The Deadliest Place for Climate Activists Is Latin America

The global climate crisis is a driving force behind record levels of violence against land and environmental defenders, and Latin America is the world’s deadliest region for them. 

At least 227 activists were murdered in 2020, a new high for a second consecutive year and more than double what was recorded in 2013, according to a report released today by Global Witness, a human rights organization focused on climate justice. While homicide rates in most countries fell due to pandemic lockdowns, the killing of defenders continued unabated. 

The majority of the murders took place in Latin America, and Colombia suffered the highest number of total killings, followed by Mexico. The Central American nations of Nicaragua and Honduras recorded the highest number of killings per capita in the world. 

Central America is one of the regions most affected by the extremes of the climate crisis, enduring prolonged droughts and catastrophic rainfall, including the unprecedented double blow of back-to-back major hurricanes in 2020. 

“This dataset is another stark reminder that fighting the climate crisis carries an unbearably heavy burden for some, who risk their lives to save the forests, rivers and biospheres that are essential to counteract unsustainable global warming,” Global Witness Senior Campaigner Chris Madden said. “This must stop.”

The climate crisis is forcing tens of thousands to migrate in search of new opportunities, in particular from the Central America Dry Corridor—which stretches from Guatemala to Costa Rica—where droughts have increased food insecurity among subsistence farmers who’ve seen their crop yields plummet in recent years. 

As the climate shifts, conflict over natural resources is worsening. “The process of climate breakdown is violent, and it manifests not just in violence against the natural world, but against people as well,” the report states. 

The impact of the climate crisis—and the violence it produces—is disproportionately suffered by Indigeneous people, who represent more than a third of all victims recorded in the last five years in the report. Indigenous people represent roughly 5 percent of the world’s population, but their position as frontline defenders of the environment makes them particularly vulnerable to attacks. 

In Nicaragua, the most dangerous country per-capita for land and environmental defenders in 2020, the killings included an attack on an Indigenous community located within the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve by some 80 heavily armed men who burned homes, killed cattle and murdered four people in an apparent attempt to expel the Indigenous people from their ancestral lands in order to exploit the natural resources. 

In August this year, another attack within the reserve allegedly perpetrated by the same paramilitary group left at least a dozen Indigenous people dead, equalling the death toll recorded in all of 2020 and suggesting that the violence resulting from land grabs continues to rise. 

“[Defenders are] at risk because they find themselves living on or near something that some corporation is demanding,” said Bill McKibben, an environmental activist. “That demand—the demand for the highest possible profit, the quickest possible timeline, the cheapest possible operation—seems to translate eventually into the understanding, somewhere, that the troublemaker must go.”