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The indigenous leader Phanor Guazaquillo was an authority on environmental issues and land restitution in the department of Putumayo, Colombia. Those who knew him remember him because, in addition to being governor of the Kwesx Kiwe Chorrolargo Nasa council of Puerto Asís, he was a visible voice of the social outbreak that the country experienced in 2021, and a member of the High-Level Special Instance for monitoring the implementation of the Peace Agreement signed by the Government of then-President Juan Manuel Santos and the former FARC guerrilla group.
They remember him like this. In the past tense. On December 3, 2023, at around 2:50 p.m., a hitman shot him as he was leaving the funeral of Manuel Carlosama, another indigenous leader, in the urban area of Puerto Asís. He was shot several times. He received them in front of part of his family, from his community. When Guazaquillo, also a former councilor of the municipality, arrived at the hospital and before being treated, they declared that he was already dead. The indigenous leader had been murdered.
“Phanor was very exposed, since he was claiming land in a context of armed conflict,” says Andrés Cancimance, a representative in the House of Representatives who coincided with Guazaquillo in several political spaces. Despite having alerted the authorities about the threats he was receiving, he never received a protection scheme. “After his murder, the family was left very vulnerable and they also had to approach my team so that we could support them in obtaining some kind of security, because no one facilitated the process,” adds the representative. “Fortunately, this was achieved and now his family has the corresponding schemes.”
The Guazaquillo case is just one of 79 documented in Colombia during 2023 by Global Witness (GW), an international organization that, since 2012, has been recording the murders of land and environmental defenders around the world. The country has always exchanged the top spot on this list with Mexico and Brazil. But this year it has not only broken the historical record for a country in a year, but has also become the nation with the most defenders killed since GW began this list in 2012 (461 deaths in total).
“Latin America remains the deadliest region,” explains Laura Furones, senior advisor at GW. “Of the 196 cases documented during 2023 around the world, 85% occurred in the region.” Of the five countries where the most murders were recorded that year, four are in Latin America. Colombia is followed by Brazil (25), Honduras (18), Mexico (18), the Philippines (17) and Nicaragua (10).
“GW has been warning about this trend in the region for many years,” the document clarifies, emphasizing the delicate situation in Colombia. Of the 79 people killed during 2023, for example, 31 were indigenous, 17 small farmers, and five Afro-descendants. Regarding the municipalities where the most cases occurred, there is also no big surprise, since they are areas that have experienced a surge in violence in recent years: Cauca (26), Nariño (9), and Putumayo (7), the department where Guazaquillo lived and was murdered.
But the report, he insists, comes with an even more chilling figure for the country. Between 2012 and 2023, years in which GW has followed the cases, Colombia once again has the sad lead, with 461 murders of the 2,106 recorded worldwide. It is followed, again, by Brazil with 401, the Philippines (298), Mexico (203) and Honduras (149).
Answering the question of why there is so much violence against land and environmental defenders in Colombia involves putting together several pieces that are scattered throughout its scope and history. Astrid Torres, director of the Somos Defensores program, whose information GW used to map the situation in Colombia, points to a number of factors that demonstrate the country’s weaknesses.
“The Colombian State has failed in its constitutional duty to protect defenders, despite the fact that in our country there is a robust architecture, with more than 30 regulations, to do so,” he says. “State entities have not been able to coordinate their actions to protect them,” he adds, referring specifically to how Guazaquillo was killed even after having demanded comprehensive protection from the National Protection Unit after receiving threats.
Added to this is the low effectiveness of judicial investigations – in which Somos Defensores estimates that there is 90% impunity –; the deepening of the extractive model in a country in which there are up to 170 socio-environmental conflicts; the presence of illegal armed groups and the failure to comply with the Peace Agreement signed in 2016. “This has allowed the reconfiguration of the armed conflict in Colombia.”
Although GW’s reports are often popular for tracking the threats faced by environmental defenders, they also include land defenders. People, as Furones explained to América Futura, who “defend their plot” or, in the case of Colombia, land claimants, leaders who often live in a highly vulnerable position, as, again, happened to Guazaquillo.
“Even though this Government [el del presidente Gustavo Petro] There has been a great political will to stop the risk faced by human rights defenders, but in reality, after two years, nothing has materialised,” adds Torres. With the Biodiversity Summit, COP16, to be held in November this year in Cali, the pressure and urgency to put this issue at the centre of the political agenda will be greater than ever.
In the coming months, delegates from 196 countries around the world will arrive in Colombia to negotiate the rules of the game for implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), an international agreement adopted in 2022. They will do so with the paradox that the COP16 motto chosen by the Government is “Peace with Nature”, but also with the certainty that this Framework recognizes that the knowledge of indigenous peoples – the group with the most people murdered in Colombia during 2023 – must be respected and preserved in order to conserve biodiversity.
In this forum, the civil population will have a space for discussion. That, added to the fact that at the end of August the Constitutional Court endorsed the law that allows Colombia to ratify the Escazú Agreement – designed, among other things, to protect environmental leaders – could be a boost to put this issue at the center of the agenda.
Mexico, where defenders disappear
The news is also bitter for Mexico. Although the number of land and environmental defenders killed dropped from 31 in 2022 to 18 in 2023, there are trends that keep the country on alert. 70% of the cases, for example, were indigenous people attacked in the states of Jalisco, Colima and Michoacán. And 40% of the victims were opposed to mining projects. In addition, the GW report dedicates an entire chapter to how, in this country, the dynamic that reigns is that of missing defenders.
In Mexico, they say, 93 land and environmental defenders disappeared between December 2006 and August 2023. In 40% of cases, there is still no news of the whereabouts of these people. And in Michoacán alone, between 2012 and 2023, 21 land and environmental defenders have disappeared.
“Faced with this, the State has created certain stigmatizing narratives against the missing and has refused to investigate whether companies may be involved,” says Alejandra Goza, director of Global Rights Advocacy. This, he adds, is happening in a dramatic context for the country, where the crisis of forced disappearances is fuelled by two factors: the forensic crisis, in which there are more than 52,000 unidentified bodies; and the crisis of justice, which means that most cases remain unpunished.
Central America, more attacks per capita in the world
Central America may not be a very large region. But, despite the fact that the total population of the seven countries combined – Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama – do not add up to even 1% of the world’s population, during 2023 GW reported 36 murders of land and environmental defenders. It is the region with the most deaths per capita.
In Honduras, 18 cases were recorded – making it the most critical country – followed by Nicaragua (10), Guatemala (4), Panama (4) and, just last year, none in Costa Rica. “For just over a decade, defenders in this region have suffered more attacks per capita than anywhere else in the world, and 97% of them have occurred in the same three countries: Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua,” the report also adds.
Honduras, for example, has remained the country with the most murders per capita since these reports began, totaling 149 cases between 2012 and 2023. “We have been pointing out the violation of the prior, free and informed consultation to which Honduras and many Latin American countries are signatories,” says Bertha Zúniga Cáceres, activist and daughter of the murdered environmentalist Berta Cáceres, one of the most iconic faces of these struggles. “An important issue is impunity, where in our countries instrumentalized justice systems have been created to persecute people who raise their voices in defense of the territory,” she clarified.
Meanwhile, an important fact has also been pointed out in Nicaragua: the 10 cases reported last year involved indigenous Mayangna and Miskito people, a population affected by deforestation in this country, which is also one of those that has lost the most forests in recent years.
And although the news seems to continue to be bitter for Latin America, as a region, it is worth highlighting the case of Brazil. Between 2022 and 2023, the reported murders of these leaders dropped from 34 to 25, according to data from Global Witness. The departure of Bolsonaro and the new policies of the Government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, although still insufficient, seem to have borne fruit.
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