Honduras is world’s number one for killing environmental activists
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Version 0 of 1. More people were killed in Honduras per capita than any other country for each of the last five years as a result of their efforts to defend land and the environment, according to a report by UK-based NGO Global Witness. The report, How many more?, alleges that people are being “killed in record numbers” and that this is happening in response to “increased competition over natural resources” - particularly from hydropower projects, agribusiness, logging and mining and other extractive industries. It states: These deaths occur because ordinary citizens and local communities are increasingly finding themselves at the forefront of the battle over the planet’s natural resources. . . At the same time, national governments are failing to protect their rights from rising threats from agribusiness, mining, logging and hydropower projects. How many more? finds that 116 “land and environmental defenders”, or “Dead Friends of the Earth”, a term Global Witness used in a previous publication, were killed last year. Three quarters were in Central and South America: 29 people were killed in Brazil, 25 in Colombia, 15 in the Philippines, 12 in Honduras, 9 in Peru and 5 in Guatemala, with other killings recorded in another 11 countries. The report states that indigenous peoples are “the hardest-hit group” - 40% of the 2014 total - and focuses on Honduras which, per capita, it calls the “deadliest country in the world to be a land and environmental defender” and where, since 2002, at least 111 such people have been killed. It notes that, since the 2009 military coup, the government has made “investment in mining, forestry, agribusiness and hydroelectric dams a top priority”, and it is this that is driving violence against activists. Although the report states that in some well-documented cases it is possible to connect the perpetrators of the killings to paramilitaries, police, private security and military, it alleges the “true orchestrators” and “suspected intellectual authors” mostly escape investigation and include “landowners and business interests, political actors and organised crime.” Asked by the Guardian if they could be more specific about who benefits from the killings, Global Witness’s Billy Kyte said in Honduras it includes “palm oil companies and their private security guards”, as well as hydropower interests with “possible political links.” “In Brazil it’s individual large landowners - soya and cattle-ranching - and in Peru illegal loggers and links to drugs trafficking,” Kyte says. “In Colombia, it’s criminal bands terrorising displaced peoples trying to reclaim their land, and in the Philippines paramilitary groups linked to army and defending mining interests.” The report suggests that the numbers of people being killed could be higher, given that civil society monitoring is limited in African and South Asian countries and because, in China, Central Asia and the Middle East, very little data is available and “political violence and wider conflicts make it difficult to identify specific cases of targeted killings of environmental and land activists.” The killings last year that received most media coverage were of four men from an Ashéninka village, Alto Tamaya-Saweto, in the Peruvian Amazon, very close to the border with Brazil, who for years had fought to keep loggers out of their territories. The widows of the four men have fled the village, and two are now living under 24 hour police protection in a town, Pucallpa, days downriver. Numerous Ashéninka men and women told the Guardian during a recent visit to Saweto that the logging is continuing and that they still receive death threats. “After what happened, this terrible thing, we don’t want to go back if there’s no security,” says Diana Rios Rengifo, daughter of one of the assassinated men, Jorge Rios Perez. Related: Honduran indigenous rights campaigner wins Goldman prize A Honduran activist, Berta Cáceres, was named this week as one of the winners of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, after surviving death and rape threats and the murder of several supporters. Grahame Russell, from the US- and Canada-based NGO Rights Action, says that since the “US- and Canadian-backed military coup” in 2009 “exploitation, repression and violence, corruption and impunity have spiked” and 100s of people have been killed or disappeared. “Most repression – by the State or wealthy private-sector interests – targets campesino and indigenous communities defending their lands, lives and environment against the illegal and violently imposed economic interests of mainly international companies and investors,” Russell told the Guardian. “This is in the areas of mining, tourism, hydro-electric dams, African palm and banana production, and maquiladora sweat-shops.” How many more? acknowledges other problems faced by land and environmental defenders globally - including being classed as “terrorists” under counter-terrorism legislation - and makes a series of recommendations to governments, Honduras in particular, international bodies, and companies. These include governments introducing legally-binding regulations to guarantee large-scale land acquisitions don’t violate “customary, or traditional, or collective land rights”, and companies refusing to make investment decisions unless possibly impacted communities give their “genuine” free, prior and informed consent.” |