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The Hidden Epidemic of Murder

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A woman arranges memorial candles in honor of the five people killed during anti-mining demonstrations that turned violent earlier this month.
Environmentalists are being killed in record numbers (and those are just the deaths we know about)




A report [pdf] last month by a London- and Washington, D.C.-based group called Global Witness, timed to coincide with the Rio+20 conference, summarizes some of the known facts. I’ve been a fan of Global Witness since they started off in the 1990s, making their name with a campaign against the “conflict diamonds” or "blood diamonds" that were fueling ruinous wars throughout Central and West Africa. Their new report says that 106 environmental activists were killed in 2011, the highest number ever recorded, up from 96 the previous year; 711 deaths have been documented in the last decade, in 34 different countries. Many of these were targeted assassinations; others occurred in the violent suppression of protests like those we experienced in Peru.

In all, 592 of the recorded killings were in Latin America, 108 in Asia (almost half of them in the Philippines), and 11 in Africa. Brazil alone accounts for 365 deaths, more than half the world total. Peru comes in second, with 123. (The worst single incident recorded was a clash between police and indigenous protesters in the northern province of Bagua in June 2009 -- on World Environment Day, if you have any further taste for irony -- which left 33 people dead. The protests were sparked by two legislative decrees -- later rescinded -- that would have opened up a huge area of the Peruvian Amazon to mining, hydropower, and oil and gas development).


Just as the phrase known facts is suggestive, so is the title of the Global Witness report: “A Hidden Crisis?” Frankly, I don’t know why they needed the question mark. With the exception of occasional celebrity cases -- like Chico Mendes, shot dead in 1988 for his efforts to preserve the Amazon rainforest, or Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged in 1995 by the Nigerian government after criticizing Shell Oil’s abuse of his native Ogoniland -- the killing of environmental activists opposing large-scale extractive industries is happening out of sight and out of mind. In the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, a distinguished Ugandan magistrate named Margaret Sekaggya, suggests one reason why. In Mexico, she told the U.N. Human Rights Council last December, a journalist was killed after reporting critically on the activities of mining companies. In Central America, a number of environmental reporters were beaten, intimidated, and threatened, and one was murdered. In Iran, a reporter was charged with espionage. In Nigeria, a documentary maker covering land and environmental disputes was arbitrarily detained without access to a lawyer. And the perpetrators of abuse have literally gotten away with murder: even in Brazil, with its sophisticated monitoring system, fewer than 10 percent of cases involving the killing of activists ever make it to court, and barely 1 percent have led to a conviction.

A hidden crisis indeed. Kudos to Global Witness for raising the veil on it, and long past time for others to follow suit.

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How does one protest this "hidden crisis"? Who should be notified, emailed, called, etc? These are huge international companies. They and their investors are only interested in profits. Once again I feel helpless and hopeless to make any change in downward spiral of the earth's health and people's safety.