Dorothy Stang

Dorothy Mae Stang was born in 1931 in Dayton, Ohio, in the United States, one of nine children in a Catholic family. She entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in 1948 and later professed religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. After years of teaching in schools in the United States, including in Illinois and Arizona, she volunteered for missionary work in Brazil and arrived there in 1966. She eventually became a naturalized Brazilian citizen and spent the remainder of her life in pastoral and social work among the rural poor of the Amazon region rather than returning permanently to the United States.

From the later twentieth century, and especially after she settled in the municipality of Anapu in the state of Pará, she worked with the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra). She helped landless and smallholder families obtain legal title to plots, encouraged sustainable agriculture and forest preservation, and organized local communities against illegal logging and the expansion of large cattle ranches onto public and peasant land. That advocacy placed her in lasting conflict with landowners, loggers, and others who sought to control large tracts of rainforest. She received repeated death threats and was known to appear on lists of people marked for assassination, yet she continued to live among the farmers she served and to report environmental and land-rights abuses.

On 12 February 2005, at the age of seventy-three, she was shot and killed on a remote road in the Anapu area while walking to a meeting with local farmers. Contemporary accounts of the crime reported that she was confronted by hired gunmen and that she read from the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew before being murdered. The killing provoked national and international condemnation and drew wider attention to violence against environmental defenders and land-rights activists in the Brazilian Amazon. Several men, including alleged gunmen and ranchers accused of ordering the murder, were later tried in Brazilian courts; the legal process was lengthy and included retrials and appeals.

She was buried in Anapu after a large funeral attended by local farmers, religious, and public figures. She has been widely remembered as a defender of the Amazon rainforest and of the rights of the poor, and is sometimes called the Angel of the Amazon in later writing about her life. She has not been beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church. Her work remains closely associated with agrarian reform, sustainable settlement, and environmental protection in northern Brazil, and her death is frequently cited in discussions of impunity and conflict over land in the Amazon.