According to the NGO Global Witness, at least 227 environmental activists died in 2020, mainly in Latin America. Timber extraction, dam construction, agribusiness and mining are related sectors
This is a record number. At least 227 environmental activists were murdered around the world in 2020, at a rate of four a week, and the majority in Latin America, denounced the NGO. Global Witness (in English), in a new report published Monday, September 13th. For the second year in a row, Colombia leads that gruesome count, with 65 activists and community leaders killed for their commitment to protecting nature, according to this report.
Outside Colombia, crimes are concentrated in Mexico (30), the Philippines (29), Brazil (20), Honduras (17) and a dozen other countries. Close “three out of four attacks” occurred in Central or South America, adds Global Witness, which points out that these attacks have been on the rise since 2018. The victims have several commonalities: 70% of them were working to end deforestation and all but one lived in countries under development.
A third were indigenous peoples. “We indigenous people (…) know that the environment is the source of all life”, told AFP Celia Umenza, community leader of the Nasa tribe, which fights deforestation, predatory monocultures and illegal mining in Colombia’s troubled southwest, in the Cauca region. She herself survived three assassination attempts.
Global Witness has maintained these statistics since 2012 and, in this latest report, finds a steady increase in these crimes over the past three years (167 in 2018 and 212 in 2019). This year the NGO wanted, as the title of its report indicates, to draw attention to “the industries that are the cause of the climate crisis and attacks on conservationists”, according to her. Timber extraction, dam construction, agribusiness and mining are the sectors linked to most deaths.