Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and this is The Takeaway. According to a report by Global Witness, which is an environment and human rights watchdog, 2020 was the deadliest year on record for environmental and land defenders around the world. On average, more than four people a week were killed as a result of their work. These numbers almost certainly underestimate the true scope of the violence. Much of the brutality occurred in central and south America and more than one-third of the victims are indigenous persons.
Now indigenous peoples and communities around the world are fighting to protect the land and natural resources where they live, but their efforts often result in intimidation, threats, and violence. The Takeaway heard from the leader of the Shuar Arutam People located in the Condor mountain range of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Josefina Tunki: [foreign language]
Melissa Harris-Perry: That was Josefina Tunki, President of the Shuar Arutam People. Now their territory spans nearly 900 square miles with approximately 12,000 residents. Nearly 60% of her tribe's territory has been concessioned to large-scale mining and extraction companies without their consultation or consent. Solaris Resources, a Canadian company that mines copper and gold in the Americas, is one of those companies trying to take resources from Shuar Arutam territories. President Tunki has tried to communicate with the company directly.
She's filed complaints on the national and international level, and she's also filed a complaint with the UN’s International Labor Organization. Because of this, she alleges that she's received a threatening phone call from Vice President of Operations at Solaris Resources, Federico Velásquez.
Josefina Tunki: [foreign language]
Melissa Harris-Perry: There president Tunki is saying that in 2020, she received this call from Federico Velásquez saying that all of her complaints are making the company look bad and that if it continues, he will cut the heads off of someone in her community. Now, in a response to The Takeaway, Federico Velásquez denies that he made the threat and you can see his full response on thetakeaway.org. Still, the Solaris Resources mine is doubling down on their extraction operations and the Shuar Arutam People are still fighting to protect their territory, the environment, and their culture.
Here's another indigenous leader of the Kakataibo People in central Peruvian Amazon.
Herlin Odicio: [foreign language]
Melissa Harris-Perry: That is our Herlín Odicio, President of the Native Federation of Kakataibo Communities. His fellow community leaders are being threatened and killed by narco-traffickers as they invade the rainforest, cut down trees, and set up coca agriculture and production within their ancestral territories. The past two years of COVID has also hit their community hard.
Herlin Odicio: [foreign language]
Melissa Harris-Perry: He's telling us how drug traffickers have killed four of his fellow community leaders in the last two years, and that COVID has killed eight members in his community. To learn more about these issues, I spoke with Andrew Miller, an Advocacy Director for Amazon Watch, a nonprofit that fights to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin.
Andrew Miller: There are many different contexts of course. There are a lot of economic drivers of deforestation, of environmental destruction. There are different industries. The agriculture, big agriculture is one industry, mining, oil and gas, and other infrastructures. Those are the licit side of it, the "legal side of it". Of course, you also have a whole series of illicit actors, as I mentioned, illegal logging, illegal mining, drug production. Actually, that's a big thing that we're seeing in our work in the Peruvian Amazon right now, where indigenous territories are being invaded by essentially land grabbers who are converting their territories into areas to produce coca and cocaine.
It's many different actors, but in many cases, they're very strong economic incentives and that's playing itself out at a local and national level. There's this question of the broader economic system and the markets to which these products are going. Certainly when we look at agricultural products, when we look at beef, when we look at soy, when we look at the minerals that are being produced, a lot of those are of course being consumed in the United States and North America and Europe and other economies, of course.
The rise of China, there are a tremendous amount of commodities that are being sent to China also. There is a broader global responsibility, but it is important for us here in the United States to think about our own consumption. The New York Times just did a piece about leather in luxury cars and how that leather is coming from-- certain amount of it is coming from the Brazilian Amazon and many of those cows are coming from areas that were illegally deforested. We can see those kinds of chains.
Not just the companies that are producing and selling those products, but we also need to look at the broader role of investors and banks. Where are those funds going and what kinds of activities are they profiting from? That's another part of the work that I think is very important that we look at the investors. It's important that we as individuals are looking at where our money is invested and what's our responsibility in what's happening. We can't just blame the Brazilian government or the Peruvian government or whoever on the ground.
We also need to look at our own culpability in these dynamics that are resulting in the deaths of really brave people at a local level.
Melissa Harris-Perry: You wrote about Columbia, and Columbia being among the deadliest place for environmentalists. Can you talk about what's happening in Columbia, but also with an eye as you point out towards the ways that this global supply chain that we may all be a part of, not only supply, but demand chain might be impacting this violence.
Andrew Miller: We worked with another organization that's based in Columbia called the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative to write a piece about what's happening there currently. Unfortunately, Columbia is a country that has had violent conflict happening for decades, and there are many different causes of that. They are a "peace process", and there was a lot of hope and expectation about that, but unfortunately the actual implementation of the peace accords in Columbia has been very spotty in many ways.
We worked to highlight that in this piece and the fact that unfortunately, there are a number of indicators about deforestation and other environmental problems that are on the rise in Colombia. Of course, the human corollary to that are the frightening number of killings of folks, of activists, of people standing up for their communities in the last two years. According to Global Witness, you had the highest number of killings that happened in Columbia. That means that they beat out the Philippines and Honduras and Brazil and other countries that have long histories of being very deadly countries for local activists.
We believe that the application of the political will, that governments really need to make a commitment and not just in rhetoric, but in practice to protecting human rights, to protecting the environment. They really need to go after the root causes. There are often actions that are taken to demonstrate that they're doing things, but they're not really necessarily getting to the root causes. For example, in Columbia, they launched a whole operation this year to go after deforestation in national parks, but really what they did was mostly arrest the low-level people who were just trying to subsist at a local level.
They didn't necessarily go after companies or the economic interests or the investors, or the higher-level economic and political interests that are really behind the deforestation and what's happening. We made recommendations to the current president of Columbia, Iván Duque, who is very much sort of presenting himself. He was at the UN General Assembly in September. He was at the Climate Summit in Glasgow, presenting himself as an environmental champion. Our op-ed was saying, look, there needs to be a real implementation of the peace accord.
There needs to be a ratification and an implementation of The Escazu Agreement, which is a regional environmental agreement that Latin American countries are signing onto that has a strong component related to protection of local defenders. We also make recommendations to the Biden administration and there's been a lot of discussion in the Biden administration about protection of the environment and climate. They launched a strategy at the Climate Summit for protecting tropical forests.
One of our key messages is that any strategy for climate really must center the protection of these local activists because they are the front lines. They are the last line of defense often. There are many things that the US government can and should be doing and other governments can and should be doing to support those local activists.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Andrew Miller is an Advocacy Director for Amazon Watch. Thank you for joining us today.
Andrew Miller: It was my pleasure.
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