In the Putumayo region of the Colombian Amazon, Waldina Muñoz, a 47-year-old environmental defender, leads Guardians of the Forest, a group of Indigenous Pasto women dedicated to protecting their culture and the Earth. They reforest land, educate their communities about conservation, and speak out against destructive projects planned by oil and mining companies.
In response to her activism, Muñoz has been threatened, beaten, forcibly displaced from her home, and targeted with gunfire. Fear looms large in this place where, she noted, “threats are fulfilled.”
Muñoz’s story is not unusual in Colombia, the second-most biodiverse nation in the world. Although the country’s first leftist president, Gustavo Petro, seeks to turn Colombia into an environmental leader on the global stage, the country is home to more documented killings of environmental activists than any other country.
According to a recent Global Witness report, 79 land and environmental defenders were killed in Colombia in 2023—the highest annual total for any country since tracking began in 2012. Colombia accounted for around 40 percent of all registered environmental killings worldwide last year, while Latin America accounted for 85 percent. Defenders also face widespread nonlethal attacks, including criminalization, smear campaigns, and forced disappearances.
This violence has taken place under an administration that says that it prioritizes environmental justice. Last October, Colombia hosted the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Cali, known as COP16, under the slogan “Peace With Nature.” Since he entered office in 2022, Petro has banned new oil and gas exploration, pushed for green industrialization, and made Colombia the first major fossil fuel producer to call for a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty.
Colombia’s record has raised concerns about the fate of environmental movements and the people behind them in Latin America. Especially in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, a combination of organized crime, militias, as well as unscrupulous mining, agriculture, and energy interests has made conditions for environmental defenders so dangerous that even a sympathetic government cannot protect them—at least not until it devotes more resources to their cause.
Attacks on environmental defenders are part of the story of splintering violence amid Colombia’s decadeslong armed conflict. In 2016, the Colombian government reached a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist guerilla group, in the hopes of ending more than half a century of fighting. However, subsequent administrations have not been able to curtail violence, which has surged again as other armed groups remain active and new dissident factions emerge. Petro’s administration has pledged to pursue “total peace,” but talks with multiple groups are faltering.
Environmental defenders in Colombia face other risks. Criminal groups, such as Clan del Golfo and Comandos de la Frontera, frequently target environmental defenders for disrupting or denouncing their illicit and environmentally destructive enterprises, such as coca cultivation and illegal mining. Amazon Underworld, an international investigative project, estimates that criminal organizations now dominate more than 65 percent of the Amazon. Meanwhile, Global Witness suspects that organized crime groups were responsible for half of all killings of environmental defenders in Colombia in 2023.
International rights organizations have also alleged that private energy, agriculture, and mining companies—including some based outside Latin America—occasionally hire armed actors to attack or threaten environmental defenders that oppose their business activities. When defenders confront these industries, they put themselves at risk, said Leonardo González Perafán, the director of Indepaz, a Colombian nongovernmental organization. “There can be a whole mafia behind an armed actor,” González said.
Indigenous people such as Muñoz are especially vulnerable. Although Indigenous people make up just 6 percent of the world’s population, Global Witness found that nearly half of the environmental defenders killed globally in 2023 were Indigenous.
Laura Furones, a senior advisor at Global Witness who worked on the report, said that Indigenous people are targeted because they are often the primary protectors of sought-after land. They manage or hold rights to around one-quarter of the Earth’s land surface, which encompasses a large share of the planet’s biodiversity and nearly half of its protected areas.
“They live in these incredibly rich territories—rich in forests, waters, fertile lands. Rich in everything that a very hungry commodity world wants,” Furones said.
Conserving nature is also fundamental to the “cosmovision,” or worldview, of many Indigenous communities in Latin America, said Oliver Kaplan, a professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
Muñoz, who has voiced opposition to oil and mining companies by organizing protests in rural communities, exemplifies this commitment. When asked in November 2024 how long ago she began her work to defend the environment, she replied: “I didn’t start; I was born with that spirit of protecting nature, from my mother’s womb.” She added, “The Earth is our mother; she is our body. Every time they cut down a tree, they cut off a finger.”
Although countries failed to agree on how to achieve and fund global biodiversity goals at COP16, there was some progress for Indigenous people at the summit. Indigenous federations in nine nations formed an alliance, the G-9, demanding to be recognized as climate authorities. Indigenous people also secured a permanent role in a body that will determine U.N. decisions regarding nature conservation. And countries agreed that a digital sequence information fund will allocate a portion of global profits from genetic sequencing—a scientific process that often involves analyzing resources from lands stewarded by Indigenous people—to Indigenous communities.
But international agreements and pledges do not necessarily translate into safety for the Indigenous people who lead environmental protection.
Muñoz started to receive verbal threats in 2015. At the time, she was afraid, she said, “but fear was replaced by rage, which was replaced by a love for the defense of the environment.” Eventually, though, her children were threatened. In March 2021, when Muñoz’s son drove her to the airport to travel to an environmental meeting in Bogotá, she said that armed men appeared and shot him with two bullets, one piercing his lung. Her son survived, but the attack threw their lives into crisis and led Muñoz to temporarily withdraw from activism. She said that the pause helped her come back more strategic and organized.
Ramón Enrique Apraez Gómez, the secretary of human rights and peace at the Communal Federation of Putumayo, has also felt the consequences of speaking out against mining and energy companies in the region. “There is a constant stress, pain, and fear,” he said.
Despite the Colombian government’s insistence that it supports Indigenous people as environmental authorities, these communities still do not receive adequate protection. “Indigenous people are the main defenders of nature, but they are abandoned by the state,” said González, the NGO director. The absence of state institutions, particularly in rural Colombia, has not only left communities without essential public services but also allowed criminal groups to flourish.
Between 2019 and 2022, Colombia’s National Protection Unit received more than 100,000 requests for protection measures, such as bulletproof vests, bodyguards, and panic buttons. But El Colombiano reported that less than 10 percent of the cases received protection, and these measures are often inadequate for environmental defenders.
“Our data shows that many defenders were under protection when killed,” Furones said. Protection mechanisms need a solid implementation plan and budget, she added, and “if there’s no money behind it … then it’s not going to achieve much.”
Justice for environmental defenders also remains elusive. Only about 5 percent of crimes in Colombia lead to a trial, according to the country’s attorney general. And impunity is a particularly serious problem for environmental defenders, who often suffer attacks “without any witnesses, state presence, or anyone to protect them,” Furones said.
When asked about the record number of killings of environmental defenders, the Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development said in a written response to Foreign Policy that “in a country like ours, where violence against social leaders is a persistent reality, the Ministry and its affiliated entities have a duty to ensure that extractive activities are conducted with a focus on local communities and their well-being” and that defenders “receive the necessary protection, preventing them from being silenced or persecuted.”
In August, Colombia became the 17th Latin American country to ratify the Escazú agreement, a regional treaty intended to guarantee access to environmental information, public participation in environmental decision-making, legal mechanisms for individuals to seek justice when their environmental rights are violated, and protection for environmental defenders.
But many rural residents continue to say that the state has neglected them. “The government itself stigmatizes us. The army and the police stigmatize us. When [an environmental] leader is threatened, they belittle him/her,” Apraez said. He added that the police often defend extractive companies.
“We have all the laws [in place], but just imagine who we are up against,” Apraez said.
In the government’s absence, many Indigenous communities have developed their own protection systems, using early warnings and mobilizing community networks to save defenders under threat. “In some territories, a bodyguard would only draw attention,” said Kaplan, the University of Denver professor.
Muñoz and Apraez have both taken protection into their own hands. Muñoz said that she does not “trust any external security,” which feels “very foreign to [her] worldview.” When she travels, she communicates with her family in metaphors, fearing interception, and she rarely enters unfamiliar places alone.
Apraez no longer travels between cities after 3 p.m. and, above all, seeks protection from God. “I pray a lot before leaving home,” he said. For his part, Apraez believes that instead of providing protection, the Colombian government should “act with full force” against criminal groups. “As long as these groups exist, we won’t ever be safe,” he said.
For now, it’s clear that governmental goodwill alone won’t save Colombia’s environmental defenders. Nor will securing a seat at international forums. It is a good first step that the government says it is prepared to take action. But, Furones said, “we also need to see that reflected in reality.”
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