Brazilian government worried over conservationists’ deaths

The Brazilian government held an urgent meeting today to outline a strategy to put an end to the escalating violence in the Amazon region.

Over the past week, four conservationists have been murdered.

The string of violence started last Tuesday when José Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, María do Espírito Santo da Silva, were brutally murdered.

The Silvas were leading forest activists and community leaders in a nut extraction local association in close confrontation to wood loggers in Nova Ipixuna, Para state.

A few days later another dead body was found. The remains of Eremilton Pereira dos Santos were in the same community, but police is yet to establish a connection between the murders.
On Friday, in the Amazonian state of Rondonia, Adelino Ramos, another conservationist and community leader was also killed.

Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a federal police investigation into those murders.
Faced with the escalating violence, Michel Temer – the countries’ incumbent president while Dilma Rousseff is in an official visit to Uruguay – summoned the government’s top officials to outline an emergency plan to restrain the increasing violence in the Amazon region.

According to the New York Times, more than 1,000 rural activists, small farmers, religious workers and others fighting the region’s rampant deforestation have been slain in the past 20 years, but only a handful of killers have ever been successfully prosecuted.