Adelino Ramos Killed:
Third Environmental Activist Murdered This Week
BY BRADLEY BROOKS 05/28/11 10:41 AM ET 
SAO PAULO -- They watched as the Amazon rain forest fell around them. Instead of staying quiet, as so many people in the lawless region do, environmentalist leader Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria, fought back.
They reported illegal loggers to police and federal prosecutors. They confronted powerful interests that destroy the forest for the quick economic gains to be made from selling timber, or from clearing land to raise cattle or soybeans.
This week, like so many Amazon activists before them, the Silvas were gunned down.
On Saturday, police confirmed that yet another rural activist was killed: Adelino Ramos, a land reform leader in the Amazon state of Rondonia, which borders Bolivia. Like the Silvas, he also denounced those who illegally cut the rain forest.
He was shot by a gunman or gunmen Friday morning. Fifteen years ago, he survived one of the deadliest land conflicts in Brazil, when police killed 10 of the so-called landless activists in an encampment on land they had occupied.
The Silvas were killed Tuesday near the sustainable reserve on government-ceded land were they led about 300 families working the forest in the Amazon state of Para, one of Brazil's most violent and lawless. Federal police said Friday that they were investigating, but had not made any arrests.
Authorities say there is little doubt the couple were assassinated for their work. They faced numerous death threats, nothing was stolen off their bodies and Silva's ear was cut off, likely as proof that he was dead.
Three more names were tacked onto an ever-growing list of more than 1,150 rural activists who have been slain in land conflicts across Brazil in the past 20 years, murders mostly carried out by gunmen hired by loggers, ranchers and farmers to silence those who protest illegal cutting in the forest.
So many die because so few face punishment.
(source:.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/29)
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