Some say the murdered nun has taken the form of a jaguar. Others that she is a saint who sits among the angels in heaven. Still more believe her spirit lives on in every land rights activist and Amazon rainforest defender who refuses to back down in the face of legal threats, physical intimidation and death squads.
Eighteen years after she was gunned down, the meaning of the life and death of the US missionary, land rights campaigner and environmentalist Dorothy Stang was once again under discussion at a recent memorial mass in the small forest city of Anapu. All of the 200 or so attendees –peasants, conservationists and journalists – would have taken something different from this remarkably Amazonian service, but for me it brought home how the murdered British journalist Dom Phillips is undergoing his own transformation from a journalistic colleague, self-effacing friend and drinking mate into an internationally recognised icon of freedom of expression and the fightback in the war against nature. He and the Brazilian indigenous expert Bruno Pereira now stand alongside Stang and hundreds of others in the pantheon of martyrs of the rainforest.
The memorial was held in the forest glade where the Catholic nun was buried. Her white stone tomb is marked with her name, dates of birth and death – 6 June 1931 to 12 February 2005 – and a photo of the smiling, silver-haired woman who looked like she could have been one of my mother’s friends. That her life and death were in fact anything but ordinary was made apparent by a large red cross on one side bearing the names of dozens of peasants and activists who, like her, were murdered in the campaign to establish sustainable farming settlements on land illegally occupied by wealthy fazendeiros (ranchers).
Anapu is one of the most murderous municipalities on Earth, with a homicide rate 10 times higher than São Paulo and 70 times higher than the UK. Crime here is a daily reality and takes many forms – logging, mining, land-grabbing – but much of the violence is related to disputes over land.
Stang knew the risks but came here in 1982 to campaign for the rural poor and the degraded forest, which was true to her creed of liberation theology, a left-wing, socially engaged form of Catholicism.
Her work infuriated local fazendeiros, who preferred to treat the forest as a quick way to expand their property portfolios and regarded anyone who stood in their way as targets. Over the years, Stang ignored multiple death threats before she was killed by six shots in 2005 at the age of 73.
The memorial mass to mark her killing was essentially Amazonian in its symbolic flux, transposing species barriers, blurring the boundaries of politics and religion, self and other. A banner hung above the entrance: “A semente plantado brotou: Nos somos Irma Dorothy” (The planted seed has flourished: We are all Sister Dorothy). Inside the open hall, the hymns were not just salutations to God but exhortations to fight for land and social justice against an uncaring system even “when they persecute and murder our comrades, when they crush our hope and terrorise us”.
Among those in the congregation were two older nuns who worked alongside Stang and bravely continue her work for the Pastoral Land Commission, which was created by Catholic bishops during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985) to defend the rural poor against attacks by landowners and the state. The commission provides legal advice, promotes unions of rural workers and keeps a tally of the deaths of land activists. Its most recent report for 2021 shows 1,768 conflicts and 35 killings, almost half of which were in the Amazon.
Paying tribute to those victims, as well as Stang, at the ceremony it was a who’s who of the region’s leading environmental and civil rights activists.
This year, however, two new martyrs were symbolically present: Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, whose granite-like faces and piercing eyes stared down from a banner on the wall above a slogan demanding justice for their killings in the Javari valley last year. The familiar image in such an out-of-the-way place was at once horrifying, uplifting and surreal. What was Dom doing here in the forest in two dimensions, I thought; he should be flesh and blood, sitting in a bar, animatedly discussing the latest shenanigans in Brazilian politics or the woes of Everton football club.
And yet, on reflection, it was entirely right that he was here. He had dedicated his latter years to reporting on the forest and the people trying to defend it. Dom belonged alongside the likes of Stang, Chico Mendes and and other inspiring figures in the struggle to save the Amazon and its people, strange as that change still feels. Suddenly, the idea of locals perceiving Stang as a jaguar, or the priests at the mass performing a eucharistic transubstantiation of wine into Christ’s blood did not seem quite so outlandish.
Of course I could rationalise it. That’s one of the tasks journalists perform: we enter realms of chaos – disasters, wars, crimes and the like – and try to make sense of what we witness, then impose the order of full stops, capital letters and paragraphs. But it is also always wise to acknowledge we neither know the whole truth, nor its consequences. There are just too many permutations. That is more true in the Amazon than anywhere I have lived. With combinations of so many species and so many belief systems, the forest is constantly throwing up surprises – creatures I never knew existed before, rituals I could not imagine, and outcomes I could never have predicted.
At the height of the carnival in Rio last month, large banners bearing the faces of Dom along with Pereira and Stang were paraded through the Sambadrome on the Amazon-themed float of the Porto da Pedra samba school. Similar images can be seen on wall murals in Manaus, T-shirts in São Paulo and on placards in demonstrations for Indigenous rights, forest conservation and protection of journalists. In Brasília, their names are raised in political debates about the need for a stronger state presence in the Amazon, more protection for Indigenous communities and long overdue crackdowns on environmental crime. Dom and Periera were the focus of a high-profile trip to the Javari valley last month by Brazil’s first Indigenous minister, Sônia Guajajara, who was joined by the two widows Alessandra Sampaio and Beatriz Matos. It seems Dom and Periera are now united in eternal brotherhood, drawing attention to less visible victims of forest crime.
Even in death, there is inequality. Like Stang, Dom is an unusual martyr in being white and from a rich nation. Most of the victims are poor and Indigenous or mixed race, victims of murders that were never investigated nor covered by the media, people whose names and faces are largely unknown outside places like Anapu. And they are not just found in the Amazon and Brazil. Across the world, at least 1,733 people have been murdered since 2012 trying to protect their land and resources, according to Global Witness. That’s an average of one killing every two days.
Dom died reporting on that frontline, and even after death it seems his role is to shed light on that conflict and make visible those sacrifices. This time, not as a journalist but as an icon. I suspect he might have felt a little embarrassed to see his face plastered on posters and a carnival float. Dom was very much of the view that journalists should never become the story. I would, of course, prefer him to be alive and his old self. But after this traumatic transformation, I’m glad he can still do the job he loved, albeit in an extraordinary guise.
