Human rights activists fall foul of ranchers and loggers as land battles rage in the lawless Amazonian state of Para
From Tom Phillips in the Amazon

AN unusual greeting awaits visitors to Castelo dos Sonhos, a former gold mining boomtown deep in the Brazilian Amazon. On the right, as you approach the dust-clogged settlement, a wooden crucifix sprouts from the undergrowth marking the spot where, in 2002, gunmen dumped the bullet-riddled body of a local human rights defender.

Just beyond the cross, at the town's entrance, a white sign looms ominously over the roadside. "Welcome to the Castle of Dreams. Love it or leave it."

The Castle of Dreams must rank as one of the most inappropriately named places in the world.

Located in the Amazonian state of Para - a region at the centre of illegal deforestation and which is also the Brazilian champion of rural violence - it was baptised by fortune-hunting goldminers who flocked from all over Brazil during the 1970s and '80s.

These days, however, the wealth has dried up leaving an impoverished, violent frontier town about which there is little to love or dream about.

Locals claim that the small town's cemetery is home to at least 100 bodies containing some kind of bullet wound. The town's main avenue, a dirt track built around what was once a goldmine airstrip, is now home to half a dozen squalid brothels where girls, some as young as 12, can be negotiated for as little as £5.

This is the Brazilian Wild West, a state where land conflicts rage and rural leaders who oppose those trying to tear down the world's largest rainforest are often executed.

According to Brazilian human rights group Justica Global, 772 activists and rural workers were killed here in Para between 1971 and 2004, while only three of these cases were ever brought to trial.

Bartolomeu Morais da Silva, the 47-year-old leader of the rural workers' union here in Castelo dos Sonhos, was one such victim. Da Silva, or Brasilia as he was known to his many friends, led the fight against the local ranchers who were trying to expel the poor from their land.

He was gunned down on July 21, 2002, and dumped beside the BR-163, a muddy highway that cuts 1000km through the jungle from north to south.

"For them the ranchers it was better to eliminate him like this He wanted justice for the poor, for the needy and they the ranchers were jealous.

"He was a clever guy," said his brother, Judas Tadeu de Morais, 51, picking his way through the undergrowth to the spot where da Silva's mangled body was abandoned exactly five years ago, filled with 12 bullet holes.

"He was a fighter He could have been elected mayor here and ordered them around.

"He was belly up, like this, with his head inside the thicket and his legs splayed out," he added, motioning to the ground.

Brasilia's execution was part of a 30-year wave of politically motivated murders in the Brazilian Amazon.

Similar assassinations continue to take place across this notoriously lawless region, where the advance of illegal loggers and cattle ranchers has triggered an explosive dispute for land.

Human-rights activists and environmentalists are routinely eliminated by those they oppose; threats against them are commonplace.

In the nearby town of Sao Felix do Xingu, the mayor recently banned motorcycle helmets after locals complained that gunmen were using them to hide their identities while carrying out their duties.

Meanwhile, environmental group Greenpeace has started using bulletproof vehicles in the region because of constant threats against its activists.

The Bishop responsible for Castelo dos Sonhos has been known to wear a bulletproof vest under his cassock because of threats against his life.

The best-known "rainforest martyr" was elderly American nun Dorothy Stang, who worked with the poor of Anapu, another small town in Para, and tried to fight off the loggers' advance.

On February 12, 2005, as she visited one settlement, Stang, 72, was confronted by two gunmen and shot at close range as she read to them from the Bible. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice," she reportedly told her killers shortly before they took her life. "For they shall be satisfied."

Since Stang's murder in 2005 the Brazilian government has stepped up attempts to clamp down on the pistoleiros or hired guns of the Amazon rainforest as well as launching an offensive against ranchers who exploit slave labour. For a period after Stang's death, the army was even sent in to keep order.

The governor of Para, Ana Julia Carepa, also recently vowed to deploy police helicopters to counter the armed groups that are hired by powerful ranchers to defend their land and silence their critics.

"Our goal is to lose the title of Brazilian champion of violence to be the champion of human rights," she said in an interview earlier this year.

Yet visit small towns in Para like Castelo dos Sonhos - as lawless as they are isolated - and it is clear just how far off this target still is.

"I haven't been killed because of luck," said Antonio Ferreira de Almeida Silva, 47, who took on the thorny task of defending Castelo dos Sonhos's poor after the execution of his friend and colleague, Brasilia.

"They the gunmen say that if I go out anywhere I'm going to be killed, that I could be killed at any time To this day I don't have the courage to go to a party around here. I've never been and I won't go. It's heavy stuff."

Even the gunmen of Castelo dos Sonhos - themselves luckless, impoverished men, who can be hired for as little as £20 - are not immune to the violence.

"All I know is that he disappeared," said Antonia Ferreira, 49, whose husband allegedly worked for the ranchers as a hitman before mysteriously disappearing into the forest one morning. Locals believe his death was what Brazilians call a "queima de arquivo", literally an archive burn - he knew too much so he had to be eliminated.

"He left one day at 5am on his motorbike and never came back," added a weeping Ferreira who denied that her husband was a killer.

Father Jose Amaro Lopes de Souza, a Catholic priest who worked alongside Dorothy Stang in Anapu, is another of those whose death has repeatedly been "announced" by his enemies.

"The whole situation is coming back with force," said Father de Souza, at his parish home, a wooden shack located next door to Stang's old residence. "The threats are constant."

He pulled out a photo album containing dozens of pictures of the American nun lying face down in the mud, a bright crimson stain across her T-shirt.

With no government protection, Father de Souza instead keeps two ferocious dogs in his garden to ward off the gunmen.

"They the politicians come here and speak oh so beautifully, hitting the table with their fists, but the tape never changes, things just get more and more complicated and history keeps repeating itself," he said.

In towns like Castelo dos Sonhos and Anapu, one of the biggest problems is the near-total absence of the state. With a population of around 12,000, Castelo dos Sonhos boasts just seven policemen. In the rainy season it can take days to reach the nearest sizeable city.

Instead, locals say, such areas are effectively controlled by "consorcios" or "consortiums" of ranchers who pay off the police and distribute justice down the barrel of a rifle.

"It's a mafia, it's an organisation of the farmers," said Morais. "They get together and they pay the gunman. There were more than 10 involved in the killing of my brother. The guy who ordered it was arrested. But there were more involved. What about them?"

Tarcisio Feitosa da Silva, the prominent Brazilian environmentalist who received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize last year because of his fight to defend the rainforest, claimed that the region was controlled by "criminal gangs" and an "illegal police force".

"The state must intervene in these areas to stop the land-grabbers," he said, adding that the region was currently "without law and without owner".

Marcelo Marquesini, a forest engineer and Greenpeace campaigner in the Amazon, defined the region as the "land of the Malboro Man the wild west".

Not everybody agrees with this analysis. Leo Reck, one of the founders of Castelo dos Sonhos, brushes off the idea that the town he helped create should, as many locals have suggested, be renamed the Castle of Nightmares.

"This is one of the calmest places I know," explained a softly-spoken Reck, who was reputedly nicknamed the White Panther during the 1980s because of his involvement in often bloody struggles for control of the area's goldmines.

"You can walk around at night. You can go wherever you want," he said.

After a few days in Castelo dos Sonhos, however, it is hard to agree with such a verdict.

It was approaching 10am but a relentless sun was already beating down on a shabby cemetery on the town's outskirts.

Morais was here to visit his brother's grave, a drab concrete slab nestled between dozens of rickety wooden crosses, many without names.

He strolled to the other side of the graveyard, pointing out the graves of several other murdered locals, and towards half a dozen empty pits that had recently been dug into the terracotta earth in anticipation of the next victims.

"Around here the level of crookedness is so high that they dig the graves before the victim has even died," Morais sniggered angrily, motioning to the holes.

He turned back to his brother's grave and wondered out loud: "Who'll be the next unfortunate soul?"