|
Various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) addressed a letter yesterday to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva requesting an effective State presence in the Amazon.
The organizations also staged a demonstration in front of the Presidential Palace in Brasília to recall Sister Dorothy Stang's struggle on behalf of the peoples of the forest and to call for peace in the countryside.
Sister Dorothy, who was killed by six gunshot wounds on February 12 of this year in Anapu, Pará, in the North of Brazil, would have turned 74 yesterday.
In the document sent to the President, the NGOs urged that federal government organs be beefed up to ensure an end to violence and impunity in the Amazon.
One of the Greenpeace representatives, Carlos Rittl, believes that very little has changed since Dorothy Stang's death.
"Despite all the commotion over Sister Dorothy's assassination, things haven't changed much. The people who live there continue to be persecuted."
He says that the federal government must adopt more concrete measures. "We are presenting the government with clear demands for it to guarantee people's security and acknowledge the demands of the communities and the rights of the peoples of the forest."
The letter asks for the territorial organization and property regularization of community areas in the state of Pará to be carried out, as well as the listing of rural properties, for the region's conservation units to be implemented.
The document also asks for Rural and Extractive Family Production to be fortified to be able to resist the expansion of entrepreneurial agricultural.
Another request is that Sister Dorothy Stang's murder trial be transferred to the federal court system.
Today, the Federal Appeals Court is expected to decide whether to transfer the case to the federal sphere.
"The impunity of the crimes that have occurred in Pará give no hope that state courts are capable of bringing everyone involved in the case to judgment. Thus we believe that justice will only be done through federalizing the case," Rittl said.
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.