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 American
nun Dorothy
Stang was killed yesterday, shot three times in the back
and once in the head, in the Northern Brazilian Amazon basin. Stang was
74.
She is the latest casualty in the 500-year Indian wars, for control of
the American continents. This long-running conflict, although largely relegated
to the history books and channels of our collective memory, continues to
this day,in modern remakes of the classic westerns, featuring ranchers,
cowboys, saloon owners, railroad tycoons, Federal Marshals, drunken posses
and, of course, plenty of Indians.
In spectacular, cinemagraphic settings from the Andes to Amazonia, the
last battles in the dying embers of this bitter war are being fought every
day. The last untamed pieces of the continent, those aeries
so inaccesable, swamps so pestilent, tribes so resistant that that they
have to this point managed to remain unprofitable to exploit, are finally
in
the sights of the forces of global development. It is inevitable, for better
or worse, that we will live to see the end of this process, the functional
integration of 100% of the worlds human and natural resources in a single
economic network, within our lifetimes.
Dorothy Stang probably didn’t care about the historical inevitability
of economic integration. She has spent the last 40 years in Brazil
trying to help Indians defend themselves from the economic forces that
are destroying
their forests, taking their lands and obliterating their cultures. For
her, every family, every farm, every act of resistance was a victory.
BELEM, Brazil — A 74-year-old American nun was shot and killed early
yesterday in Brazil’s Amazon jungle, where she worked for decades to defend
peasant farmers and the rain forest from illegal loggers and ranchers.
Two gunmen approached US missionary Dorothy Stang and shot
her three times in the back at a settlement of landless peasants, 30
miles from the town of Anapu in the state of Para, police and fellow missionaries
said.
Sister Dorothy, as she was known, was originally from Ohio. She worked
with peasant families to prevent them from fleeing illegal loggers and
ranchers in the Trans-Amazonian highway region, about 435 miles southwest
of Belem, the state capital.
Back when the Dowbrigade was a rising young technocrat we would use the
LACK of a
Trans-Amazonian highway as a prime example of why Latin America
remained mired in underdevelopment while the US was a paragon of enlightened
modernity. After all, it was in 1869 that the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific
met up in Utah and completed the link between the oceans on OUR half of
the continent. From that initial tiny trickle, those twin bands of steel, the mighty modern river of American
commerce emerged, and the fate of North America’s native peoples was sealed.
Meanwhile, 150 years later, there is STILL no land-link between the Atlantic
and Pacific in South America. To get from the Atlantic coast in Brazil
to the Pacific ports of Colombia, Ecuador or Peru, one must take a convoluted
series of riverboats, frequently portaging over often impassable mud tracks.
And Latin America is poor and underdeveloped, with a shorter life expectancy,
lower per capita income and a poorer showing in just about all the indices
of socioeconomic health.
But, just as every cloud has a silver lining, so with every blessing comes
a curse (we are teaching Proverbs in class this week). Our economic development
is built on the ruins of a dozen cultures, hundreds of decimated tribes,
dozens of languages lost to the human inheritance forever, a way of life
plucked from the human tapestry.
In our enthusiasm for traveling to South America to participate in the
process of development and intercultural transmutation, we lost sight of
the fact that one of the main reasons we LIKED living and working there
was precisely because it was relatively UNDER developed, that people weren’t
always stressed out and running around between Tai Chi and wine-tastings
and AA, because life had refinements beyond the endless variations on the
art of
selling,
selling products, selling services, selling opinions, selling yourself.
Although we wish it were otherwise, in our heart of hearts we believe
the Trans-Amazonian highway will be built in our lifetimes, despite generations of inertia, government corruption and popular resistance. Ten thousand
Dorothy Stangs couldn’t do more than slow it down for a few years, and
maybe, hopefully, get the Indiians a better deal than the historical track
record indicates they should expect.
Maybe someday the Trans-Amazonian highway will be studded with Chief Wannawinna
Palace Casino and the Shrunken Headwaters Hotel and Gambling Emporium.
Hopefully, however, the Brazilians will be more successful than their northern
neighbors
in preserving the legacy of the human beings who really tamed this continent,
and eked out the secrets of how to read its rhythms and live in equilibrium
with its ecology.
Sister Stang will be remembered, and missed.
from the
Boston Globe
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