Adelina Vargas, Lita Rojas, Julia Pérez, and Ergilia Rengifo, the wives of four Indigenous Saweto men who were murdered in 2014 for fighting back against illegal logging in the Peruvian Amazon. Pablo Sánchez / LVU
Indigenous Peruvians have long faced violent attacks by miners, loggers, coca growers, and drug traffickers, but a troubling new report finds that murders of environmental defenders are on the rise.
Peru saw the killings of 29 environmental defenders between 2010 and 2022, according to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, but nearly half of those killings, 14, took place after 2020. Defenders “continue to face criminalization, legal harassment, and threats of violence and murder,” the report said, noting that Peru ranks among the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental activists.
The numbers from Peru reflect a broader global trend, according to a new report from Global Witness, which finds that killings of environmental defenders have been increasing for more than a decade worldwide. “Murder continues to be a common strategy for silencing defenders and is unquestionably the most brutal,” authors said.
The report found that Latin America is far and away the most deadly region in the world, accounting for 166 of the 196 defenders killed last year. Included in that tally were four slain defenders in Peru.
Peru is also seeing violence take the lives of land intruders. Earlier this month, the Mashco Piro people, the world’s largest uncontacted tribe, killed two loggers encroaching on their lands.
“This is a tragedy that was entirely avoidable,” said Caroline Pearce of Survival International. By allowing logging on Indigenous lands, she said, Peruvian officials are “not only endangering the very survival of the Mashco Piro people, who are incredibly vulnerable to epidemics of disease brought in by outsiders, but they’ve knowingly put the lives of the logging workers in danger.”
