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.
