Land activist murdered in Brazil after refusing to testify against Dorothy Stang's successor [In-Depth]
Marcio Rodrigues dos Reis, a land activist murdered in Brazil, in an undated photo. (Credit: Courtesy of CPT)
SÃO PAULO, Brazil -- Marcio Rodrigues dos Reis's murder on Dec. 4 in the Amazonian city of Anapu was the 15th case of a peasant being killed in the region due to land conflicts since 2015, according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), which is affiliated with Brazil's National Bishops' Conference.
Anapu has been one of the epicenters of violence against the rural poor in the Amazon in the past few decades and is the city where the American-born nun Dorothy Stang was murdered by gunmen working for local ranchers in 2005.
Reis, 33, was working as a motorcycle taxi driver when he was stabbed by a passenger in his neck. The murderer hasn't been found.
Reis was a landless rural worker and in 2016 had taken part in the occupation of a farm in Anapu, along with dozens of families. The occupants demanded possession of the territory and claimed that it had been illegally taken from the Brazilian State by a local farmer. The governmental land agency recognized their claim and filed a lawsuit in order to recover the farm, but a higher court's final decision is still pending.
After the peasants' movement showed no signs of ending, Reis was charged with several crimes and imprisoned for nine months in 2017. The local CPT coordinator, Father José Amaro Lopes de Sousa, was accused of being the leader of the occupation and was also arrested for 92 days in the beginning of 2017. Amaro worked for 15 years with Stang defending landless peasants and the local environment and is considered her successor.
"Reis was the main defense witness in the case against Father Amaro. Both the local ranchers and the police pressed him to testify against Father Amaro, so he would be convicted. But Reis never did so and kept his initial version that Father Amaro is innocent," said José Batista Afonso, the priest's lawyer, who is also a member of the CPT.
According to Afonso, the evidence gathered by the prosecutors against Amaro is "weak" and he will probably be found innocent in the first half of 2020, when a decision is scheduled to be announced. If Reis had changed his story at the police's urging and testified against Amaro, it would have effectively silenced the priest and put an end to his work in the region, Afonso claimed.
"That's why they hated him so much," the lawyer told Crux.
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