The Washington Post
Wednesday, February 16, 2005; Page A13

U.S. Nun Buried in Amazon Outpost

Thousands Gather To Honor Activist Slain Saturday

By Michael Astor
Associated Press

ANAPU, Brazil, Feb. 15 -- Thousands of people, from peasants to politicians, converged on this remote Amazon town Tuesday to bury the bullet-ridden body of an elderly American nun killed in the struggle to protect the Amazon rain forest and its poor residents from loggers and ranchers.

After an all-night vigil, mourners filed slowly past the simple, flag-draped coffin holding the remains of Dorothy Stang in the small, shingle-roofed church of Anapu, the jungle town of 7,000 residents that Stang adopted.

"I feel like a river without water, a forest without trees. It's like losing a mother," said Fernando Anjos da Silva, who said Stang helped him get medical care after a logging accident left him in a wheelchair.

Nearly 1,000 miles to the southeast, in Brasilia, the capital, cabinet ministers compared Stang to Chico Mendes, the celebrated defender of the rain forest who was gunned down in 1988.

"Chico died for the same reason, killed by people with no respect for life or the law," said Marina Silva, the environment minister. Stang, 74, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio, was attacked Saturday in a settlement 30 miles from Anapu, where she worked to help about 400 families survive in the rugged jungle.

A witness said that when two gunmen approached Stang, she pulled out a Bible and began to read. Her killers listened for a moment, took a few steps back and fired, he said. Coroners said she was shot six times at close range by two guns.

"Dorothy's last words were the only words she knew: the word of God," said Mary Alice McCabe, a nun from Connecticut who has lived in Brazil for 34 years.

Stang's colleagues said she helped build sustainable development projects to benefit poor residents of Anapu, which is on the southern edge of the rain forest. Development, logging and farming have destroyed as much as 20 percent of the Amazon's 1.6 million square miles.

Stang had warned that land speculators were arming themselves, but she received little response from the government.

"Gunmen loose! Loggers cutting! . . . The federal police is nowhere to be seen in Anapu," Stang wrote last year in a letter to the federal government. The letter was reproduced Tuesday by the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.

Stang received repeated death threats but no protection.

"They wanted to shut her up because she was messing up their plans," said Julia Depweq, a nun from Cincinnati who works in Belem, the state capital of Para. "I don't think they realized the repercussions her death was going to have. They thought they'd get rid of her like any other worker."

Police were looking for four suspects in the killing: two hired gunmen, an intermediary and the man they say ordered Stang's death.

© 2005