Editor's Note: This is Part II of the series Martyr of the Amazon: The Life and Death of Dorothy Stang
BELEM, Brazil — Hours before the body of Sister Dorothy Stang arrives in the state capital of Para, supporters line the streets outside the morgue, carrying banners that proclaim, simply, "Justica."
Justice for Dorothy.
Around 5 p.m. the plane finally touches down in Belem.
The coroner lays down the law: No one can be present at the autopsy. But Annie Wihbey, an 81-yearold Catholic nun with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, steps forward, all 90 pounds of her, brown as a berry from more than 40 years in Brazil. She has been called "half-pint" and "peanut" all her life, but today her dark eyes are as fierce as they are warm. "I am a registered nurse," she announces, "and I am her sister."
The coroner wisely makes an exception.
"I hope Dot knows that we love her and knows that we're here," she keeps telling herself.
And then Stang's body is released to the nuns, to Wihbey and a cluster of young novices who have known and loved the nun named Dorothy. They circle the body like beads on a pocket rosary. "Everybody knew what to do," Wihbey says. "It's like that with families in those moments."
Stang's body is still soft and pliable from so many hours in the rain. The women dress her in her best yellow dress — her only dress — the one with the cheerful sunflower pattern. It's the one she wore at every formal occasion. At her Golden Jubilee in Cincinnati in 1998 — the 50th anniversary of her religious vows — she tried to come to the party in her white T-shirt and flowered shorts. "Oh, no!" scolded her lifelong friend from Julienne High School, Sister Joan Krimm. "You are going to march back upstairs and change!"
She wore the yellow dress again when she turned 70 in June 2001, and the villagers surprised her with a party. "Whoopee! I'm 70!" she wrote to her family in Dayton. "Thank you my good God for life filled with friends and wonderful adventure sharing, caring, laughing, crying, struggling and arriving with all of you."
Her enemies called Stang the "old woman" or the "old one," but except for her snow-white hair she still looked like the impish kid who walked every day to St. Rita's, a fourroom schoolhouse in Harrison Twp. "That girl, she was just smiling all the time," recalls her brother, Jim Stang of Dayton.
Somehow, Dorothy Stang stepped from that cloistered Catholic girlhood onto the world stage. In death, her global footprint grows larger by the moment. But it's a fame she came by not because of how she died, but how she lived, never wavering from the admonition of Sisters of Notre Dame founder St. Julie Billiart: "Our zeal ought to be wider than the universe."
A new symbol for the poor
For the people of the rain forest, Stang is a new symbol, a powerful emblem for the rights of the landless poor. Thousands of Brazilians, including many who never met her, attend vigils and funeral Masses in the days following her death.
They aren't simply mourning Sister Dorothy. They're mourning Sister Adelaide, the Brazilian nun whose 1986 murder brought not a single conviction even though she was gunned down in a train station in front of dozens of witnesses. They're mourning the 19 farmers from the Eldorado dos Carajas region of Para who were fired on by military police during a peaceful demonstration by 3,000 landless peasants on April 17, 1996. They're mourning every peasant farmer whose home and land were destroyed by those who enforce their will through violence and intimidation.
"For the poor, this is the first time in their adult lives they feel someone is on their side," says Sister Julia Depweg, a Hamilton native who works out of the convent in Belem. "This death of Dot has struck the whole world."
Hundreds file past the body at the St. Maria Goretti church around the corner from the convent. The vigil lasts until early morning, followed by another Mass at 4 a.m. The ritual is repeated when the traditional plain wooden coffin, bowed out in the middle like a rowboat, is flown to Altimira and then to Anapu. The final stop is the Center of Formation at Sao Rafael — named for the congregation's sister parish, St. Raphael in Springfield — where an outdoor funeral Mass draws more than 2,000 mourners from every corner of the rain forest and every class of society. They link arms throughout the service, tears running down their faces as if in synchronization with the heavy rain.
Wihbey carries the black sneakers Stang was wearing when she was murdered. Another nun carries her blood-soaked baseball cap.
"Dorothy is not buried!" Depweg shouts. "She is planted!"
Stang is laid to rest underneath a mango tree at Sao Rafael. Father Jose Amaro Lopes de Sousa sleeps for three nights at her graveside, then stands sentinel for another 15 days. He ignores the 2,000 troops assembled near the graveside to prevent violence.
With his goatee, broad ruddy face and red bandanna, Father Amaro looks more like a field hand than a Catholic priest. He grew up in poverty, with few opportunities for education. He came to Anapu at the behest of Padre Sabino, an Italian priest and friend of Stang's.
"She was a mother to me," he says of Dorothy. "More than a mother."
A worldwide embarrassment
After leaving Stang's body face down in the rain, Rayfran das Neves Sales and Clodoaldo Carlos Batista flee to the ranch of Vitalmiro Moura, the man everybody knows as Bida.
But they never receive what they say they were promised: $50,000 reals — the equivalent of $25,000 — and a flight out of Anapu. Only Bida is flown out of his luxurious ranch, Fazenda Rio Anapu.
Sales and Batista hide in the forest for nine days. They are captured after Sales is seen in town buying biscuits and cigarettes. Police officers track them into the forest by the scent of the cigarettes.
The execution of the 73-year-old American nun brings worldwide coverage, shaming the Brazilian government in a way that hundreds of previous murders — even that of renowned environmental activist Chico Mendes in 1988 — failed to do. That history of injustice is so notorious it has a name known all over Brazil. Impunidade. Impunity.
It's unusual enough that the pistoleiros, or gunmen, have been apprehended. But what happens next is truly astonishing: Three ranchers — Bida, Tato and even ranch kingpin Regivaldo Galvao — are arrested and charged with murder. It's virtually unprecedented for the government to charge the mandantes, or wealthy ranchers, and none has ever been convicted in more than 700 land-grab killings since 1974.
Dorothy's friends are insistent that they don't want justice only for her. They want to change a system that all but condones murder.
"We do not want Dot isolated from the 700 other deaths of people killed because of this struggle for agrarian reform," Depweg says.
Strongly worded promises come from Brazil's new president, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, the former shoeshine boy whose election has brought hope for the poor. He and other Brazilian authorities vow that justice will be done.
Dorothy's supporters aren't taking their word for it. Prosecutor Aton Fon Filho, a well-known human rights lawyer in Brazil, urges the nuns to make a strong presence at every arraignment, every hearing. The Jesuit priests initiate phone trees and e-mail alerts.
They have been transformed into judicial activists. The accused ranchers are well-financed and well-versed in the art of intimidation. Sister Rebeca Spires, a Columbus native who worked closely with Stang, feels the wrath of the ranchers.
"During the interrogations," she says, "Regivaldo's brother looked as if he would shoot you from behind the eyes if he could."
Powerful ally
The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur have a powerful ally in the Stang family, particularly David Stang of Palmer Lake, Colo. David and his twin brother, Tom, are the youngest of the nine Stang children.
Dorothy begged David to come to Belem in December 2004, when she received the Human Rights Award from the Brazilian Lawyers Association. "I want the family to know what I'm doing," she told him.
A former Maryknoll priest who served 10 years in Africa, David understood the full weight of her words. "She does not think the family knows the sweat, tears and truth about her life." After traveling to Belem with another sister, Marguerite Hohm, David came home reenergized about Dorothy's cause. He wrote in his 2004 Christmas letter, "Important people — senators, legislators, judges, lawyers, newspaper reporters and most importantly, the poor — look at this woman with hope, respect and love. She is a vital person to the Amazon."
On Feb. 11, 2005, Dorothy called her brother and joked, "I can breathe that cool Palmer Lake air." It is more than 100 degrees in Anapu and the humidity makes it almost unbearable. "I'm getting old and it's beginning to bother me."
She died the next day.
On Feb. 23, 11 days after Dorothy's murder, David leaves Palmer Lake for the first of many trips to Brazil to crusade for justice for his sister. With CNN camera crews in tow, he travels deep into the rain forest, to the many outposts where Dorothy used to leave family photos and mementos at each hut.
"Along the way, many, many people knew Dorothy, and seeing Dorothy's picture on my T-shirt, they came up to me in tears and in shock," he says. "They could not fathom how their Mother of the Forest could be killed."
Kneeling beside his sister's grave in Anapu helps the healing process to begin. But dealing with the judicial system in a foreign land will not be an easy journey for the Stang family. During this trip David receives an early, and shocking, initiation into the Brazilian justice system. It is only a couple of weeks after the murder, but national television is broadcasting a bizarre re-enactment of the crime — with the gunmen starring as themselves and actors portraying Stang and Cicero, the lone witness to the crime.
It isn't long before the Brazilian authorities' forceful response turns tepid. The family is frustrated when Brazil's high courts deny motions to have the case tried in federal courts, a move the family considers essential because the state of Para, where the killing took place, has a long history of failing to prosecute loggers and ranchers for violent acts. The family writes an impassioned letter to Lula that concludes, "Words are cheap, Mr. President."
'I want to witness'
The prosecution wins a victory of sorts when the trial is transferred to the state court in Belem, away from the ubiquitous reach of the ranchers in Anapu.
The first trial is scheduled to take place Dec. 9 and 10, 2005, with the accused gunmen being tried together. David Stang and Hohm return to Belem to represent the family at a trial that seems part Fellini, part reality television, and very different from anything they've experienced in the United States.
In the middle of the trial, a barebreasted Indian woman wearing a grass skirt floats up to the Stang siblings. Upon seeing Hohm her eyes light up in recognition at the woman who strongly resembles her sister. She takes off her feather necklace and places it over Hohm's head, blessing her. Then she disappears into the packed courtroom.
It's a touching moment during a trial that's profoundly painful for the family.
The prosecution presents a slide show of graphic pictures of Dorothy's body, with the multiple bullet wounds being shown from every angle. The family is seeing these for the first time, and Hohm begins to sob. News photographers flock around her. "We felt torn between wanting to broadcast this cowardly murder and wanting our privacy," David recalls.
In Brazilian courtrooms, witnesses are given considerable discretion about whether to testify. Cicero is suffering from cancer and he is given the option of not testifying. "No, I want to witness," he says.
Cicero's face is hooded as he is brought into the courtroom. His last name is shielded because he is a protected witness.
But he is anything but cowed as he takes the stand. Cicero isn't intimidated by the defense's badgering. He stands by his story, that he saw Sales fire six bullets into Dorothy's body as she read from her Bible.
Prosecutor Edson Cardoso is wiry, thin, with thick black hair and an intense manner of speaking. He addresses the gunmen directly: "As you tried to murder her in the baha the night before, you could not find her. As you peeked through the slats of this simple home, as you looked for her among those simple hammocks, you could not find her. You could not find her because she was sleeping on the damp, wet floor."
The courtroom slips into a profound silence.
Between the eyewitness account and the incriminating confessions, including the videotaped re-enactment, it doesn't take the jury long to deliberate. Sales, who fired the shots, is sentenced to 27 years, his accomplice Batista to 17.
Four months later, the accused middleman, Amair Feijoli da Cunha, known as Tato, is also convicted. His 27-year sentence is reduced to 18 years because of his role as an informant.
The convictions bring a measure of comfort to Stang's family, but the true test cases remain — the trials of the mandantes, Bida and Regivaldo Galvao. The trials seem unconscionably delayed, but Bida's is finally scheduled for May 14 and 15.
At long last, more than two years after Dorothy's murder, the veil of impunity may be lifted from one of the masterminds behind the plot to have her silenced.
Much more at stake
Comite Dorothy is gearing up. Translated from Portuguese as "The Dorothy Committee," it's an ecumenical group with the dual goals of achieving justice in the trials as well as continuing Stang's work in the Amazon. "Her struggle doesn't have borders," said Luciney Vieiro, a Comite Dorothy staff member. "It touches everybody. I am not a Catholic, but I am for Dorothy."
Everywhere it seems there are Dorothy T-shirts, Dorothy posters, many featuring her most widely quoted slogan, "The death of the forest is the end of our lives."
Much more is at stake here, everybody knows, than simple justice for Dorothy. Vieiro puts it this way: "If Bida is convicted, there's more hope that the people of the Amazon will not be assassinated. If he's not convicted, the impunity will continue, and there will be more deaths."
The committee decides on a tactic that is startling to the American visitors. It's a poster of Dorothy's body lying face down in the mud, with the slogan, "The Blood of Dorothy Cleanses the Earth."
"They're hard to look at," admits Krimm, who has flown from Cincinnati to attend the trial. "But it has been more than two years and the committee wanted to bring back the horror of the murder."
Committee members are prepared for the possibility that Bida's camp will hire agitators to provoke Stang's supporters to violence.
The residents of an impromptu tent city erected outside the courtroom are immediately trained in nonviolent responses, such as forming a human chain.
All is peaceful as the trial commences at 9 a.m., and the people of the tent city listen intently from loudspeakers broadcasting into the park. "Our dream is that the person who committed this crime will receive just punishment," says Raimunda da Nonata Araujo dos Santos, a peasant farmer who Stang helped through the Project for Sustainable Development.
The jury is literally hand-picked, with the judge pulling numbers out of a wooden box like a church raffle. There are other unorthodoxies, at least in contrast to the United States. This, after all, is the same judicial system in which official court documents refer to the rancher Regivaldo Galvao as the "Big Maniac" and the "Big Pervert."
A news anchor does live broadcasts in front of the jury box. Defense attorneys and the prosecution team slip out regularly for interviews with the press. On May 14, the first day of the trial, the defendant is brought in. Bida is a tall, broad-shouldered man with Kennedy-esque wavy black hair. He is smartly dressed in a black shirt and blue jeans. Cardoso thunders at the defendant, "This is the third trial and you have been identified as the person who authored these crimes. Do you deny it?" "Yes," Bida replies. "Have you participated in this crime?" the prosecutor asks. "No," he responds firmly. "I have nothing to do with it." Bida tells the jury that the gunmen came to his house and said, "We shot Sister Dorothy!" "Why did you do that?" he says he responded. "You have to leave now." "Did you feed them?" Cardoso asks. "Of course," Bida replies. "You can't send people away without food." David Stang gasps audibly when Bida testifies that he owns Lot 55, the land where his sister was murdered. Even from prison, Bida has been defying the law and grazing his cattle there, forcing the farmers off the land. "This trial is the classic clash of the Amazon," David says during a courtroom break. "Who owns the land, the government or the ranchers?"
It is up to Sister Rebeca Spires to testify on behalf of her friend, the woman with whom she blazed a trail to the Amazon in 1974.
She is unflinching as she responds to allegations that Stang was a rogue nun who worked outside the boundaries of the church. "She didn't do anything without telling her superiors," she testifies. "She wasn't working on her own, she was working with government agencies."
Spires remains unnerved even as the microphone sputters and screeches like an angry hoot owl. "Somebody doesn't want to hear this," Wihbey whispers.
Spires adamantly contradicts allegations that Stang supplied arms to farmers or promoted violence. "That was totally against her principles," she says in a strong voice.
It is only after she steps down from the stand, and is handed a cup of coffee, that she realizes her hands are shaking.
Spires proves the prosecution's strongest witness, but she is, essentially, a character witness.
Will the case be strong enough to counteract whatever the high-powered defense team is saving up?
Already the prosecution has lost a key witness, a worker at Bida's ranch who stated in a previous deposition that he overheard his boss ordering the hit on Stang.
But the nuns hear that the prosecution decided against calling the witness to testify out of fear that the simple peasant, terrified for his life, wouldn't be able to withstand the questioning from the bulldog defense attorneys.
The defense finally has its turn, after a grueling day of testimony that threatens to go into the early morning hours. They call Rayfran das Neves Sales, the convicted gunman.
'I lied'
Sales has testified on 12 previous occasions that Bida ordered the American nun's murder. The slight man, a laborer with a fourth-grade education who can't read or write, is all but swallowed up by the witness chair.
"Do you stand by your previous 12 testimonies, do you agree with the court record?" Cardoso asks.
"I agree with some of it," Sales tells the court. "There are some things I don't confirm."
"Does that mean that it's all a lie?" Cardoso demands. "Do you mean to say that in front of four lawyers and a prosecutor and a judge, in this honored courtroom, that you LIED?"
Dorothy's twin brothers, David and Tom Stang, listen intently near the front of the courtroom to the man who emptied his gun into their sister's body.
"Yes," the man replies. "I lied."
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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