An Average Week in 2024: Three Environmental Defenders Murdered or Disappeared

On a November morning, Julia Chuñil, 72, strode through her cabin door in Chile’s lush Los Ríos region in search of missing livestock, with her dog Cholito by her side. 

They never returned. 

As president of her Indigenous Mapuche community, Chuñil had led efforts to recover ancestral Mapuche lands and defend the evergreen Valdivian forest, rapidly being replaced by timber industry plantations. That made her a target and the subject of repeated harassment from a local businessman. More than one attempt was made on her life before she vanished. 

Chuñil is one of 146 environmental defenders killed or disappeared last year, according to a new report from the watchdog group Global Witness.

Environmental defenders are people peacefully acting to protect their homelands and other ecosystems from pollution, degradation and destruction. Since Global Witness began tracking annual deaths in 2012, more than 2,253 environmental defenders have been murdered or disappeared. Many of the victims opposed extractive industries, such as mining, logging and industrial agriculture, or had challenged systemic issues like organized crime and land theft. 

“What all of these attacks have in common is that they are intended to silence the voice of territorial and environmental defenders,” said the report’s lead author, Laura Furones.

For the third year in a row, Colombia had the largest share of reported attacks, with 48 cases, down from 79 in 2023. 

Guatemala (20), Mexico (19), Brazil (12) and the Philippines (8) followed, with Guatemala recording the largest toll per capita. Killings there increased fivefold from 2023, largely due to a surge in crime linked to land grabs and environmental exploitation. 

“Decades of corrupt deals between political and corporate interests in Guatemala have enabled widespread exploitation of the country’s natural resources,” the report said.

The overall number of attacks dropped from 196 in 2023, but Global Witness warned the decline doesn’t mean the world is safer for defenders. 

“The gathering of information continues to be a challenge,” said Furones, senior advisor to the land and environmental defenders campaign at Global Witness. 

Global Witness works with local civil society organizations to independently verify reported attacks. But failing justice systems, armed conflict and the remote locations where many attacks take place make it difficult to establish details of the assaults. Perversely, the more repressive a government is, and the more likely reprisals are, the more likely attacks are to go unreported.

Africa’s nine murders and Asia’s 16 last year are likely an undercount, the researchers said. 

“Environmental defenders across Africa play a vital role, often at great risk to their own safety or lives,” said Peter Frederick Gilbey, communications lead at Hub Cymru Africa, a group that supports African civil society. 

“The obstacles to monitoring defenders, from conflict to shrinking civic space and fear of retaliation by corrupt law enforcement, vigilantes or in conflict zones, are very real, and often mean attacks go unseen or unreported,” he added. 

Global Witness said the vast majority of reported attacks, 82 percent, occurred in Latin America.

Like Chuñil, around a third of victims were Indigenous—an alarming figure given that they are only 6 percent of the global population. 

Nega Pataxó, a spiritual leader for the Indigenous Pataxó people and professor in Brazil’s Potiraguá region, was one of them. She spent years fighting alongside her brother to recover and protect their people’s land in Brazil’s Potiraguá region. 

Pataxó didn’t know when she woke the morning of Jan. 21, 2024, that more than 200 farmers—members of a group dedicated to removing Indigenous peoples from their lands—were coordinating a violent assault on WhatsApp. That afternoon, dozens of pickup trucks surrounded Pataxó people and gunmen opened fire. 

A video circulating on social media after the shooting showed the attackers celebrating the killing. To date, no one has been held accountable for Pataxó’s death. 

Neither the Chilean nor Brazilian embassies in Washington, D.C., responded to requests for comment. 

Beyond the Killings

The report also said that non-deadly attacks on environmental defenders persist: threats, sexual violence, online harassment and stigmatization, like labeling defenders as “anti-development” or “communists.”

Lawsuits aimed at bleeding defenders of resources and cowing them into silence are also common, the report said. And criminalization is increasing. 

In July last year, a Cambodian court found 10 environmental activists guilty of “plotting” against the government. Three were also found guilty of “insulting the king.” The activists, who work for the youth-led environmental group Mother Nature Cambodia, had uncovered corrupt natural resource deals, including exports of sand to Singapore and fake hydroelectric dams. 

A year before their sentencing, the organization received the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize, for defending ecosystems in one of the most repressive countries in the world. Five of the activists are now serving six- to eight-year prison terms, four others are in hiding or in exile and Spanish activist Alex Gonzalez-Davidson was deported and banned from returning. 

Gonzalez-Davidson said the primary goal of Cambodia’s environmental destruction—from extreme deforestation rates to intensive mining and the privatization of national park land—has been “to enrich the tiny elite that rules over the country.”

The Hun family has dominated Cambodia’s political system for decades, with human rights groups criticizing the government for political violence, manipulated elections and widespread corruption.

“The five in jail had been successful at exposing and stopping some of these corrupt schemes,” Gonzalez-Davidson said. “This caused those in power to lose access to very profitable cash cows, so the regime retaliated by using the puppet judiciary to sentence them to lengthy jail terms.”

The Cambodian embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment. 

Human rights groups have asked the International Criminal Court to investigate environmental crimes in Cambodia, alleging there have been more than 100 incidents of forced evictions, murders, violence and illegal imprisonment of land activists. Lawyer Richard J. Rogers, who drafted that request, said of the Mother Nature activists: “It is the Cambodian government that has been terrorizing its own people for decades, not these brave young environmental defenders.”

Standing up to Extractive Industries 

On Sept. 14, 2024, Juan López, 46, was leaving church when bullets ripped through his car, killing him. 

A year earlier, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights told the Honduran government to take immediate action to protect López, who had faced death threats for his opposition to a large open-pit iron oxide mine. The mine and its petroleum coke power plant and an iron oxide pelletizing plant threatened water sources for dozens of communities. 

Honduran prosecutors charged three people in connection with López’s killing, but no charges have been filed against the “intellectual perpetrators of the crime,” according to a letter sent by U.S. lawmakers to Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week, urging the U.S. Department of State to press Honduras on the issue. 

The Honduran embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment. There is no indication the mine owner was involved in Lopez’s death. 

The mining industry was linked to the largest share of attacks last year, with 29, followed by logging and agribusiness. Deadly attacks were driven by conflicts over infrastructure projects like roads and dams, as well as over poaching. 

“Rising demand for food, fuel and commodities has seen land grabs surge for benefiting industries like mining, logging, agribusiness and infrastructure projects,” the report said. 

A spokesperson for the industry group International Council on Mining and Metals said protecting and respecting human rights is a “core commitment” for its members and that the group recognizes the “vital role that human rights defenders and environmental advocates play, often in very difficult circumstances. Threats, violence or reprisals against them are unacceptable.”

The group added that all ICMM members must implement principles that include conducting human rights due diligence, consulting meaningfully with affected communities and providing effective grievance mechanisms. Last year, ICMM added guidance aimed at helping companies “identify and mitigate risks to defenders and others who may be affected by their operations, while promoting transparency and accountability,” the spokesperson said. 

Often, the soy, beef, timber, minerals, oil and other resources extracted by industries linked to killings are exported to high-consuming countries such as the United States. 

Caught in a Battleground

Some defenders are trapped between the interests of legalized extractive industries and violent criminal groups, both vying for control of local resources. 

Mining companies, oil firms and drug trafficking groups have all sought to invade rural communities in Colombia’s Putumayo region, one of the country’s most dangerous. 

“We’ve found ourselves caught in a battleground where control over land and resources is the goal,” local leader Jani Silva told Global Witness. 

“It is not just our community that is endangered, but the entire world.”

— Jani Silva, environmental defender

Silva helped establish Colombia’s first protected peasant reserves. For her advocacy, she has faced death threats and assassination attempts for over a decade, having to relocate multiple times. At the root of communities’ struggles, she said, is “gaining rights to our land and protecting everything within it.”

In an open letter, Silva said her work isn’t only about defending local communities, but that there is “an immense responsibility on our shoulders because everyone breathes the oxygen that our forests and wetlands produce.” 

“When there are threats to our territory,” she added, “it is not just our community that is endangered, but the entire world.”

Silva is one of more than 10,000 Colombian human rights defenders receiving government protection because of threats and attacks. Yet this is not enough, Global Witness said. Colombia has had the highest number of tracked murders of environmental defenders since 2012, and only 31 percent of human rights defenders requesting protection have received it. 

Of the 48 defenders killed in Colombia last year, 13 were from the Nasa community, with six of them acting as Indigenous guards defending their territory due to the lack of state protection. 

The Colombian embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment. 

Protecting Earth’s Most Biodiverse Places

On Nigeria’s southwest coast, the ancient Cross River rainforest is a refuge for endangered wildlife, including forest elephants, gorillas and pygmy hippopotami. It’s also home to the Ekuri community of Indigenous Nkukorli peoples, who have lived sustainably in the forest for generations. 

British colonization led to intensive resource extraction, a problem that has escalated in recent decades. Ekuri leaders took a stand in 1997, creating a community-led, award-winning conservation model that divided the forest into protected zones and areas for sustainable logging. 

Their success was cut short when the state government imposed a logging moratorium that cut off the Ekuri’s revenue stream from sustainable timber sales, funnelling the timber trade toward criminal groups. In the ensuing years, the government reversed the moratorium, and legal and illegal loggers have ravaged the forest: 11 percent of the region’s tree cover has been lost as of 2024, with about 40 percent of the Ekuri community’s forest destroyed since 2018, according to the Global Witness report. 

People who speak out against loggers face violence and criminalization, Global Witness said. When Ekuri eco-guards confiscated equipment of loggers operating on their lands without permission, company representatives and 30 armed state security forces descended on the community, opening fire, according to a 2023 submission to United Nations human rights experts. 

“There’s a huge level of conspiracy in the logging operation. Most of the concessions and permits are fake,” Ekuri activist Odey Oyama told Global Witness. 

In recent months, Oyama tried to stop illegal loggers from moving stolen timber from the forest. In January, he was arrested by more than 40 armed police officers and charged with promoting inter-communal war—a crime that carries a potential life sentence. In April, the charges were dismissed for lacking an evidentiary basis. 

The Nigerian embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment. 

China, the United States, Japan and European countries are the largest consumers of illegal timber. Just under a third of last year’s attacks on environmental defenders were associated with organized crime. 

Leaving Defenders More Isolated 

Global Witness pointed to “alarming shifts” in environmental and human rights policy around the world, including recent U.S. government actions. 

The Trump administration has pulled the United States out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, scaled back reporting on human rights abuses, including on abuses against Indigenous peoples and has gutted programs that combat drug-trafficking groups enriching themselves through environmental crimes. 

“These shifts undermine the potential for decisive and transformational action to protect our planet and those who defend it,” the report said. “They leave defenders more isolated and vulnerable to attack than ever.”