The killers came from the forest, the very same forest Raimundo Santos Rodrigues so loved.
The environmentalist had spent years defending one of the last pristine swathes of the eastern Amazon rain forest from loggers, miners and farmers. But his activism had earned him enemies in Brazil’s northern state of Maranhão.
And on Tuesday afternoon, those enemies pounced.
Santos Rodrigues and his wife were riding their motorbike from the market back to the Biological Reserve of Gurupi when two men suddenly emerged from the treeline, witnesses told local media. As the couple crossed a bridge, the gunmen opened fire, hitting both the environmentalist and his wife.
To ensure their objective, the assassins ran up to Santos Rodrigues and stabbed the injured man to death. His wife, Maria da Conceição Chaves Lima, was rushed to the hospital and is expected to live.
Santos Rodrigues had been a “marked” man because of his environmentalism, said a man who spoke to G1 anonymously for fear of also being targeted.
“Loggers hated him because he denounced them,” said a co-worker, also anonymously. “He was very active in the region, defending the community, attending the Union of Rural Workers of Bom Jardim.”
Officials have promised a thorough investigation and are treating the murder as an attack on a public official. Santos Rodrigues was a volunteer with the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, part of the Ministry of the Environment.
“It will be treated with top priority,” said Alexandre Saraiva, a federal police superintendent.
But that promise appears hollow against the bloody reality in Brazil, widely considered the most dangerous country on earth for environmentalists.
Between 2002 and 2013, at least 448 environmentalists were killed in Brazil, according to Global Witness. That equates to roughly half of all the environmentalists murdered worldwide during that period.
According to local watchdog CPT, the grim tally is even worse: More than 1,500 Brazilians have been killed over the past 25 years fighting deforestation, and another 2,000 have received death threats, Men’s Journal reported in 2012.
Last year, 29 Brazilian environmentalists were murdered, again more than any other country, according to Global Witness.
The reasons behind Brazil bewildering conservationist killing spree are simple. The country’s land ownership is “among the most concentrated and unequal in the world,” leading to conflicts between subsistence farmers or indigenous groups and “well-connected landowners over who has the legal right to forests and land,” according to Global Witness.
“Magnates buy off local politicians and policemen, and kill anyone who challenges their agricultural practices,” according to Men’s Journal.
As in the slaying of Santos Rodrigues, environmentalists are in most danger inside or at the edges of the Amazon. The giant rain forest — which some activists fear will be half gone by 2030 — is the site of 68 percent of all such murders, according to Global Witness. First the trees are cut down by loggers, which then opens the land up to cattle ranchers, soy farmers or miners.
“Many people from the logging and mining companies think the only way to solve problems is by killing the people who defend the forest,” federal prosecutor Felício Pontes told Men’s Journal.
Like the Amazon itself, the problem of violence against environmentalists is shared by many Latin American countries. Last year, at least 25 environmentalists were killed in Colombia, according to Global Witness. Honduras (12), Peru (9), Guatemala (5), Paraguay (3) and Mexico (3) also reported multiple murders of conservationists in 2014.
Although more than 80% of the killings were in Latin and Central America, Asian environmentalists are also at great risk. Fifteen Filipinos were killed in 2014, followed by Thailand (4), Indonesia (2) and Myanmar (2), again according to Global Witness.
Almost none of these murders are ever solved, the group says. A 2014 Global Witness report found that 908 activists were killed in 35 countries between 2002 and 2013, yet there were only 10 convictions.
“What feeds the violence is the impunity,” Isolete Wichinieski, national coordinator of the Brazilian group Commisão Pastoral da Terra, told the Guardian.
https://archive.is/khuzY