Thousand of soldiers have been deployed to an Amazon rainforest region where a US nun was shot to death last weekend amid violent attacks by loggers and ranchers against indigenous people trying to defend the areas vast natural resources. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva cut short a visit to Suriname and rushed home yesterday, where he held an emergency cabinet meeting on the situation. Yesterday, Lula ordered the creation of two massive new rain forest reserves amid increasing pressure to protect the region. About 2,000 troops were mobilized to the area to restore order hours after thousands of people converged on the small Amazon town of Anapu to bury the bullet-riddled body of Dorothy Stang, the 73-year-old nun who was killed trying to defend the jungle where she had lived for decades.

Stang is a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio. She was attacked Saturday. A witness said she began to read from a Bible before being shot at close range six times by two gunmen.The government says it hopes the troops will put an end to the violence in the area where slave-labor and illegal logging is rife. But environmentalists have said that the soldiers alone cannot solve the region’s problems. The government recently restored some logging permits in the area after loggers and ranchers staged protests by blocking roads. In the latest attacks, assailants gunned down the former president of the Rural Workers Union. In addition, a farmer was found shot to death in an area where Stang had been trying to establish a sustainable development project for poor Brazilians. Meanwhile, the Independent Media Center in Brazil reported this week that on Wednesday, Brazilian military police raided a homeless camp killing at least two members of the Homeless Movement. More than 800 people were arrested, including two Indymedia journalists, one of them from New York.