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At Least 146 Killed or Disappeared for 'Defending Life Itself' Last Year
"It is critical that governments and companies turn the tide to uphold defenders’ rights and protect them rather than persecute them," said the lead author of the new Global Witness report.
Sep 17, 2025
At least 142 people were killed and four were confirmed missing last year for "bravely speaking out or taking action to defend their rights to land and a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment," according to an annual Global Witness report published Wednesday.
"Year after year, land and environmental defenders—those protecting our forests, rivers, and lands across the world—continue to be met with unspeakable violence," said Laura Furones, the report's lead author, in a statement. "They are being hunted, harassed, and killed—not for breaking laws, but for defending life itself."
"Standing up to injustice should never be a death sentence," Furones declared. "It is critical that governments and companies turn the tide to uphold defenders' rights and protect them rather than persecute them. We desperately need defenders to keep our planet safe. If we turn our backs on them, we forfeit our future."
The report, Roots of Resistance, begins by listing the activists who were murdered or disappeared for six months or more in 2024. It also says: "We acknowledge that the names of many defenders who were killed or disappeared last year may be missing, and we may never know how many more gave their lives to protect our planet. We honor their work too."
The most dangerous country for environmental defenders, by far, was Colombia, with 48 deaths. Jani Silva, a defender there living under state protection, said that "as this report shows, the vast majority of defenders under attack are not defenders by choice—including myself. We are defenders because our homes, land, communities, and lives are under threat. So much more must be done to ensure communities have rights and that those who stand up for them are protected."
Colombia was followed by Guatemala (20), Mexico (18), Brazil (12), the Philippines (7), Honduras (5), Indonesia (5), Nicaragua (4), Peru (4), the Democratic Republic of Congo (4), Ecuador (3), and Liberia (3). There was one confirmed killing each in Russia, India, Venezuela, Argentina, Madagascar, Turkey, Cameroon, Cambodia, and the Dominican Republic. The four disappearances were in Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines.
"This brings the total figure to 2,253 since we started reporting on attacks in 2012. This appalling statistic illustrates the persistent nature of violence against defenders," the report states. It stresses that while the new figure is lower than the 196 cases in 2023, "this does not indicate that the situation for defenders is improving."
The report notes that "120 (82%) of all the cases we documented in 2024 took place in Latin America," while 16 killings occurred in Asia and nine were in Africa. It emphasizes that "underreporting remains an issue globally, particularly across Asia and Africa. Obstacles to verify suspected violations also present a problem, particularly documenting cases in active conflict zones."
A third of all land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared last year were Indigenous. The deadliest industry was mining and extractives, at 29, followed by logging (8), agribusiness (4), roads and infrastructure (2), hydropower (1), and poaching.
In addition to detailing who was killed or disappeared, what they fought for, and how "the current system is failing defenders," the report offers recommendations for "how states and businesses can better protect defenders."
Currently, said Global Witness project lead Rachel Cox, "states across the world are weaponizing their legal systems to silence those speaking out in defense of our planet."
"Amid rampant resource use, escalating environmental pressure, and a rapidly closing window to limit warming to 1.5°C, they are treating land and environmental defenders like they are a major inconvenience instead of canaries in a coal mine about to explode," she continued.
"Meanwhile, governments are failing to hold those responsible for defender attacks to account—spurring the cycle of killings with little consequence," she added. "World leaders must acknowledge the role they must play in ending this once and for all."
The recommendation section specifically points to the upcoming United Nations climate summit, COP30, in Belém, Brazil, "a city amid one of the world's most biodiverse regions—and one of the most dangerous countries to be a land and the environment defender."
"The protection and meaningful participation of land and environmental defenders at COP30 and beyond is an essential element of the fight against climate change," the document says. "It must become a core principle of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity process."
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Why Pointing the US Military at Cartels Won’t Stop the Flow of Drugs
The Trump administration may present this as some magic solution that will win the drug war once and for all, but the reality is bullets and bombs have been lobbed at the narco traffickers repeatedly to little positive effect.
Aug 12, 2025
In 2020, during the last year of the Trump administration’s first term, U.S. President Donald Trump asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper a shocking question: Why can’t the United States just attack the Mexican cartels and their infrastructure with a volley of missiles?
Esper recounted the moment in his memoir, using the anecdote to illustrate just how reckless Trump was becoming as his term drew to a close. Those missiles, of course, were never launched, so the entire interaction amounted to nothing in terms of policy.
Yet five years later, Trump still views the Mexican cartels as one of Washington’s principal national security threats. His urge to take offensive action inside Mexico has only grown with time. Unlike in Trump’s first term, using the U.S. military to combat these criminal organizations is now a mainstream policy option in Trump’s Republican Party. According to The New York Times, Trump has signed a presidential directive allowing the Pentagon to begin using military force against specific cartels in Latin America, and U.S. military officials are now in the process of studying various ways to go about implementing the order.
While this may come as a shock to some foreign policy commentators, it shouldn’t. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and short-lived national security adviser) Mike Waltz, and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ron Johnson have all left the door open to military force, whether it takes the form of striking fentanyl-production facilities by air or deploying U.S. special operations forces to take out top cartel leaders on Mexican soil.
Effectively declaring war on Mexico, America’s top trading partner and neighbor with which we share a nearly 2,000 mile-long border, presents the illusion of progress without actually making any.
The Trump administration wasted no time going down this road. The Central Intelligence Agency is engaging in more surveillance flights along the U.S.-Mexico border, and inside Mexican airspace, to gather information on key cartel locations. The U.S. national security bureaucracy was already in preliminary discussions about the possible use of drone strikes against the cartels as well. And on February 20, the U.S. State Department designated six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which is designed to deter Americans from working with the cartels and lay the foundation for future strikes.
This is all good politics for Trump, who recognizes implicitly that getting tough on Mexico economically and politically is red meat for his base. But politics isn’t nearly as important as policy, and the policy implications of U.S. military operations in Mexico—even if the purpose is a noble one—is riddled with costs and make managing the problems the Trump administration ostensibly cares about even harder.
First, we should remember one thing right off the bat: Using the military to tackle cartels is not a new phenomenon. The Trump administration may present this as some magic solution that will win the drug war once and for all, but the reality is bullets and bombs have been lobbed at the narco traffickers repeatedly to little positive effect. Successive Mexican governments since the turn of the century, from the conservative Felipe Calderón to the leftist Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), have relied on the military under the presumption this was the best way the Mexican state could pressure criminal organizations into extinction.
Calderón, for instance, declared a full-blown war on the cartels immediately after his election in 2006, deploying tens of thousands of Mexican troops into some of the country’s most violent states. Despite lambasting the military-first strategy during his own presidential campaign, Enrique Peña Nieto largely continued Calderón’s strategy with a special emphasis on targeting so-called “kingpins” of the narco-trafficking world. When AMLO entered office in 2018, he tried to get the Mexican army back into the barracks but wound up expanding their authority and rushing Mexican soldiers into hot spots, like Culiacan, whenever large-scale violence broke out.
The result was a bloodbath. Rather than submit to the state’s diktats, the cartels fought the Mexican state with ever greater levels of force. Politicians, police officers, and soldiers were all targeted and killed with greater frequency. Areas of Mexico previously insulated from cartel violence were suddenly drawn into the maelstrom. Although senior narco traffickers were killed and captured in the process, Mexico’s cartel landscape was shattered into a million different pieces; as my colleague Christopher McCallion and I wrote in July, the demise of the cartel’s senior leadership merely opened up these organizations to extreme bouts of infighting between replacements who sought to grab the crown.
The end product was a massive uptick in Mexico’s homicide rate, which is now three times greater than it was before Calderón declared war almost two decades ago.
Of course, the Trump administration is unlikely to mimic the Mexican government’s past strategy entirely. It’s hard to envision tens of thousands of U.S. troops deploying to Tamaulipas, Guanajuato, or Sinaloa, sealing off neighborhoods, establishing checkpoints, and conducting offensive operations against cartels that in some instances have more firepower than the Mexican army. If Washington is going to do anything militarily, it’s more likely to come in the form of air power. Bombing fentanyl manufacturing plants would be more economical and wouldn’t involve U.S. ground forces, so the risk to U.S. personnel would be much lower.
Still, if the objective is to bomb the cartels into submission or convince them to stop producing and shipping drugs across America’s southern border, then an air campaign will fall flat. We can say this with a reasonable degree of certainty because there’s first-hand experience to go by. The U.S. Air Force did something similar in Afghanistan in 2017-2018, taking out opium labs in Taliban-controlled areas to deprive the Taliban insurgency of the revenue it needed to wage the war.
But as the Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction reported, the bombing campaign failed to do anything of significance. The U.S. air campaign didn’t dent the Taliban’s revenue streams to the point where it made a negotiated resolution on U.S. terms possible. As David Mansfield, the world’s leading expert on Afghanistan’s drug patterns, wrote in a 2019 report, “It is hard to see how the campaign offered anything in terms of value for money, with the cost of the strikes and ordnance used far outweighing the value of the losses to those involved in drugs production or potential revenues to the Taliban.”
Why would Mexico be any different than Afghanistan? If anything, denting cartel revenue via an air campaign would be even more difficult than it was with respect to the Taliban. Unlike heroin, fentanyl is a synthetic drug that can be easily produced, isn’t particularly labor intensive, and doesn’t require acres upon acres of poppy fields that can be easily located. Sure, the United States is bound to find some of these facilities, but the cartels responsible for production will still have a monetary incentive to set up shop somewhere else. Fentanyl nets the cartels billions of dollars every year; this is a very large financial resource that the Sinaloa and New Jalisco Generation cartels—or frankly anyone in the business—will be hard pressed to pass up.
And if even if they magically did find a new line of work, other players would step into the void to increase their own market share.
These are only several problems associated with treating the U.S. military as a panacea to the drug problem. But the important thing to take away is that effectively declaring war on Mexico, America’s top trading partner and neighbor with which we share a nearly 2,000 mile-long border, presents the illusion of progress without actually making any. And it will inject immense tension in a U.S.-Mexican relationship that Washington should be strengthening, not undermining.
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Failed 'War on Drugs' Redux? Secret Trump Order Would Aim US Military at Overseas Cartels
"The legality of this move should certainly be under scrutiny," said one international relations expert.
Aug 08, 2025
The New York Times reported on Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump has signed a secret order directing the United States Department of Defense to use the American military to combat drug cartels in foreign nations.
According to the Times, the order gives the military authorization to carry out operations against cartels both at sea and on foreign soil. What's more, the paper reported that "U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after" the cartels.
The report then outlined some of the thorny legal issues involved with bringing the military in to handle what has traditionally been a matter for law enforcement. Among other things, the Times said that it's an unresolved question whether "it would count as 'murder' if U.S. forces acting outside of a congressionally authorized armed conflict were to kill civilians—even criminal suspects—who pose no imminent threat."
Shortly after the Times report broke on Friday, The Guardian reported that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Friday tried to shoot down any talk of an American incursion into her country.
"The United States is not going to come to Mexico with their military," she told reporters during a news conference. "We cooperate, we collaborate, but there will be no invasion. It's off the table, absolutely off the table."
Experts who cover Latin American relations were quick to raise alarms about the Trump administration's plans, which they said would likely lead to needless civilian deaths while also failing to curtail the flow of drugs into the United States.
"The legality of this move should certainly be under scrutiny, but we should also discuss the mountains of evidence that show militarizing the war on drugs has never resulted in minimizing the market and rather increased violence against civilians massively," commented Renata Segura, the director of Latin America and the Caribbean Program at the International Crisis Group.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is now a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, commented on Bluesky that he's long been warning about unilateral military involvement in Latin America to fight the drug cartels and linked to an analysis he published earlier this year at Just Security in which he declared such a strategy to be "almost certainly illegal" and "definitely counterproductive."
In his piece, Finucane argued that any plans to bomb drug labs would likely turn into a Whac-A-Mole-style game given how "low-tech" and simple to build such labs have become, as evidenced by the American military's failed efforts to bomb opium-processing facilities in Afghanistan.
Additionally, Finucane warned that Mexico would likely look to retaliate against the U.S. for violating its sovereignty with military operations in its territory, which would damage Trump's goal of stemming the flow of migration to the southern U.S. border.
"Mexico could respond by curtailing or terminating assistance in stemming the passage of migrants through its territory," he explained. "Further, the unilateral bombing of drug labs or killing of narcos would also shut down the possibility of counter-narcotic cooperation with Mexico in the future."
Risa Brooks, a political scientist at Marquette University, argued on Bluesky that a U.S. military campaign in Latin America could be part of a broader effort to politicize the military and make it into an institution primarily loyal to the Republican Party.
"Missions that involve the U.S. military in counter cartel, as well as immigration and law enforcement roles, embroil it in controversy, because the public's attitudes about those missions are so polarized," she explained. "People that support the administration and these missions applaud the military's involvement. Those that don't come to mistrust it. The public starts to see the military as supporting one side in U.S. politics."
All of this, Brooks added, "normalizes the idea of the military as a partisan force" that is expected to serve at the behest of a political party rather than a nation.
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