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Between 2012 and 2024, at least 35 women defenders of land, territory and the environment were killed in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua
On 22 April, commemorating Earth Day, the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders (IM-Defensoras) publishes the supplement The land belongs to those who work it and defend it. 10+ years of attacks against women defenders of land, territory and the environment in Mesoamerica (2012-2024). This document provides a specific analysis of the attacks against sister defenders of land, territory and the environment registered in the report Data that Hurt Us, Networks that Save Us. 10+ Years of Attacks against Women Human Rights Defenders in Mesoamerica (2012-2023), going deeper into the cases and updating them with preliminary data from 2024.
Through our registry system, between 2012 and 2024, we documented 9,629 attacks against women defenders and organizations that defend land, territory and the environment in Mesoamerica. In this same period, at least 35 of these women defenders were killed in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua. This places women defenders of land, territory and the environment as one of the collectives with the highest number of documented attacks, accounting for 22.3% of the 43,186 attacks registered against women defenders in the region since 2012. It is important to note that we do not have data from Guatemala for the period 2023-2024.
The violence that Mesoamerican women defenders of land, territory and the environment experience is related to the extractive capitalist model imposed throughout the region, linked to structural forms of classist, racist and patriarchal oppression exercised on women’s bodies and territories. In this context, the historical analysis of the evolution of attacks against these women defenders show three significant peaks, with an exponential increase in the number of registered attacks at each one. The first peak is in 2017, the year following the territorial femicide of Berta Cáceres, reflecting the attacks experienced by Honduran compañeras who opposed megaprojects and demanded justice for the murdered Lenca leader. The second peak appears in 2020, marked by governments’ authoritarian responses to the syndemic due to COVID-19. The third peak is in 2022, marked by the deepening policies militarizing territories and the increase in evictions, which is expressed in a significant increase in collective attacks involving excessive use of force, with clear support from authorities and armed forces, and the manipulation of judicial frameworks legalizing repression and violence.
Another important point highlighted in the report is that the historic victories of our struggles and our communities in the defense of territory and the commons can be rolled back at any moment, based on the will of the government in power. Such is the case of metal mining in El Salvador, which was banned in 2017 and was recently, in December 2024, once again made legal.
Finally, the report offers a synthesis of seven paradigmatic cases that describe the diversity of attacks perpetrated against women who defend land, territory and the environment, and against their communities and organizations: killing as the culmination of a prolonged series of attacks and the impunity enjoyed by the masterminds in the case of Berta Cáceres; the repetitive and systematic nature of attacks in the cases of peasant leader Francisca Ramírez in Nicaragua and Garífuna woman defender Miriam Miranda in Honduras; the instrumentalization of the legal system to criminalize women defenders, as in the cases of Amuzga lawyer Kenia Hernández in Mexico and peasant leader María Concepción Hernández in Zacate Grande, Honduras; collective violence, as experienced by the community of Santa Marta in El Salvador – with the criminalization of its leaders and the harassment and threats against the rest of the community – and as expressed in the constant violent evictions faced by the community of Agua Blanca Sur, in El Progreso, Honduras – perpetrated by public security forces; and the complicity between private interests and State institutions.