Letter from a Friend of Vanessa

Dear Colleagues,

Below is a letter from a friend from Acre, Cazuza, who is in Florida now to study English. Vanessa was a close friend of his. I had the painful task of telling him what had happened when he was having lunch with other friends.

Incapacity, impotence, sadness, lots of sadness. It is this mixture of sentiments that have taken hold of me this Monday afternoon, when I was struck with the news of the barbarism suffered by my friend, Vanessa Sequeira.

Vanessa, a young 36 year old researcher from Portugal, was brutally murdered while carrying out an important research project which would defend Amazonia and its people.

I met her in February of this year and since then have had a growing friendship with her, a friendship that the physical distance in which we found ourselves for two months was not sufficient to undermine. We seemed to have been connected for many years.

What drew me to her was her immense character, something that seems to me to be losing ground in our society to brutality, to the lack of awareness of life and even to a sense of banality in life.

Vanessa was one of those people with love for their neighbor, with solidarity and a preoccupation for society that should be a guide for all of us in this new millennium.

While a researcher, her primary concern was with the formation of social capital through her work. She always encouraged students and recent graduates to participate in her research, even though she was capable of conducting her research alone. She always sought to give to families in the communities that she visited knowledge that they were capable of improving their lives, even after the conclusion of her research. She always worked in a transparent manner, involving the community and overcoming the most diverse of obstacles that would have made most people desist from the task.

I find myself asking why someone with values such as these, with such motivation and energy to defend just causes such as Amazonia and its people had her life violently ended by such a brutal crime. For how long shall we hear of barbarisms such as this?

I don’t know if some day we will have answers to these kinds of tragedies, but I am certain that there will not be acts such as these that will cause in me the sentiments that I described in the beginning of these lines.

I have faith and conviction that I and many others, that are outraged with the lack of positive values in this millennium, that we will continue doing all that we can to ensure that we will never again be surprised with news such as this.

To you, reader, I ask that you do not lose your capacity for reaction and outrage with the injustices of life. To Vanessa, her family and friends, I wish you great light and that you can find peace in this moment. This is what I can offer while faced with this tremendous sadness.

Cazuza (Eduardo Amaral Borges)
Researcher and Extensionist at PESACRE-Rio Branco, Acre. In the picture above Cazuza and Vanessa are at the Park Chico Mendes in Rio Branco. Cazuza is now on his way to Lisboa to participate on Vanessa’s funeral tomorrow.