Slacknexx

I know, i've been slack but I've been battling a cold. Here's some more slackness: an article coming out today that I wrote.

Movie revives interest in US nun killed in Amazon
By MICHAEL ASTOR
Associated Press

In Daniel Junge's chilling new documentary "Who Killed Sister Dorothy," a defense lawyer for one of two ranchers accused of ordering the killing of 73-year-old American nun Dorothy Stang dryly explains the circumstances that led to her murder.
"She irritated a lot of people. In this region, if you irritate people, you don't live long," Americo Leal says, laying down the law of the land in Brazil's rough and tumble Amazon.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Stang spent the last 30 years of her life building schools and teaching poor settlers from Brazil's drought-ridden Northeast to respect the rain forest and to stand up for their rights along the Amazon's hardscrabble logging frontier.

On Feb. 23, 2005, her work earned her six revolver shots at close range on a muddy stretch of red dirt road sandwiched between two dense walls of green jungle.

Stang, who wanted to preserve a stretch of rain forest that a rancher wanted cut down, was just one of over 1,000 activists killed in land disputes since Brazil began pushing to open up the Amazon region in the 1980s.

But her age and American citizenship drew the kind of international attention not seen in the region since the environmental activist and rubber tapper Chico Mendes was murdered in 1988.

That notoriety helped speed the conviction of the gunman, his accomplice and a middleman, all within a little over a year after the murder _ record time in Para state, where trials usually drag on for decades.

The wheels of justice began to grind to a halt, however, when it came time to prosecute the ranchers.

An initial conviction at a high profile-trial for one of the ranchers, Vitalmiro Moura, was hailed as a new chapter for justice in a state where only three other men have ever been convicted of ordering the kind of land-related killings that plague the region.

That conviction was short-lived, however, because Brazilian law grants an automatic retrial to any first offender sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

At the second trial, which took place after interest in the case began to fade and with no members of the international media present, the jury found Moura not guilty.

Another considerably richer rancher, Regivaldo Galvao, has been charged with the killing but has, so far, managed to avoid trial altogether.

Now, pressure is once again building for Brazil to bring Stang's killers to justice.

Stang was posthumously awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in November, and Junge's documentary, narrated by actor Martin Sheen, is set to premiere on HBO on March 25. It is also slated for theatrical release in Brazil.

"I think the momentum of the film is going to force the politicians' hands, or I hope it will," Junge said in a telephone interview from Colorado. "Two senators saw the film in Brasilia and said they were going to personally take it to president for him to see."

The film takes the viewer to Brazil's bad back country, where "pistoleiros" routinely force settlers from their homes in order to raze the forest for timber and cattle pasture. The region's politicians and courts are in the pocket of land-grabbing ranchers whose holdings can rival the size of some European nations.

Mostly, the documentary details the ranchers' Byzantine efforts to elude justice.

Drawn from over 400 hours of footage filmed over three years during eight trips to Brazil, Junge's work captures the high theater of Brazilian courts and the gritty back room dealings that often determine the outcome.

Defense attorney Leal, whose flowing gray beard and black robes give him the air of a fire and brimstone preacher from an earlier era, denounces Stang as an agent of American imperialism _ linking her, in the same breath, to the abuses at Guantanamo and the bombing of Hiroshima.

Junge also follows the defense lawyers as they storm around town in black suits and sun glasses like something out of Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas," wielding their cell phones like weapons.

The amount of access the defense lawyers provide Junge and his cameras as they brazenly game the system, railroading the gunmen to protect the ranchers, only serves to highlight the routine nature of their actions.

Not long after Amair Feijoli, the man convicted of acting as the intermediary between the gunmen and the ranchers, agrees to testify against them, he was placed in a special cell with another inmate who beats him so badly he fails to appear at the trial the following day.

Footage of his battered face is interspersed with that of a court clerk explaining the defense will be calling one less witnessed than planned.

"The film reveals the entrails of how impunity is constructed in the Amazon and in Brazil, especially in relation to land ownership," said Brazilian Sen. Jose Nery, who arranged for a special showing of the documentary in the country's Senate last month.

"I hope the film can be an instrument to mobilize Brazilian society to demand that the judiciary punish these crimes, and that this case serve as an example," Nery added in a telephone interview from Brasilia, the nation's capital.

There are already concrete signs that interest in the case is being revived by the film, which, along with the U.N. human rights prize awarded to Stang, has won awards at film festivals around the U.S. and Brazil and was short-listed for the Oscars.

Earlier this year, rancher Galvao was jailed on federal charges of illegally trying to seize the plot of land over which Stang was killed.

State Prosecutor Edson Cardoso Souza, who is in charge of the murder case, says he believes the film has helped step up pressure for Galvao to be put on trial.

"The film presents the case from many angles, which allows for a clearer analysis of what really happened," Souza said, in a telephone interview from Para state.

He says he expects Galvao will face trial sometime this year and remains hopeful that a court will overturn the acquittal last year of the other defendant, Moura.