Forest reserves created in Brazil to protect lawless Amazon region

ANAPU, Brazil — Brazil's president signed decrees yesterday creating two massive new forest reserves, succumbing to intense pressure to protect a lawless Amazon region from violent loggers and ranchers after the killing last weekend of an American nun who fought to protect the jungle.

The measures signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will form a reserve of 8.15 million acres and a national park spanning 1.1 million acres in the state of Pará, where 73-year-old Sister Dorothy Stang was shot to death Saturday in a dispute with a powerful rancher.

"We can't give in to people committing acts of violence," said Environment Minister Marina Silva, who announced the decrees. "The government is putting the brakes on in front of the predators."

The decrees were announced after more than 60 groups signed a letter to the president demanding strong moves to curb "violence and impunity associated with the illegal occupation of lands and deforestation" in the Amazon — and especially in Pará, a state nearly twice the size of Texas.

Unless the killing stops, Lula "will risk making history as the champion of rural violence, illegal occupation of public lands and illegal logging," said the letter, signed by the World Wide Fund for Nature, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other groups.

Logging companies and wealthy landowners have steadily pushed deeper into the world's largest rain forest, which sprawls over 1.6 million square miles and covers more than half the country, vying for its abundant natural resources. Development, logging and farming have destroyed as much as 20 percent of the rain forest.

In this eastern Amazon town, helicopters flew in 110 soldiers from the 51st Jungle Infantry Division to join a police manhunt for four men accused of killing Sister Stang. They set up camp near the graveyard where Sister Stang was buried this week.

For the town's 7,000 residents, the arrival of the troops was both a relief and another reminder of how much the situation had deteriorated in Pará, 900 miles northwest of Brasília, the capital.

The troops were part of a larger operation involving 2,000 soldiers sent in to keep the peace around Pará. At least three other people have been killed in the region since Sister Stang's murder.

Police were searching for the two gunmen and for rancher Vitamiro Gonçalves Moura, known as Bida, who authorities say ordered the killing.

Walame Fiado Machado, who is heading the federal police investigation, said he believed the two gunmen were likely hiding in a dense, hard-to-reach stretch of forest near Bida's ranch, and that the rancher and an associate may have fled the region in a small plane soon after the murder.

Sister Stang, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Ohio, was attacked Saturday in a settlement 30 miles from Anapu. A witness said she began to read from a Bible before being shot at close range six times by two gunmen.

Lawlessness has long been common in Pará, where ranchers, backed by hired gunmen, ensnare poor workers in an endless cycle of debt akin to slavery. Tensions rose further when the government recently ordered ranchers to evacuate land they occupied but couldn't prove they owned.

Ranchers and loggers blocked roads and rivers, and the government relented, allowing ranchers with dubious claims to the land to continue logging.