2015 a deadly year for environmental activists

It was a brazen and nasty attack.

Three armed men marched into a village in the Philippines island of Mindanao last September and ordered Dionel Campos and his relative Bello Sinzo out of their homes. They were activists fighting a new mining operation. In front of villagers, the two men were executed. Afterward, the gunmen fired their weapons skyward, causing the villagers to scatter.

When the villagers returned, they found a third victim. Emerito Samarca, executive director of the Alternative Learning Center for Agricultural and Livelihood Development, was dead in a chair with his hands bound and his throat slit. No arrests have been made.

A report released Monday by the nonprofit watchdog group Global Witness claims that 2015 was the deadliest yet for people who sought to protect their land, forests and rivers from mining, logging and dams. The report, “On Dangerous Ground” called the 185 deaths it uncovered from news reports and public records “shocking,” a nearly 60 percent increase from the previous year, “and the highest annual toll on record.”

“More than three people were killed every week in 2015 — more than double the number of journalists killed in the same period,” the report said.

The most dangerous countries for environmentalists were Brazil, where 50 were slain; the Philippines, where 33 were killed; and Colombia, where 26 people lost their lives. At least 42 slayings were linked to mineral-mining operations, the most among categories that included logging and dam building.

According to said Billy Kyte, the report’s author and a researcher for Global Witness, the toll in other countries could be higher than Brazil’s because the group could only uncover deaths where there was some record of a fatality.

As it was the year before, Latin America was the world’s most dangerous region for people trying to protect natural resources. With the slaying of acclaimed Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres Flores in March, along with the killing weeks later of Nelson Garcia, a fellow worker with the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), 2016 threatens to be worse, Kyte said.

“The environment is emerging as a new human rights battleground,” Kyte said. The reason hardly anyone is brought to justice for these crimes is that governments are assisting a broader corporate quest for resources, and leaders of indigenous groups are fighting them in remote areas.

Nearly 40 percent of those killed were from indigenous groups, Kyte said.

The slain, according to the report, included Rigoberto Lima Choc, a Guatemalan teacher who spoke out against river pollution caused by a palm oil operation. He was shot on the steps of a court building. Saw Johnny was gunned down in the Karen State of Myanmar after advocating for stronger land rights. Alfredo Ernesto Vracko Neuenschwander was killed near his home in Peru’s Tambopata region, where he protested a gold mine.

Maria das Dores dos Santos Salvador was kidnapped and killed in August, likely for speaking out against the sale of her community’s land in the rural Amazonas area of Brazil.