Environmental defenders killed in record numbers in 2020: Report

Three quarters of the 2020 killings occurred in Latin America, Global Witness report says, with Colombia seeing the most deaths.

Bogota, Colombia – Colombia is the world’s most dangerous country for environmental defenders, a report published on Monday by Global Witness, an international human rights group, highlighted. For the second year in a row, the Andean nation saw the highest number of killings in 2020, with 65 land and environmental defenders murdered, the report said. Since the end of a five-decade war between the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group and the Colombian government with a peace deal in 2016, new violence has emerged in the rural areas where the FARC demobilised. Existing and new illegal armed groups vie for control to use land for illegal mining, logging, or drug trafficking, and they often operate on Indigenous or Afro-Colombian territories.