‘Appalling Figures’: At Least Three Environmental Defenders Killed Per Week in 2023

Eduardo Mendúa, a member of the Indigenous A’i Cofán peoples, resisted the expansion of oil operations in Ecuador’s Cofán territory. On February 26, 2023, Mendúa, 40, was in his garden when two hooded men shot him 12 times at point-blank range. 

Mendúa is one of 196 environmental defenders murdered last year, according to a report released Monday by the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Witness. 

That means, on average, at least three people were killed every week in 2023 for speaking out against land grabbers, pollution and extractive industries.

More defenders were murdered in Colombia than in any other place: 79 people, the highest number in a calendar year for any country since Global Witness started tracking these deaths in 2012. 

Honduras, with 18 defenders killed, had the largest number in per capita terms. Mexico and Brazil, along with Colombia and Honduras, accounted for 70 percent of the murders in 2023. The Philippines, with 17, had the largest share in Asia.

Those tallies are largely considered undercounts due to the remote locations where attacks usually occur, fear of reprisals and government suppression of information about the killings. The report only covers 22 countries, likely leaving defender killings in large swaths of the world unacknowledged. 

“Families may never find justice or closure, nor feel safe enough to speak out,” the report said. “The truth is obscured by a system of complicity: compromised civic spaces, rampant corruption, and dysfunctional legal systems.”

Indigenous people made up a disproportionate share of the victims. Despite being only 6 percent of the global population, they comprised about 43 percent of defenders killed in 2023. That is, in part, because of companies’ and governments’ rampant disregard for their rights and because Indigenous communities own or occupy land that is home to roughly 80 percent of Earth’s biodiversity and often sits atop vast amounts of minerals, metals and fossil fuels sought by extractive industries. 

“At the heart of this violence,” the report said about the targeting of Indigenous people, “is the increasing rush for land, which results in land grabbing … often without consent, for extraction and production purposes.”

Impunity is widespread and acts as an incentive for more violence. Most attacks go uninvestigated and unpunished. In Eduardo Mendúa’s case, only the accomplice who had driven the get-away canoe of the assassins was arrested—he is serving a 13-year sentence. The two gunmen remain at large and are alleged to have crossed Ecuador’s northern border into Colombia. 

Albeiro Mendúa, a friend and colleague of Eduardo’s, said friends and family have demanded Ecuador’s law enforcement officials work with their counterparts in Colombia and international agencies to pursue the men. Meanwhile, conflict and division over the oil operations Eduardo Mendúa opposed has continued, with the state oil company advancing its expansion plans, Albeiro Mendúa said. 

Eduardo Mendúa’s widow, Fabiola Ortiz, said in a statement provided to Inside Climate News that the family’s six children miss their father and that his death has left a hole in their lives that will never be filled. She wants the alleged fugitives to be caught and to serve a sentence for the crime. 

The Global Witness report, issued annually, is a grim reminder of how dangerous it is to defend nature: Since the organization began tracking the deaths in 2012, more than 2,100 defenders have been murdered. 

“These are appalling figures,” said Laura Furones, a senior adviser to Global Witness’ Land and Environmental Defenders Campaign and lead author of the report.

‘Not Learning’

Overall, the mining industry has been the sector linked most often to defender killings, according to Global Witness. The report said 25 defenders were killed in 2023 after opposing mining operations. 

Given the continued high demand for traditionally mined materials like gold, coal and iron, and the growing demand for minerals and metals used in low-carbon technologies like batteries, that portends a dark future.  

“What we’re seeing from the [mining] industry is that it is not learning, and it is replicating a model of social conflict and attacks,” Furones said. 

The report calls on businesses and their financiers—some of whom are U.S.-based companies and banks—to support the enactment of mandatory due diligence laws that require companies to identify, prevent and remedy human rights abuses throughout the lifecycle of their projects. 

Transnational companies have remained stubbornly opposed to mandatory legal requirements, but have welcomed the more than 3,000 international treaties that give those same companies binding special rights and protections. 

Crime, Corruption and Big Industry

Holding perpetrators and their beneficiaries accountable for the violence is a key step toward protecting defenders.

But rights activists say it is challenging to link deaths to particular companies or armed groups because, increasingly, legal and illegal groups—from miners to loggers, agribusiness and drug traffickers—have overlapping interests and the support of powerful elites. 

Those groups form explicit or implicit alliances: Loggers clear land, making way for cattle pasture and mining, the profits of which fuel criminal groups, which in some cases pay politicians for protection. 

In Brazil, some mining and agribusiness companies have worked with right-wing politicians known as “ruralistas” to try to legally open Indigenous land to those industries. 

Though the ruralista caucus continues to hold a majority in Brazil’s Congress, recorded attacks in Brazil dropped from 34 in 2022 to 25 last year, which researchers attribute to the policies of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office in January 2023. Among other things, those policies restored some funding to Indigenous and environmental protection agencies.  

Left to Fend for Themselves

While Brazil’s numbers fell this year, Colombia’s rose. The nation has the largest share of defenders killed, 461, since Global Witness started tracking it in 2012.

Part of what has made Colombia such a dangerous place for defenders is over a half century of armed conflict, from which the nation is only recently emerging. In 2016, the government signed a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym of FARC, but the disintegration of the FARC has given rise to a proliferation of smaller criminal groups.

Activists say Colombia’s high number of defender killings is a stark warning for a region where violent crime has exploded in recent years.  

Communities living throughout Colombia’s rural areas have been caught in the middle of complex environmental conflicts involving extractive companies and organized criminal groups. 

Vanessa Torres, deputy director of the Colombian nonprofit Asociación Ambiente y Sociedad, said communities are put in impossible situations where they often must pay armed groups for protection but don’t have the money to do so. That pushes some people to work for mining, logging and other industries they oppose. Communities, lacking other economic opportunities, then sometimes become divided over support for extractive industries.

Large and small companies take advantage of that dynamic, Torres said. 

Caught between industry and criminal groups, some Colombian communities have created their own guard forces. The guards, members of the community, patrol territories and disseminate information to locals about their legal rights to land, consultation and access to information, like companies’ environmental studies. 

“The guards need the support of the state, but right now they receive no recognition and no funding,” Torres said. 

“If we don’t protect the defenders—the Indigenous, Afro descendant and farming communities—our fight against environmental problems is in trouble.” 

Hopes that would change rose with the 2022 election of leftist President Gustavo Petro, who promised to adopt measures protecting defenders. In August, Colombia ratified the Escazú agreement, making it one of at least 16 countries to adopt the treaty’s legal protections that include requirements for governments to prevent and punish attacks on environmental defenders. 

In October, Colombia will host this year’s Convention on Biological Diversity conference of the parties, the theme of which is “Peace with Nature.” An aim of the conference, according to the Global Witness report, is to spotlight the voices of people protecting ecosystems—work that benefits people around the world. 

“For us in Colombia, it’s very important to promote this message,” Torres said of the conference theme. “If we don’t protect the defenders—the Indigenous, Afro descendant and farming communities—our fight against environmental problems is in trouble.” 

Harassment, Smear Campaigns and Disappearances

Murder is not the only tactic used to silence and intimidate defenders. The report said land defenders are also targeted by businesses, governments and criminal groups with harassment, criminalization and smear campaigns that brand them as “against development” or, in some cases, as communists. 

Criminalization, the report said, “is now the most common tactic used to silence defenders globally.” That happens when governments or businesses weaponize defamation, terrorism and other laws against defenders. 

The shift toward criminalization has dovetailed with an overall trend of democratic backsliding around the world—some countries have eroded, or limited, citizens’ civil and political rights.

In the United States, more than 20 state governments have adopted a model law pushed by the activist industry group American Legislative Exchange Council that restricts protests near fossil fuel projects. 

In Southeast Asia, forced disappearances and abductions have been growing. Last year, Jhed Tamano, 22, and Jonila Castro, 23, were abducted by armed men after visiting with fishing communities affected by development projects in Manila Bay. The Filipino women told Global Witness that they were blindfolded, had their hands tied and mouths taped.

Tamano and Castro were held for 12 days, questioned about their advocacy work and threatened with sexual assault. After the women were released, they were charged with defamation for “embarrassing” the Philippine armed forces, who had allegedly been involved in the abduction. The women face up to six months in prison. 

Some members of Congress think the United States can and must do more because American companies are among those operating in regions where there are conflicts. 

“The findings of this report outline the dangers and deadly impacts of corporate greed and corruption on communities and biodiversity, and the frontline role environmental defenders play in safeguarding human rights, land, and natural resources around the world,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.). “We have seen defenders targeted and killed for their commitment to a cleaner, healthier environment for all. It’s vital that Congress work with environmental defenders to hold accountable bad actors and protect those that are being persecuted for standing up for what’s right.” 

Perhaps most chilling about the report is the dearth of information about defenders across the African continent, Russia, Iran and China, among other repressive places. The report listed two defender deaths in Africa this year, one in the Democratic Republic of Congo and one in Ghana. Since 2012, Global Witness has counted 116 defenders murdered in Africa, most of whom were DRC park rangers. 

The uncounted, the report said, “will remain unnamed, their sacrifices unacknowledged, their stories of defiance untold.”

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