Red flags sliced the air and cries of “Dorothy, Dorothy, this one is for you” and “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!” echoed in the streets outside the Brazilian Consulate Friday afternoon.
Rally organizer and AU graduate student Lyndsay Hughes waved flags for the Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement with approximately 20 AU and Trinity University students to commemorate the murder of Sister Dorothy Stang, a sister of Notre Dame de Namur.
Stang worked to defend poor farmers’ land rights and to protect the Amazon from land-grabbing ranchers and loggers in the area. In 2005, ranchers killed her with six gunshots fired at point blank for her views.
Eve Bratman, a professor in the School of International Service, attended the rally on Friday. Bratman served as a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil from 2006 to 2007 where she worked on her doctoral field research in the Amazon.
“Dorothy’s message of environmental justice and sustainability go hand in hand,” Bratman said.
Hughes has been working as SIS Professor Miguel Carter’s research assistant since August. Carter introduced Hughes to Bratman. When Bratman and SIS Professor Miguel Carter told Hughes about the land reform injustices, Hughes “couldn’t stand by and do nothing,” she said.
One of Stang’s accused murderers was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison earlier last week. The activists celebrated this conviction and called for other cases to receive the same attention.
The rally also coincided with International Day of Peasants’ Struggle on April 17, a day that commemorates 19 landless Brazilian peasants who were killed by military police in 1996 while demanding access to land.
Stang’s great niece Brenna Daugherty, 19, a student at Trinity University, also attended the rally to show support for her great aunt’s work. Daugherty marched and chanted with the group and led a prayer in her great aunt’s honor.
“She lived simply and would have been proud of us being here today,” Daugherty told the crowd.
The activists paused for a short candle lighting in honor of the victims of the past decade’s land disputes.
Fewer than 100 cases have gone to court out of the thousands of killings of other activists, small farmers, judges, priests and other rural workers who have been killed in land disputes in the past decade, according to the event’s press release. About 80 convicted suspects were hired gunmen for powerful ranchers and loggers seeking to expand their lands, the release said.
Bratman said AU students also rallied outside the Brazilian embassy in 2005 right after the death of Stang. Though this year’s rally did not receive as much attention, the 2005 rally made Brazilian news, according to Bratman.
“They would be moved to tears in Brazil to know there’s solidarity with their struggle here in D.C.,” Carter said.
You can reach this staff writer ascalamogna@theeagleonline.com.
