bartholomew, alongside saints Óscar Romero and Charles de Foucauld. She is the first woman from the United States to have her relics added to the shrine, which include a small container of blood-soaked soil from the site of her murder and one of her sweaters.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, and later naturalized as a Brazilian citizen, Sister Dorothy inspired a generation of environmental activists with her vision of sustainable agrarian settlements. But despite her hard work and her sacrifices, many of the concrete aspects of her legacy are being eroded in what remains a highly contested and violent part of Brazil.

PDSs not serving their purpose

At the heart of Sister Dorothy’s work in the Brazilian Amazon was the creation of Sustainable Development Projects (PDSs), agrarian settlements designed to balance low-impact farming with forest preservation. Formally established in 1999, these projects gave migrant families plots of land to farm, on the condition that the majority of the native forest therein remained intact.

“The idea was to mix annual crops with perennial crops,” said Sister Jean Ann Bellini, coordinating director of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic Church-affiliated organization. “It was a good solution for the Amazon; you’re modifying the forest environment with the annual crops, but it's not such a drastic change. And Dorothy was so enthused by this idea.”

These settlements eventually became regulated PDSs, largely thanks to Sister Dorothy’s insistence and hard work lobbying public authorities. At the time of her murder in 2005, less than a dozen PDSs existed; after her death and the international commotion that surrounded it, these settlements were set up all over the Amazon. More than a hundred exist today.

But Sister Dorothy’s original mission behind these settlement projects has been undermined. Investigative news outlet Agência Pública, using data from MapBiomas, showed a total of 496,000 hectares (about 1,900 square miles) of deforestation in 94 of Brazil’s PDSs between 2005 and 2023.

The percentage of PDS land used for cattle ranching rose to 22.27% in the same period. All land in Brazil’s Amazon must, by law, preserve at least 80% of its natural vegetation — the PDSs have failed to hit even that baseline requirement. In some settlements, more than 50% of the forest has already been chopped down.

The problem, Sister Jean told The Brazilian Report, lies in conflicting visions among settlers. Some of the families embraced the idea of sustainable forestry, while others merely wanted land to tend to as they pleased, creating two conflicting models of how to work the land in these regions.

“It’s a difficult fight, because those annual crops give you a yearly income, while perennial crops can take some years to start producing,” she said. “The group that wanted to just clear everything, plant yearly crops and raise cattle, they began gaining the backing of weather landowners, who would eventually buy their lots and turn them into ranches.”

Environmental policy researchers complain that the PDS program was never properly implemented, with agrarian settlers not fully given legal security over their plots, and often left exposed to land-grabbers amid a lack of consistent support from the State — largely due to the national agrarian reform institute Incra being spread too thin after decades of underfunding.

In such precarity, it can be difficult keeping the settled families on these projects. “Let’s say a member of their family gets sick, and the nearest hospital doesn’t have the medicine or equipment to treat their ailment, that family might end up selling their lot and going in search of that treatment,” explained Sister Jean — and there is no shortage of landowners ready to buy up these territories.

Sister Dorothy’s life and death in Anapú

Anapú emerged from the Brazilian military dictatorship’s construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway in the 1970s. As part of the regime’s goals of occupying the vast, untouched Amazon, it handed out cheap and provisional land deeds for the areas on either side of the main road to migrants and businessmen who wanted them.

The only condition of these deeds in towns such as Anapú was that these lands had to become productive, which never happened — and which should have seen them given back to the State. What happened instead, is that these failed pioneers sold their territories to loggers, who began chopping down the forest.

Dorothy Stang, a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, arrived in Brazil as a missionary in 1966 and moved to Anapú in 1982. Working with the CPT, her fight, from the moment she arrived to when she was murdered, was that these lands should be used for agrarian reform.

For decades, she worked tirelessly to denounce land-grabbing, deforestation and other crimes against the environment and rural workers. She would famously travel hundreds of miles, by herself, to the headquarters of government agencies and prosecutors, in order to deliver her complaints, letters and petitions.

On February 12, 2005, gunman Rayfran das Neves Sales and his accomplice Clodoaldo Carlo Batista ambushed Sister Dorothy. Realizing her fate, she recited the Gospel of Matthew: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Rayfran shot Sister Dorothy six times.

Investigators concluded that land-grabbers Vitalmiro “Bida” Bastos de Moura and Regivaldo “Taradão” Galvão ordered the hit, with Amair Feijoli da Cunha serving as an intermediary.

Today, only Rayfran, the trigger man, remains behind bars. And Anapú remains one of the most violent cities in the Brazilian Amazon. Since Sister Dorothy’s brutal assassination, another 21 rural workers and environmental activists have been murdered there, with none of the perpetrators convicted.

Dangers for environmental activists in Brazil

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2024 ranks Brazil as the world’s second most dangerous country for environmental activists — which makes for disheartening reading particularly considering the list of high-profile killings of Amazon defenders over recent decades, from Chico Mendes and Dorothy Stang to Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips.

Despite the grim outlook, Sister Jean sees signs of progress. “Over the years, the CPT has worked to strengthen local movements, emphasizing that behind every environmental activist, there’s a community.”

That, she explained, is partly down to these activist communities learning methods of self-protection and avoiding unnecessary exposure. Examples of such strategies include always traveling in groups, alternating who speaks first at hearings and public events, and generally trying not to overexpose a single person. 

“If Dorothy ever gets the chance to visit us again, she’d be proud of how much stronger and more resilient these communities have become.”

Other stories we’re following

🛢️ Speaking to a radio station from the northern Brazilian state of Amapá, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva suggested that environmental protection agency Ibama is “working against the government” by delaying the approval of oil drilling permits to Petrobras in the controversial Equatorial Margin region, near the mouth of the Amazon River.

🌡️ While several parts of Brazil are experiencing heat waves, two studies published in journal Nature Climate Change suggest that the planet may have already entered into a period of several decades of average temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 

🔋 Uber joined the Brazilian Association of Electric Vehicle Manufacturers (ABVE). The ride-hailing giant says the number of app drivers using EVs has jumped by more than 500% over the past year.

⏳ Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes is poised to present a new proposal to settle the dispute around the agribusiness-backed “time frame argument,” which limits indigenous land rights to areas occupied or claimed in 1988, when Brazil’s Constitution was enacted. 

😱 In its most recent sustainability report, international food company Cargill suggested that it could abandon the Soy Moratorium, the voluntary pact established in 2006 to halt the purchase of soybeans grown in areas of the Amazon deforested after 2008.