Rural social movements oppose Forest Code revisions claimed by the agribusiness lobby to be for their benefit.
Authorities in Brazil have sent an elite police force consisting of 60 officers to offer protection to environmental activists in the Amazon after a series of killings, reports the Associated Press.
The move comes 10 days after Brazil’s Vice President Michel Temer announced the creation of a working group on Amazon violence following the assassinations of three activists in the region in late May. The Brazilian Amazon is no stranger to systemic violence against environmental activists, yet the response from the federal government in the past two weeks is the most significant to date.
On May 24th, environmentalist José Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria, were gunned down near Marabá, Pará, where the couple worked in a sustainable extractive reserve. Only three days later another prominent activist was killed. The leader of the Amazon Peasants Association, Adelino Ramos, was murdered in front of his family in Vista Alegre do Abunã, Rondonia. Both Ramos and da Silva were vocal opponents of deforestation in the Amazon. The deaths of these activists are being compared to the murder of American nun Dorothy Stang in 2005 and rubber trapper Chico Mendes in 1988, considered martyrs by many.
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References: Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Hochstetler. Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society. Duke University Press. Durham: 2007.
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