Brazil Hunts Man Suspected Of Ordering Nun's Death
Date: 22-Feb-05
Country: BRAZIL
Brazil has launched its biggest-ever crackdown on rain-forest crime, after the Feb. 12 murder of US missionary Dorothy Stang sparked international outrage at death-squad killings and deforestation in the Amazon state of Para.
"It is repulsive people still think a .38 revolver is the solution to a conflict, as serious as it may be," Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in his biweekly radio address. "We are going to find the people who ordered this to show there is no impunity under our government."
Brazilian legislators say Stang was a high-profile victim in a little-reported "rural civil war" between poor settlers and loggers fighting to control vast jungle areas.
Police on Sunday arrested a man they suspect shot Stang dead at an isolated settlement of landless peasants about 31 miles (50 kms) from the town of Anapu, in Para.
The man, Rayfran das Neves Sales, confessed to shooting Stang and named another gunman involved in the contract killing, state news agency Radiobras reported.
Federal police have named local rancher Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura as the prime suspect in ordering Stang's death.
Police on Sunday charged another rancher, Amair Freijoli da Cunha, with hiring the killers.
Brazil's federal government last week sent 2,000 troops to lawless areas of Para and set up a crisis cabinet in the state after three rural workers were killed in as many days after Stang's murder.
Lula on Feb. 17 ordered the creation of one of the world's largest environmental-protection areas to stop the advance of illegal loggers on Brazil's Amazon jungle, which covers over half the continental-sized nation.
He called for strict controls or bans on logging in an area three times the size of Belgium and for the completion of conservation areas in Para -- the most threatened part of the rain forest.
An area twice the size of France, Para has Brazil's worst rates of illegal logging, slave labor and rural violence.
Federal prosecutors say such crimes are rarely punished in areas where local police and judges are allied with landowners.
Stang opposed loggers and ranchers encroaching on an area of jungle designated as a government reserve for peasant farmers.
