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São Paulo-Eachtund thirty years after the brutal murder of the Jesuit missionary Vicente Cañas born in Spanish in the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso finally gave the Brazilian judiciary an arrest warrant against one of the murderers.

Ronaldo Osmar, a local police deputy, was found guilty in view of the fact that he was old and was taken to the hospital, his detention still depends on his health conditions.

“Such an undeficity doesn't bother me. The most important thing is that it has been convicted and nothing can change” core.

Cañas was born in Albacete, Spain in 1939 and joined Brazil as a missionary in 1966. In 1969 he started working with indigenous groups in Mato Grosso.

“We met for the first time in 1978. At that point, he had established contact with the Enawenê-Nawê a few years earlier,” Moreira recalled.

Until then, the Enawenê-Nawê had no real contact with the surrounding society. Their traditional area was not recognized by the government, the cattle breeders and lumberjacks.

Cañas lived with them for 10 years and learned their language and habits. It became part of the working group that the government would present the parameters for the definition of their territory.

“Of course, the cattle breeders were very interested in their country. When they saw Cañas' work for their protection, they quickly began to aim at, and the threats became common,” recalled Morira.

At a certain point in time, Cañas himself would warn his friends that his life was in danger. In fact, he was killed in his hut in April 1987, 37 miles from the village of Enawenê-Nawê. He was alone in quarantine and waited to join them again. His body was found only 30 days after the murder.

With his death, a long wait for justice would begin. The problem is that the police examination of his murder was led by Deputy Ronaldo Osmar, who was a great suspect. He would do anything to cause delays and hinder the examination.

A bizarre chapter of the investigation occurred in 1989. Cañas' body was already examined by forensic experts in the state of Mato Grosso, but for some reason his skull was sent to the state of Minas Gerais for further analyzes. There it was declared missing. The skull would later be found on the street, in a small box, by a shoeshine boy.

“While the process was carried out by the local judiciary, he did not move. That is why we fought for his federalization,” said Moreira.

One of the reasons for the transfer to the federal judiciary was the fact that Cañas represented the Brazilian government as a member of the Enawenê-Nawê Land Grant Work Group. The new lawsuit started in 2015 and led to Osmar's conviction two years later.

According to Cimi, one of the key elements of the jury was participating as a witness to members of the Rikbaktsa Indigenous group. The Enawenê-Nawê-Volk has a cultural ban that hindered it to mention dead people so that they could not talk about Cañas in court. The Rikbaktsa agreed to do this and provided new evidence.

If the legal process was completed so much, the Amazon Church of Cañas would quickly become a great martyr, side at other missionaries who have lost their lives in land disputes in the region, as the sister Dorothy Stang (1931-2005), born in the USA (1931-2005) and Father Josimo Tavares (1953-1986). During the synod for the Pan-Amazon region (2019), he was called back several times by many of his friends.

“He was a very humane person. He would never correspond to a kind of injustice. He had the utopia that we would build a fraternal world and died for it,” said Sebastião Moreira. “For me, he was a model in the way he led his life and faith.”

Cañas was never forgotten under the Enawenê-Nawê. Tragically, part of his struggle for the demarcation of her country in the region of Preto River, a trunk area in which the spirits of the three of the clans of the group are supposed to inhabit. Such a area is now occupied by farms.

“And part of the country that was officially granted to them [in 1996] are now expressed by ranchers and illegal wooden fellers, ”said Moreira.

Some of Caña's' Jesuit colleagues said justice was only delivered in his case if invasions such as this stop in Brazil. Unfortunately, this seems to be a distant scenario.