John Collins Rudolf has posted a thorough overview of the latest murder on the eroding perimeter of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil. There’s been enormous progress in efforts to bring governance to forest frontiers in Brazil since the late 1980s, when I spent months in the western Amazon reporting on the life and assassination of Chico Mendes for “The Burning Season,” my first book. But pistols and shotguns still sometimes blaze.
Here’s a video of a recent TEDx appearance of the new victim, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva, a forest activist and tree nut harvester who was gunned down on Tuesday along with his wife as they rode a motorcycle in Brazil’s still turbulent Para State (for English subtitles, press play, then engage the “cc” closed-captioning button):
Read on for the nut of Rudolf’s report and a link to the rest:
News of the slayings, emerging on the same day that Brazil’s parliament was to vote on a controversial revision of the country’s forest protection laws, rocketed through Brazil’s political classes. Within hours, senior government officials were briefed on the crime and President Dilma Rousseff had ordered an investigation by the federal police.
Yet whether that investigation results in punishment for the killers — or those who likely hired them — is deeply uncertain. More than 1,000 rural activists, small farmers, religious workers and others fighting the region’s rampant deforestation have been slain in the past 20 years, but only a handful of killers have ever been successfully prosecuted, according to a statement by the Pastoral Land Commission, a Catholic organization that tracks rural violence. [Read the rest.]
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