Brazil is the deadliest country of the decade for defenders of land and the environment, says NGO

Brazil is the deadliest country of the decade for land and environmental defenders and accounts for 20% of the murders of these activists in the last ten years.

The data are from the British organization Global Witness, which for ten years has monitored worldwide murders of activists for the right to land and environmental defense. The entity launches this Wednesday (28) a report that summarizes the crimes of the decade and gathers the number of victims in 2021.

The document highlights the urgency of protecting these defenders, especially in the context of the climate crisis and record devastation of the planet’s main forest, the Amazon. In the balance of the decade, Latin America concentrates 68% of deaths.

“Latin America is one of the most unequal regions in the world, which influences violence in a generalized way”, evaluates Chilean environmental activist Francisca Stuardo, Global Witness consultant for the region.

“The colonial systems imposed historic violence against these groups of defenders, who continue to be an important target of violence”, she says, for whom the impunity that marks the region’s institutions also contributes to the scenario, as well as the pressure of private agents on decision makers in the state.

Since 2012, when the NGO started monitoring work, an activist has been murdered somewhere on the planet every two days. Over these ten years, 1,733 violent deaths of these defenders were compiled globally — 39% of the victims were indigenous.

Brazil concentrates 342 lethal attacks on activists. One in three was indigenous or Afro-descendant. And 85% of these lethal attacks occurred in the Legal Amazon region, whose population is immersed in an ecosystem of illicit markets, from drug trafficking networks to illegal extraction of wood, minerals and wild animals.

These criminal dynamics have gained strength in recent years, which has led to a 55% increase in murders in the region between 2020 and 2021.

“The concentration of natural resources makes the Amazon region a point of concentration for this violence and the number of deaths”, says Ali Hines, a senior activist at Global Witness, about the deaths that occurred in Brazil.

The report highlights the case of the Pau D’Arco massacre, in Pará, which completed five years in 2022 with the indictment of two civil police officers and 14 military officers for the death of ten landless workers who occupied the Santa Lúcia farm. The investigations did not point to those responsible for the murders.

The massacre was considered the biggest massacre of landless rural workers since 1996, when 19 landless activists were murdered in Eldorado dos Carajás (PA), just over 200 km from Pau D’Arco. The region is considered one of the most dangerous for human rights defenders in Brazil.

In January 2021, landless rural worker Fernando Araújo, a survivor and key witness of the Pau D’Arco massacre, was killed at his home on the same Santa Lúcia farm.

In this tragic ranking, Brazil is closely followed by Colombia, with 322 murders of activists in the decade, and also by the Philippines (270) and Mexico (154). These four countries take turns in the top four rankings of most lethal territories for these defenders for almost the entire period.

In 2021, it was no different. Mexico comes in first with 54 murders, followed by Colombia (33), Brazil (26) and the Philippines (19).

According to the report, there has been an increase in these deaths in Brazil compared to 2021, which “is representative of the many threats facing land and environmental defenders, particularly under President Jair Bolsonaro.”

“Since Bolsonaro came to power, he has been encouraging illegal logging and mining, dismantling protections for indigenous lands, attacking conservation groups and slashing the budgets and resources of forest and indigenous protection agencies,” describes the report, which points to the murder of indigenist Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in June 2022 as “indicative of aggression against indigenous peoples and those who try to protect them”.

According to the document, the high number of cases in Brazil is also partly attributable to greater awareness and control by Brazilian civil society over environmental and land issues compared to other parts of the world.

The text states that conflicts over land and forest rights are the main driver of deaths of defenders in Brazil, at an intersection between environmental rights and those linked to indigenous peoples, who “play an important role as guardians of the forest, in containing emissions from their deforestation and degradation, which will help to curb the climate crisis”.

According to Ronilson Costa, who coordinates the CPT (Commissão Pastoral da Terra), an organization linked to the CNBB (National Commission of Bishops of Brazil) that has been monitoring conflicts since 1985 and is a partner of the British NGO, “in distant Brazil, where the presence of the State is minimum, everything happens, between threats, expulsions and murders”.

“It is an anguish and a concern because we realize that the problem has only increased. And the scrapping and dismantling promoted by the State of land and environmental inspection organizations have an important role in this scenario”, he says. “It is necessary to place the Brazilian State in the defendants’ chair to be held accountable for crimes that go beyond omission.”

According to the CPT, the number of murders in the countryside in the first half of 2022 indicates a new high in these deaths and already exceeds the total number of deaths recorded by the commission throughout the entire year of 2021. There were 32 deaths last year and, until September of 2022, 36.

“Brazilian investment in the primary sector has major implications for the environment and communities, favoring deforestation for planting soy or grass, for example, and the extraction of minerals in a predatory way,” says Costa.

From the 2021 activist deaths resulting from conflicts with a defined and verifiable cause, Global Witness created a ranking of the main vectors of violence. According to him, the main cause is the mining sector, followed by hydroelectric plants, agribusiness, illegal logging and road and infrastructure construction.

Main causes of the conflicts that led to the deaths of environmental defenders in 2021*

1st Mining and mineral extraction

2nd Hydroelectric

3rd Agribusiness

4th Illegal loggers

5th Roads and infrastructure

_{*In most cases (143), the industries linked to the conflicts could not be confirmed. Global Witness speaks of a majority of land-related conflicts, generally.}

_{Source: Global Witness}