A new report from the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) says the Peruvian Amazon is experiencing a rise in murders against environmental defenders, most of which are related to illegal activities such as mining, logging and coca cultivation.Between 2010 and 2022, an estimated 29 environmental defenders were killed in the region.The frequency of killings has increased in recent years, with almost half taking place after 2020.Indigenous leaders and researchers said many of these killings remain unsolved while the state remains largely absent in protecting communities in these remote regions.
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Ten years ago, four Indigenous Asháninka environmental defenders were murdered in the forests near their community of Saweto in Peru’s Amazon Ucayali region. In 2023, a court in Pucallpa found three loggers guilty of aggravated homicide against the leaders, sentencing them to 28 years and three months in prison. However, this case has since been appealed. Today, members of the Asháninka community say they continue to fear for their lives.
“The problem is still there,” said the wife of one of the four leaders, who wished to remain anonymous for safety reasons. “I am in trouble and so is the community. For the loggers, this work is not finished. They keep cutting down the trees in the village, and they say if you come to bother us, you will be killed.”
According to a new report by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), the estimated 29 environmental defenders killed in the Peruvian Amazon between 2010 and 2022 may be connected to environment-related crimes, such as illegal mining, logging and coca cultivation. This is because many of the killings disproportionately occurred in geographic clusters that coincide with these activities. This violence has increased in recent years with almost half of the killings occurring since 2020.
The wife of one of the Indigenous leaders killed in 2014 told Mongabay that she had to leave the community to seek safety in a nearby city. This has been a huge challenge, as she previously relied on the forest to sustain herself and her multiple children. In the city, she has to pay for accommodation, travel, food and water, despite having no income. “Where am I supposed to grow food, to plant yucca or banana to feed my children?”
Her community is not alone. Many other communities in the Peruvian Amazon have been impacted by environmental conflicts that have led to widespread deforestation and the killings of environmental defenders, the MAAP report said.
Timber transport in the Ucayali region in 2018. Image by Marlon del Aguila Guerrero/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Killings tied to environmental crime hotspots
Herlin Odicio, an environmental defender from the Kakatibo Indigenous community in the Peruvian department of Ucayali, told Mongabay that his community has been threatened by illegal loggers and coca producers for many years.
During a flyover organized by AIDESEP, a leading Indigenous rights organization in Peru, on March 15, members of the Native Federation of Kakatibo Communities and Ministry of Culture officials observed evidence of drug production and trafficking activity inside the Kakatibo Indigenous Reserve. From above, they identified clandestine landing strips, unauthorized forest roads and deforested areas in and adjacent to the reserve.
Odicio said loggers, drug traffickers and miners used to work alone in the past, but they have now merged. “Drug traffickers work together with loggers. The loggers open the road and give [miners] access to get from one place to another.”
Organizations associated with the drug trade have diversified into mining, logging and land-grabbing enterprises, redrawing the map of criminal networks in Latin America, researchers on drug trafficking said in a conference hosted by Ohio State University in September.
A recent report by the Agency for the Supervision of Forest Resources and Wildlife found that more than 20% of timber harvested in Peru in 2021 came from illegal origins. The report identified Loreto, Madre de Dios, Amazonas and Ucayali as the regions with the highest levels of unauthorized timber extraction.
According to official data in the MAAP report, the surface area of coca production in Peru is increasing, particularly in the central Peruvian Amazon, along the Andes Mountains in the regions of Ucayali and Huánuco. Since 2010, 10 environmental defenders have been killed in this area and their deaths have been attributed to their fight against coca-related activities, the authors said.
In an attempt to protect their territories from coca production, between 2020 and 2021, three environmental defenders were killed within or near their communities of Sinchi Roca and Puerto Nuevo in the region of Ucayali. Both communities are located within a coca production zone known as Aguaytía, which experienced a 158% increase in coca cultivation between 2018 and 2022, according to the National Commission for Development and Life without Drugs.
In the southern Peruvian Amazon, such as the Madre de Dios region, gold mining is a larger problem, particularly in Indigenous territories and protected area buffer zones, the report said. Since 2015, three environmental defenders have been killed within or near the Tambopata National Reserve buffer zone, where there is extensive gold mining-related deforestation. All three cases involved forestry concessionaries who tried to defend their concessions from illegal miners.
Peruvian Amazon landscape scarred by open pit gold mines. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
State absence
Megan Montoya, a student at the University of Richmond and co-author of the report, told Mongabay that environmental defenders in the Peruvian Amazon lack protection because of the country’s “flawed system” for punishing those guilty of killing environmental defenders. It has been 10 years since the murder of the four Indigenous Asháninka environmental defenders and yet the case is still ongoing.
Despite having several agencies and regulations to protect environmental defenders, such as the Intersectoral Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Bill 2069/2021-PE, which is meant to protect and assist communal and Indigenous or Native leaders at risk, they continue to face criminalization, legal harassment and threats of violence and murder, according to the MAAP report.
The wife of one of the Indigenous leaders killed in 2014 told Mongabay the state has done nothing to help her community. “When you file a complaint in Peru, they don’t pay attention to you,” she said.
Peru’s Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Ministry of Justice and Human Rights and Ministry of the Environment did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment before publication.
David Salisbury, chair and associate professor of the Department of Geography, Environment and Sustainability at the University of Richmond, who was not involved in the report, told Mongabay that the Peruvian state has been largely absent from these remote regions. “Development interests and the invasion of the same remote areas by drug traffickers appear to complicate the state’s ability to defend its most marginalized rural populations from the incursions of outsiders,” he said.
Many of the 29 deaths that were reported between 2010 and 2020 remain unsolved, such as the killing of Juan Julio Fernández Hanco near the edge of the Tambopata buffer zone in 2022. During 2021 and 2023, nearly 24,000 hectares (59,000 acres) were deforested in this area as a result of gold mining, an earlier MAAP report found.
“Peru is bound by international treaties, but unfortunately it does not comply with that,” Odicio said. “They are destroying our territories more and more, and that’s why we raise our voices. Then we are the ones who are threatened and murdered.”
Banner image: An Indigenous group in a boat in the Ucayali River. Image by Juan Carlos Huayllapuma/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Safety of Peru’s land defenders in question after killing of Indigenous leader in the Amazon
Citations:
Finer M, Mamani N, Ariñez A (2023) Gold Mining Deforestation in the Southern Peruvian Amazon, 2021-2023. MAAP: 195. Recovered from: https://www.maaproject.org/2023/mining-deforest-peru/
Montoya M, Bonilla A, Novoa S, Tipula P, Salisbury D, Quispe M, Finer M, Folhadella A, Cohen M. (2024). Killing of Environmental Defenders in the Peruvian Amazon. MAAP:218. Recovered from: https://www.maaproject.org/2024/killing-enviro-defenders-peru/
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