They should have known better.
September 6, 2018 8:24 AM   Subscribe

Threats. Violence. Criminalization. Murder. Governments and corporations around the world are making it increasingly difficult — and deadly — for Indigenous Peoples and local communities to protect lands and forests.

FRONT LINE DEFENDERS has documented 821 human rights defenders (HRDs) who have been killed in the four years since we started producing an annual global list in cooperation with national and international NGOs. Seventy-nine percent of this total came from six countries: Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines.

The vast majority of these cases have never been properly investigated, and few of the perpetrators of the killings have been brought to justice. Political and economic power across these countries is controlled and manipulated by an entrenched elite, with close links to the army and the security services, who block reform initiatives to protect their own interests, and are often behind targeted attacks on HRDs who expose their corruption or oppose their exploitation.
posted by poffin boffin (2 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
In Chile, we have the Mapuche fighting the logging companies, with 'mysterious' deaths of journalists and documentarians, hundreds of mapuches incarcerated, some based on evidence outright fabricated by the police, many mapuche dead, and an "antiterrorism" law passed by Pinochet that is being used to defend the profits of the half dozen richest families in the country.
posted by signal at 10:24 AM on September 6, 2018 [8 favorites]


I met someone (being purposefully evasive to protect them) recent-ish-ly who worked with corporations in Chile a while ago, hoping to improve ecological responsibility and communication with indigenous groups.

Instead they very quickly found out that their good faith initiatives were being used as, essentially, spy material so as to sow discord and identify activists to target.

And that's merely one aspect.

It's chilling.
posted by fraula at 10:29 AM on September 6, 2018 [5 favorites]


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