Ruthless exploitation of the forest has seen businessmen routinely commission acts of violence to intimidate opposition and this week they were responsible for the murder of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang who was shot to death in a dispute with a powerful rancher. Sadly, it took Stang's death to galvanise the government into making an intervention in the Para region although it had been strongly petitioned by activists for over 2 years previously.

Half of Brazil - 1.6 million square miles - is rainforest. Development, logging and ranching have destroyed as much as a fifth of this environment.