What now happens twice a week to “ordinary people” around the world trying to protect the environment and rights to land? They get killed.
That’s the conclusion of a report released last week by UK-based NGO Global Witness, which states that at least 908 people in 35 countries have been killed since 2002 and the “problem is particularly prevalent in Central and South America.”
According to the report, titled Deadly Environment, the country with the highest number of “Dead Friends of the Earth”, as it calls them, is Brazil – a massive 448 – followed by Honduras in second place, the Philippines third, Peru fourth, Colombia fifth and Mexico sixth. It states that rates have increased sharply since 2002, and calls 2012 “the bloodiest year yet.”
The underlying reason for the killings is the “competition for resources [that] is intensifying in a global economy built around soaring consumption and growth”, Deadly Environment argues, noting that “many of those facing threats are ordinary people opposing land grabs, mining operations and the industrial timber trade, often forced from their homes and severely threatened by environmental devastation” – with indigenous communities “particularly hard hit.”
In Brazil, the main reasons are illegal logging followed by cattle ranching and industrial agriculture.
“Driven by the powerful agricultural interests at the heart of Brazil’s export-focused economy, farms push ever deeper into the forest and spawn many conflicts,” the report states.
The majority of the perpetrators remain unknown, according to Global Witness, which describes the situation worldwide as an “endemic culture of impunity” and states that only 10 perpetrators of documented killings from 2002 are known to have been convicted and punished. A rare example is the case of nut-collectors-turned-activists José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva – or Zé Cláudio, as he was known by many – and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo who were ambushed and shot in Brazil’s Pará state on 24 May 2011: two men have been convicted. Part of the reason for their convictions, the report states, is that this particular case became “high-profile” and “political pressure” was applied.
Three years later, Maria’s sister, Laisa, is continuing to try to protect her land and last year was awarded a Human Rights Defender prize, but she receives death threats for her efforts and has been placed under a federal government protection scheme. Meanwhile, Zé Cláudio’s sister, Claudelice, is preparing to mark the three year anniversary of her brother’s and sister-in-law’s murders. In a letter read aloud at a conference in Washington this month honouring Brazilian rubber-tapper and environmental martyr Chico Mendes, assassinated in 1988, and then again at the Nobel Museum in Sweden to mark the screening of an extremely moving film about Zé Cláudio and Maria, called Toxic: Amazon, members of both families said:
Our forests worldwide are increasingly under threat. Those who defend them are being assassinated. We have already lost some great defenders like our eternal colleague Chico Mendes, [American-born nun] Dorothy Stang [assassinated in 2005], and Zé Cláudio and Maria.
The re-trial of a third man, cattle rancher Zé Rodriguez, who was found not guilty of all charges with regards to Zé Claudio and Maria’s murders, should be held in Belém in the next few months. According to Brazil’s Pastoral Land Commission, other upcoming trials in Belém include: 1) on April 29 Décio José Barroso Nunes, a cattle rancher accused of instigating the assassination of José Dutra da Costa, known as Dezinho, who was murdered in Pará in 2000 and whose widow, Maria Joel, has since received death threats and is also under government protection; and 2) on 8 May Marlon Pidde, a landowner accused of instigating the massacre of five workers on his farm, named Princesa, back in 1985.
