Ecumenical News International, GENEVA
Daily News Service
23 September 2005

Kennedy, slain nun's family seek meeting with Brazil president

By Chris Herlinger
New York, 23 September(ENI)--The family of a US nun slain in Brazil after a life of fighting for peasant land reform in the Amazon rain forests is pressuring Brazil's government to prosecute those who they say ordered her killing and not only the gunmen who shot her.

The family of Sister Dorothy Stang - an American member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and a long-time resident of Brazil
- have received the support of Ethel Kennedy, the widow of the late Robert F. Kennedy, the assassinated US senator and presidential candidate.

Kennedy, as a representative of a US-based human rights foundation named after her husband, as well as Stang's siblings, are seeking an audience with Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in a planned visit to Brazil.

They want the case to be heard in a federal court because only the two gunmen who allegedly fired the killing shots, and not the landowners believed to have ordered it, have been charged by local authorities for the 12 February killing in Para state.

Some of the Stang family were in Brazil this week. In statements reported in the US and Brazilian media, they, along with representatives of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, expressed disappointment with the Brazilian government.

They assert the government has not sufficiently implemented land reforms tied to the advancement of human rights in the impoverished Amazon region that Stang embraced and for which she
died at the age of 73.

"This murder was foretold," Emily Goldman, a researcher for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, told Ecumenical News International. "Unfortunately, her [Stang's] murder was one of a
horribly long list of killings over the issue of land rights."

Stang worked with the Roman Catholic Church's advocacy group, the Pastoral Land Commission, and she received death threats from
loggers and ranchers before she was killed.
Activists say President da Silva, a champion of land reform, has not done enough to end the impunity prevalent in the largely
lawless region.

The Brazilian government says it has begun implementing reforms it claims will help settle 430 000 landless families before 2006.

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