Death of 'Irrepressible' Forest Defender Prompts Investigation

[Judi Lynn]

Published on Thursday, September 11, 2014
by Common Dreams

Death of 'Irrepressible' Forest Defender Prompts Investigation

Illegal loggers suspected in killing of Edwin Chota, other leaders

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer


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Edwin Chota attending a meeting on land titles and illegal logging in the Chambira community. (Photo: Emory Richey)
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Authorities in Peru are investigating the murder of environmental activist Edwin Chota, a leader of the Ashaninka Indian village of Saweto, who was killed along with three other men in a remote area of the Amazon jungle that they were attempting to protect from illegal logging.

Chota was murdered on September 1 after he left his home in Saweto to meet with other indigenous leaders and anti-logging activists who lived deeper within the jungle, a few days' walk away, near the Brazilian border. His body, and that of the other three men who were killed with him, was discovered by villagers several days later. The distance from the village to the regional capital, Pucallpa, delayed news of Chota’s death for over a week.

Illegal loggers are suspected in the killings, according to Ashaninka regional leader Reyder Sebastián. Chota often spoke of receiving death threats due to his activism and told the New York Times in 2010 that “the law does not reach where we live.”

“They could kill us at any time,” Chota said.

Chota had long fought for the rights of indigenous people to reclaim their land and ban loggers who illegally cut trees and raided the region’s rainforests.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/09/11/death-irrepressible-forest-defender-prompts-investigation

[Judi Lynn]

1. LTTE: Avoidable death of an environmentalist

Avoidable death of an environmentalist
The Guardian, Monday 15 September 2014 15.42 EDT

News of the deaths of four Peruvian tribal leaders (Illegal loggers blamed for murders in Amazon, 10 September) is especially resonant because their killings should have been avoided. It was well-known that one of the victims, Edwin Chota, a high-profile environmentalist, received numerous death threats from illegal loggers clearing forest on land that he was trying to secure rights to.

Chota was committed to protecting the forest that sustained him and local communities. His death is part of a rising trend in Peru, as our recent report Deadly Environment revealed, with over 58 environmental defenders killed in the country since 2002. Over half of these deaths occurred in the last three years.

Illegal logging is rampant in Chota’s Amazon Ucayali region. It is gutting the rainforest of rare woods like mahogany and tropical cedar, and increasing local tensions and violence. Loggers are literally getting away with murder and seem to enjoy impunity from the law.

Peru is hosting this year’s climate conference in December. It is tragically ironic that while governments flounder over international measures aimed at protecting the environment, they fail to recognise, respect and protect people like Chota, who put their lives on the line in the name of real environmental protection. People like Edwin embody the courage and tenacity needed to resolve our climate crisis, but we are losing them in the silent battles waged far from the boardrooms where decisions are made. Peru could lead by example and act to protect environmental defenders as one of our best hopes for the future.

Chris Moye
Forest campaigner, Global Witness

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/15/avoidable-death-of-an-environmentalist

[Bill USA]

2. Why Do Environmentalists Keep Getting Killed Around the World? - The Smithsonian magazine

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-do-environmentalists-keep-getting-killed-around-world-180949446/?no-ist

It has been 25 years since the assassination of Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper who made defense of the Amazon rainforest an international cause célèbre after he was shot dead by the son of a rancher. And it has been nine years since Ohio-born nun Dorothy Stang was killed in similar circumstances. The shattered plaque offers a grim testament to how risky it still is to stand up for the rainforest. Environmental activists in Brazil and around the world continue to pay the ultimate price for their convictions. And their numbers are mounting.

Zé Cláudio and Maria, both in their early 50s at the time of their deaths, had been married for nearly 30 years. For even longer they’d been fighting to protect their lush forestland from illegal loggers, ranchers and the operators of clandestine charcoal pits that reduced magnificent, centuries-old trees to sacks of briquettes. In 1997, they helped succeed in petitioning the federal government to create the Praia Alta-Piranheira agro-forestry settlement, 84 square miles of public land to provide themselves and other family farmers a sustainable living while keeping the forest intact. Its purpose stood in stark contrast to other pursuits that had turned so much of southern Pará, a state in Brazil, into an epicenter of violence and devastation.

But the boundaries of the reserve could hold back neither the bloodletting nor the pillage. Fourteen years after Zé Cláudio and Maria helped found the settlement, its forest cover had shrunk from 80 percent to 20 percent. Speculators snatched up parcels and sold off the timber. They flipped the land to cattlemen and wheeler-dealers looking for a quick buck. They imposed their own brand of frontier justice, tapping when necessary into an abundant pool of underemployed enforcers, or jagunços, from the rough-and-tumble slums of Marabá, Pará’s fourth-largest city, which boasts one of the highest murder rates in Brazil.

Evidently, it was to this reservoir of talent that the enemies of Zé Cláudio and Maria turned in the spring of 2011. Nearly two years later, two out-of-work day laborers—Alberto Lopes do Nascimento, 30, and Lindonjonson Silva Rocha, 31—sat in prison blues in a Marabá courtroom, charged with carrying out the murders with coldblooded calculation. Silva Rocha, named in honor of the 36th president of the United States, happened to be the brother of José Rodrigues Moreira, a rancher whose efforts to acquire land inside the reserve had been repeatedly frustrated by Zé Cláudio and Maria. Moreira, a tightly wound and fervently religious man of 43 with short-cropped auburn hair and pinched brow, was also on trial, accused of ordering the killings.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-do-environmentalists-keep-getting-killed-around-world-180949446/#VKUisbVxz2wfFIb0.99
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[Bill USA]

3. Surge in deaths of environmental activists over past decade, report finds - The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/15/surge-deaths-environmental-activists-global-witness-report

The killing of activists protecting land rights and the environment has surged over the past decade, with nearly three times as many deaths in 2012 than 10 years previously, a new report has found.

Deadly Environment, an investigation by London-based Global Witness documents 147 recorded deaths in 2012, compared to 51 in 2002. Between 2002 and 2013, at least 908 activists were killed in 35 countries – with only 10 convictions. The death rate has risen in the past four years to an average of two activists a week, according to the report, which also documents 17 forced disappearances, all of whom are presumed dead.

Deaths in 2013 are likely to be higher than the 95 documented to date, the environmental rights organisation warned, with under-reporting and difficulties verifying killings in isolated areas in a number of African and Asian nations. Reports from countries including Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar, where civil society groups are weak and the regimes authoritarian, were not included in the Global Witness count.

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Brazil, the report found, is the world's most deadly country for communities defending natural resources, with 448 deaths between 2002 and 2013, followed by 109 in Honduras and Peru with 58. In Asia, the Philippines is the deadliest with 67, followed by Thailand at 16. More than 80% of the recorded deaths were in Latin and Central America.
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