One Land Defender Is Killed Every Two Days

In the past 10 years, an environmental activist somewhere in the world was killed every two days. In 2021, three-quarters of such murders were perpetrated in Central America. The perpetrators have been mainly organized criminal groups and governments that want to destroy land for profit, such as through mining, logging, and extractive industries like oil and gas.

A recent report from the international NGO Global Witness published these statistics, and more: Last year, of the 200 environmental defenders killed, 54 of them were in Mexico. About 40 percent of them were indigenous — despite the fact that indigenous people make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population. In Brazil, since the group started tracking the deaths of land defenders in 2012, 343 people have been killed, with 83 percent of them dying in the Amazon.

The activists “play a crucial role as a first line of defense against ecological collapse, yet are under attack themselves, facing violence, criminalization, and harassment perpetuated by repressive governments and companies prioritizing profit over human and environmental harm,” a spokesperson for Global Witness said.

And these murders occur in silence, for the most part. “Most of these crimes happen in places that are far away from power and are inflicted on those with, in many ways, the least amount of power,” the report author, Ali Hines, writes.

Besides Brazil and Mexico, the deadliest countries for environmental activists were Columbia, Honduras, and the Philippines. Hines told The Guardian: “This is a global problem, but it is almost exclusively happening in the Global South. Corruption and inequality are two kinds of key enabling factors for the killings.” As an example, she cites the land titling process, where companies and corrupt officials can make investment deals.

And widespread underreporting, Global Witness says, means that all these numbers are likely lower than the deadly reality. In Mexico alone, the group found that 94 percent of such murders go unreported, and less than 1 percent of cases are resolved.

“Defenders who try to seek justice are sometimes up against judges paid off with bribes,” Hines said. “That leads on to the third factor, which [are] the high rates of impunity. Cases are very rarely credibly investigated, never mind perpetrators brought to justice.”

People of color often have the least control over the environments their livelihoods depend upon, and tend to be the people most negatively affected by climate change. But they are also leading the charge to save the land and water they subsist on.

Dr. Vandana Shiva, a scientist and author who grew up in the Himalayas in India, writes in the Global Witness report that, growing up, “industrial logging was destroying the ecosystem in which we as humans were intertwined.” She explains that both her parents were tied to the land: her father as a forest conservationist and her mother as a farmer.

“We knew, intimately, that the value of the Himalayan forest was not to be found in the price of its timber, but in the way its extraordinary, abundant diversity sustains all forms of life — not least our own,” Vandana writes. “And so we put ourselves in the way of the commercial deforesters. By doing so, we weren’t just putting ourselves in danger. We were confronting a whole viewpoint — a way of seeing nature as something not to be cherished and protected, but to be conquered and subdued.”

And while almost all the environmental defenders who have been killed in the past 10 years lived in the Global South, she writes that “it is not the Global South that reaps the supposed economic ‘rewards’ of all this violence.” It is up to the people who do benefit to do what they can to stop these murders.

As Vandana put it: Land defenders "don’t just deserve protection for basic moral reasons. The future of our species, and our planet, depends on it.”