Killing the Messengers: Rising Violence Against Journalists and Indigenous Leaders Defending the Ama
OCTOBER 11, 2019
Killing the Messengers: Rising Violence Against Journalists and Indigenous Leaders Defending the Amazon
by GABRIEL LEÃO
In February 2005, the body of 73-year-old Sister Dorothy Stang was found on the side of a remote dirt road 33 miles from Anapu, Pará, in Brazil’s AmazonBasin. Seven bullets pierced her body. The first hit her in the abdomen, then after she fell face down, the killers fired bullets to the back and four to the head.
The masterminds turned out to be Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura and Regivaldo Pereira Galvão, wealthy farmers who opposed the U.S. missionary for creating the first sustainable development program in the Anapu region of the Amazon on lands formerly exploited by large landowners and loggers that had been confiscated by the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA).
The missionary’s death drew world-wide attention to the violence that environmental activists are exposed to around the globe, specifically in the Amazon region. It wasn’t until this year- on April 16, 2019,14 years after the assassination–that Pará’s Civil Police finally arrested Galvão, who was condemned to 30 years in 2010.
On July 30, the British-American NGO Global Witness released its annual report on attacks against land and environmental defenders. The report “Enemies of The State? How governments and business silence defenders” registers 164 defenders killed in 2018, an average of more than three a week, with many more attacked or jailed. The Philippines leads the world with 30 killed, followed by Colombia with 24, India with 23 and, in fourth place, Brazil with 20. The report finds that the majority of the killings happen in the mining industry. Hydropower, agribusiness and logging projects follow close behind. According to the document, “more than half of 2018 murders took place in Latin America, which has consistently ranked as the worst-affected continent since Global Witness began publishing data on killings in 2012”.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/11/killing-the-messengers-rising-violence-against-journalists-and-indigenous-leaders-defending-the-amazon/
As a girl.
