This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Brazilian police have arrested a priest in the Amazon who championed the rights of smallholders against powerful agricultural interests.



Father Amaro Lopes is the best-known follower of the American-born nun, Dorothy Stang, who was murdered in 2005 in a killing orchestrated by landowners during a dispute that continues today.

We must honour lost land defenders by fighting the system which killed them Read more

Police in the jungle city of Anapu accuse Lopes of extortion and sexual harassment, but in denying the charges, his followers say they have been trumped up to silence an influential opponent of plans to clear forests and small farms.

“It’s the landowners and the gangsters,” said Jane Dwyer, a nun in Anapu. “They are trying to criminalise their opponents. This always happens.”

In an interview with the Guardian two weeks before his arrest, Lopes said he had been warned he was a target.

“We’re all threatened for protecting the rights of the poor against people in power,” he said. “They’re working on a plan to get rid of me. It won’t be a shooting because I am a priest – and they don’t want the same fuss that followed the assassination of Dorothy. But they’ll arrange an accident or something.”

The police operation to arrest Lopes involved 15 officers, a large number for a single priest – and a sharp contrast to the resources devoted to investigating the 10 killings carried out in Anapu since 2015.

The small municipality of 27,076 people has one of the highest murder rates in the country.

Anapu’s police chief, Rubens Mattoso Ribeiro, said Lopes had been under investigation for a year and could face charges of “extortion, intimidation, sexual harassment and leadership of land invasions”.

He said the evidence against Lopes included depositions from local landowners who claim they were extorted, bank records and an audio recording of a man allegedly forced to have sex with the priest in the parish house.

Lopes and the two nuns who worked with him – Dwyer and Katia Webster – had recently urged the authorities to investigate the murder of Valdemir Resplandes, a land activist who was shot on 10 January after receiving threats over a land dispute with a local businessman.

Like Stang – whose community leadership role he adopted after her death – Lopes advocated forest protection, tree-planting, and sustainable use of land by small farmers rather than clearance by agribusiness or miners. This put him and his congregation up against powerful interests.



Tensions over land have never been far from the surface in this frontier community – and they have grown as a result of the influx of workers and businesses that followed the construction of the nearby Belo Monte dam.

The violence ebbed after Stang’s death, which prompted an international outcry and spurred the then Workers Party government to fill local justice positions with officials who were more sympathetic to the Landless Workers Movement.

But activists say the pendulum has swung against them since Michel Temer, who is more closely aligned with the ruralista agribusiness lobby, assumed the presidency.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Father Amaro Lopes: ‘When we see violence, we naturally have fear. But we will carry on because we are defenders of human rights and our land.’ Photograph: Jonathan Watts

“National politics really makes a difference. This is a moment in Brazil where the ruralistas are getting more powerful so the struggle has become worse. The murderous violence has returned,” said Webster, a nun in the Congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.

Webster said some big landowners now used more sophisticated tactics. She said that instead of killing opponents in the countryside – which would probably be classified as political assassinations – the fear is that they now arrange for murders in cities, which are more likely to be dismissed as common crimes.



At a mass shortly before his arrest in a small rural church, Lopes spoke from the altar to the dozen or so congregants about the recent killings and the threats they all faced.

“When we see violence, we naturally have fear. When we see the police, we are not reassured because we don’t believe they will protect us. But we will carry on because we are defenders of human rights and our land.”

Those gathered then joined him in singing “We’ll overcome the violence.”