- Environmental leaders in Latin America are facing out-of-control violence and deaths, with little accountability.
- Journalism is failing environmental leaders by focusing on statistics instead of their stories.
- Journalists must immerse themselves in the field, along with environmental leaders, to expose their fights and struggles.
- This commentary is part of Our Letters to the Future, a series produced by the Y. Eva Tan Conservation Reporting Fellows as their final fellowship project. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.
Protecting the jungle “justifies all the struggles. … what’s the value of your life if you have nothing to die for?” Ángela Maldonado, Whitley Award winner and director of the NGO Fundación Entropika, said to me once during an interview.
Her answer got tattooed in my mind and soul. For years, I have met all sorts of activists, environmentalists and social leaders, and I always wondered if they felt the same way as Maldonado about protecting their territories and values. It is not something you usually ask, but I wish I had. What are the stories of the people who oppose the destruction of their water sources, land, forests and homes, to the point that their lives are being taken away from them?
In countries of Latin America such as Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, the number of assassinations and disappearances of environmentalists is out of control. For example, Colombia, the country with the most mechanisms to defend social and environmental leaders, is, for the third year in a row, the country with the highest number of land and environmental defenders killed, Global Witness reports.
The reasons behind the systematic crimes are: extractivism, coca crops and monoculture expansion, a vivid struggle for land control in rural areas. Governments condemn these crimes in copy-paste plain speeches with the empty promise to take action, to find the intellectual and physical parties responsible. The reality is, these files end up in a pile of unresolved crimes.
Journalists, on the other side, stick to criticizing governments and agencies, asking how they will protect environmental and social leaders after signing the Escazú Agreement, a treaty for Latin America and the Caribbean, establishing justice in environmental issues, as the promotion and protection of environmental human rights defenders. Yet, we are also failing to take action in the reality of the problem; we keep talking about numbers, double- or even triple-digit figures that might be important to take into account but that at the same time do not tell society anything about why a person would stay consciously in a place under threats, bullets and fear.
At what point does somebody’s life become a simple statistic? Numbers that tell us, for example, that in Colombia every 36 hours a social leader is assassinated, that Colombia had 31 fewer people assassinated in 2024 compared with 2023, or that this year, as of mid-October, 158 social and environmental leaders have been killed, as the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace, INDEPAZ, reports.
Statistics do not tell us who people like Jani Selva and Marlén Arévalo, renowned Colombian environmentalist leaders, are and how they are living under threat, intimidation and still risk their lives in the most dangerous country for environmentalists. Numbers do not tell us why Alis Ramírez had to leave her home in the Amazon and asked for asylum abroad.
To reiterate: It is three years in a row that Colombia appears as the country with the most assassinations of environmental leaders in the world, making one-third of the total in Latin America. A number that, including social leaders and human rights defenders, adds up to 1,569 human beings lost between 2016, the year Colombia signed the peace agreements with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and May 2025, the Ombudsperson’s Office reports.
I am writing from the comfort of distance, behind my computer, away from the struggle and not having to look directly into the eyes of people who wake up every day and live every day as if it could be their last day on Earth. I have talked with editors and mentors that no story is worth your life as a journalist. But then I ask, what makes it worth it — when journalism is an exercise to expose the truth, a counterbalance of power, to bring injustice to the spotlight and not to straightforwardly repost numbers and figures from the establishment?
Journalists might have the luxury to leave a place when under threat; environmental and social leaders often do not. We have a responsibility to show the struggles, the threats, their faces, the reason why they are staying, who is threatening them — and also the ghosts of the ones who died and still revolt in the collective memory of these places where everyone keeps looking away.
That does not mean that we as journalists need to go with our badges and expose ourselves to unnecessary risks; I do not intend to incentivize reckless and kamikaze journalism. Still, even with the tools we have to protect ourselves, 13 environmental journalists were killed between January and July this year in Latin America, Reporters Without Borders reports, for doing what we all should be doing: showing the faces and nuances of the conflict in which environmental leaders are confronted daily.
In spite of that, we need to go out to the field, where these crimes we call stories actually occur. These incidents rarely occur in the cities. We need to go out, find these environmental and social leaders screaming out loud to bring attention to their homelands and help against the destruction of their communities — before bullets find them first.
Media such as the League Against Silence, a group of media outlets in alliance that join to investigate and report stories on those who, due to pressure from power or violence in regions of Colombia, are forced to remain silent, have shown that numbers and figures do not feel relatable. They have reported a series of stories about deforestation, land control and threats to and assassinations of environmental leaders, which gives a face to governments and society.
It is time to change the narrative, to start showing who the people are, their motivations, their problems — and to protect them in the spotlight. Journalism is failing them to the point that we are always late, reporting what environmentalists are dying for, instead of showing the value of their lives and inspiring others with their tenacity and actions. This will not solve the problems, for sure. But it is part of how we as journalists can help to protect them.
Banner image: Colombian climate activist Sofía Gutiérrez on stage after a march through the streets of Glasgow, Scotland, host city of the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit. Image by AP Photo/Jon Super.
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