Friday, April 25, 2014

Today’s Video – Sister Dorothy

In honor of Earth Day this week we looked at a few videos on environmentalism in Latin America.  We conclude our brief look into that area with the following trailer to a 2008 documentary on the late nun and environmental activist Sister Dorothy Stang:

Stang was shot and killed in February 2005 after she received death threats from loggers and landowners. Following several appeals, a pair of local ranchers - Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura and Regivaldo Galvao - were each convicted to thirty years in prison for masterminding the murder of the 73-year-old.   Rayfran das Neves Sales, the man who confessed to assassinating Stang, was released from jail in 2013 after serving less than nine of his 27-year sentence.

According to the Global Witness NGO, Brazil accounted for half of the nearly 1000 deaths of environmentalists worldwide between 2002 and 2013.  Aside from Stand, among the best-known cases of murdered environmental activists in Brazil are those of Chico Mendes in 1988 and José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva in 2011. 

Satellite imagery has shown deforestation in the Amazon rainforest decreased by 80% from 2003 to 2012 though it increased by nearly one-third between 2012 and last year.

Video Source– YouTube user sisterdorothy

Online Sources – The Guardian; GlobalPost

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