ECO MARTYRS

The purpose of this project is twofold: to honour the sacrifice of these activists, and to spread awareness about this little-known phenomenon.

As you will find in your perusal of these stories, a person is designated an environmental martyr when their murder is tied directly to their work as an activist. This could mean being killed by corrupt government militia, fellow townspeople who have a stake in a mining or logging project, or even someone belonging to the corporation they are opposing.

These activists were parents, teachers, journalists, lawyers, community leaders, police, humanitarian workers, park rangers, farmers: but most importantly, they were selfless people who were willing to lay down their lives in defense of the planet. It's our job to keep their memories alive and, in whatever way we can, keep on fighting.

Some of the posts we used to introduce the project to Instagram in 2021:

Since we only ever published 21 on Insta, here's the whole set of 46 together, in order of the date they were assassinated.

For more info, here are some relevant links:

Wikipedia Contributors. “Isidro Baldenegro López.” Wikipedia. April 13, 2024.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isidro_Baldenegro_L%C3%B3pez
Malkin, Elisabeth. “Isidro Baldenegro, Mexican Environmental Activist, Is Shot to Death.” The New York Times, January 19, 2017.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/world/americas/mexico-environmental-activist-shot-sierra-madre.html.
“Second Winner of Environmental Prize Killed Months after Berta Cáceres Death.” The Guardian. January 18, 2017.
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/18/isidro-baldenegro-lopez-killed-goldman-environmental-prize-mexico-berta-caceres.
“Killing of Isidro Baldenegro Lopez.” Front Line Defenders. January 18, 2017.
- https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/killing-isidro-baldenegro-lopez.
“Isidro Baldenegro.” n.d. Goldman Environmental Foundation.
- https://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/isidro-baldenegro/.

Esmond Bradley Martin was an American ivory-trade researcher who worked in Kenya, China and Burma. He was once a UN special envoy ‘For the conservation of rhinoceros.’

Upon his assassination, Paula Kahumbu, CEO of WildlifeDirect, tweeted, “It is with deep shock and horror that we learn this morning of the death of long time conservationist, Esmond Bradley Martin, whom police say died in suspicious circumstances at his home in Karen, Nairobi. Esmond led investigations into ivory & rhino horn trafficking.

"Esmond was at the forefront of exposing the scale of ivory markets in USA, Congo, Nigeria, Angola, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Laos and recently Myanmar. He always collaborated with Save the Elephants and worked with many of us, generously sharing his findings & views. Esmond was a global authority on ivory and rhino horn trafficking. We send our deepest condolences to his wife. RIP Esmond, pachyderms have lost a great [champion].” 🐘🦏

Dorothy Stang was a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, a Catholic group combating poverty and inequality. She was American, born in Ohio, but worked extensively in Brazil, helping to campaign against illegal logging and human rights abuse. In 2005, she was ambushed and brutally shot one morning on her way to church, by two men with machine guns.

They didn’t get away with the murder, though. According to an article from the New York Times in 2010, “A Brazilian rancher accused of ordering the murder of an American nun, Dorothy Stang, has been found guilty and sentenced to 30 years, it was announced late Monday night... Ms. Stang worked for three decades to preserve the rain forest and defend poor settlers’ land rights. Prosecutors said Vitalmiro Moura ordered her killing in 2005 because she blocked him from taking land the government gave to farmers.” Dorothy is now being considered for canonization as a Saint.

Mia Mascariñas Green was a Filipina lawyer who specialised in women’s, children’s and environmental cases. She was married to an English expat, (pictured right) and they had three children; a ten-year-old girl, and twin baby boys. One afternoon, driving home from work with the kids and their nanny, two men, hired by her opponent in her latest environmental property dispute case, overtook her car on motorbike, at one of the busiest intersections in the area, and gunned her down. She was 49 years old.

According to Campaign Human Rights Philippines, as they left the gunmen ‘taunted’ the children by aiming their guns at them, before riding off. In a statement about her death, her husband said, “A lot of the bullets went into the side of her neck at the back, but it was because she didn’t bother to look at these people, she was just turning to check that the kids were OK. So actually, that gives me a small sense of something nice, because I know that she died knowing the kids were [safe].”

Berta Caceres is one of the world’s most distinguished and recognisable environmental martyrs. Born in southwestern Honduras, she was a member of the Indigenous Lenca people. Over the course of her life she became a prolific activist for indigenous rights, environmentalism, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ issues.
Her most notable campaign was that against the proposed construction of four hydroelectric dams on the Gualcarque River, which is sacred to her people. They had not been consulted on the dams’ construction and would be severely impacted. It was for this that in 2015, she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.
The next year, in 2016, she was murdered in her home. Her Mexican friend described the attack: “I was working on a presentation when I heard a loud bang. I thought something had fallen, but when Berta screamed, ‘Who’s there?’, I knew it was bad, that it was the end. [...] When the hitman arrived, I covered my face. He was three metres away. I moved as he fired, and the bullet passed my ear. He thought he’d killed me. It’s a miracle I survived.” 8 people were arrested in connection with her death. 7 were convicted in 2018.

Nelson García was killed on the 15th March 2016, at the age of 38, 2 weeks after Berta Caceres, the leader of COPINH, (Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras) of which Nelson was a member. He was not as well known as Berta, and his death did not receive the same amount of publicity. However, he was an extremely active protester, and was murdered, in the words of Global Initiative, by “the same unholy triumvirate of politicians, corporations and criminal organizations...” responsible for Berta’s death.

Guardian quote, upon his death, “García spent the morning with the Río Chiquito community where more than one hundred police and military officers helped evict dozens of families from land which local politicians claim doesn’t belong to them. Their simple timber houses and crops were destroyed using heavy machinery yesterday morning, according to Copinh.”

Sikhosiphi Rhadebe, nicknamed "Bazooka," after his favourite football star, was killed on the 22nd March 2016, on the Eastern Cape of South Africa. His son, who was 17 years old at the time, would have been 21 when we first posted this. His campaign was "…to prevent an Australian mining company from strip-mining their sand dunes for titanium…" This company is Perth-based Mineral Commodities Ltd. or MRC. He was killed by two unidentified men, posing as police, driving a Volkswagen Polo, who drove up to his house before dragging him out and shooting him eight times when he resisted, in front of his son. No convictions have been made. Locals suspect that corrupt police sabotaged the operation.

Family, friends and fellow campaigners of Bazooka say that his death was just one of many which have resulted from the resistance to the mining operation. While they do not claim that his death was ordered by MRC itself, local tensions created by the mine may have caused their own people to turn on each other.

Rest in peace Bazooka.

On the 22nd of March 2019, 48-year-old Brazilian activist Dilma Ferreira Silva, her husband and their neighbour were tortured and killed in her house. Since 2005, Dilma had been an activist for the Movement of People Affected by Dams, known by its Portuguese acronym, ‘MAB,’ an organisation which formed in the aftermath of the destruction caused by the Tucuruí hydroelectric power-plant. Rather than allowing herself to become a victim of the dam, Dilma became a fighter for the human rights of her people, including those whose properties were stolen by land-grabbing farmers. In particular, she focused on the ‘gendered impacts’ of these phenomena.

“Dilma Ferreira is the image of an affected woman who rebuilt herself as a subject of struggle in a devastated region... She stood out very fast because she was always very fearless,” said her colleagues. And it was probably how much she stood out that led to Fernando Rosa Filho, a local landowner, ordering her death. Fortunately, he was later arrested by police.

Zezico Guajajara was an Amazonian activist, a supporter of the Guardians of the Forest movement, and a former teacher from the state of Maranhao in Brazil, who was shot near his home on the last day of March, in 2020 - the year of the pandemic. In the previous six months, four other anti-deforestation activists had been killed in the region, including another member of the Guajajara tribe - a young man called Paulino, assassinated in the November when Black Summer was beginning to take hold in Australia.

According to the BBC, ‘Brazil's populist President Jair Bolsonaro has drawn intense domestic and international criticism for failing to protect the Guardians' territory in the eastern Amazon region.’

A fellow member of his tribe: "We are mourning his death. We're protecting the forest for all humanity, but powerful forces are out to kill us."

Nazildo dos Santos Brito lived in Pará, a Brazilian state in the Amazon region. Many environmental murders have these four things in common: first, the martyr was an authority figure. Nazildo was a leader in his Quilombo Afro-Brazilian community, called Paratê Tembé. Second, the martyr comes from an ethnic minority, whose land rights are disregarded by big business. The Quilombo people are guaranteed land rights under Brazil's constitution, but the palm oil industry, which is part of Brazil's larger 'agribusiness', and their lobbyers, were threatening these rights. Third, many martyrs had plenty of warning that their death was imminent, but chose to continue to campaign anyway. Nazildo had received death threats prior to his assassination, including the recent deaths of two other activists in the region. And fourth: an 'execution-style killing'. According to The Guardian, "Brito’s body was found on Sunday morning. He had been shot in the head and the stomach. None of his belongings had been taken, prompting police to believe he was the victim of an execution-style killing… Fellow campaigners... urged the authorities to find and punish the killers, but they said they had been largely left alone to deal with the risks they continually faced."

Edmore Ndou was a Zimbabwean ranger who spent four years fighting poaching near the country’s southern border. He was tracking a pair of impala poachers with two colleagues, when the trio were ambushed by their enemies. One of the poachers shot Ndou in the thigh, after which both criminals fled the scene, leaving Eddie bleeding out on the ground.

The head of security, Ishmael Tshabalala, tells the rest of the story: “I received a text message saying someone had been shot. I didn’t even think to ask who. I just drove straight to the station... I regret not going there sooner. Maybe I could’ve been able to save Eddie’s life. By the time [I arrived] it was too late – he’d lost too much blood... We tried to rush him to our [Nottingham Estate] clinic. That’s where he died, 20 minutes later.”

Cambodian environmental activist Chut Wutty was killed in 2012 while giving a driving tour of a local forest, which he knew well, to two female journalists, Phorn and Olesia, from the local newspaper. Olesia first caught sight of the three armed men tearing towards them on motorbikes. She called it, “It was a horrific moment.” They were members of the military police, and Chut was shot in the back trying to flee the attackers.

Chut had been campaigning against the military’s illegal destruction of Cambodia’s forests for nearly a decade, through investigation and exposure of corruption within government institutions. He had been Deputy Director of Global Witness in Cambodia, until the government kicked the organisation out. After this, he founded his own group, dedicated to the preservation of Cambodian nature, including forests, called the Natural Resource Protection Group.

He died at the age of just 40, leaving behind a wife and three children. In 2014, Obama acknowledged Chut’s sacrifice in his speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. In 2015, the film I Am Chut Wutty was released, depicting his adventurous life.

At 3pm on the sixth of July, 2017, a Brazilian activist for peasant land rights was gunned down in a car wash. The execution took place in Porto Velho, the capital of the Brazilian state of Rondônia. Ademir de Souza Pereira, who was part of the League of Poor Peasants of Rondônia, was shot with three 40 calibre bullets through the neck and back, in cold blood. By the time an Emergency Medical Services unit had arrived, Ademir was already dead. He had been in town for a meeting with the superintendent of Brazil’s National Institute for Agrarian Reform - INCRA.

The assassins fled the scene without a trace, but were possibly paid by a land owner who had previously threatened the activist. During the following wake for Ademir, a note containing a death threat to his wife and three children was delivered to the house, by an unidentified man on a motorbike.

On the 6th of July 2016, a 49-year-old Honduran activist and mother of three left her home at 5pm. Her body wouldn’t be found by authorities until the next day, near a rubbish dump just outside the city, killed by a machete to the head. Lesbia was a well-known Indigenous rights and environmental activist in Honduras, belonging to the same Indigenous group - the Lenca people - as Berta Cáceres, murdered only a few months earlier. She also worked in the same organisation: COPINH, described by Front Line Defenders as “an organisation that works for the recognition of the political, social, cultural, and economic rights of indigenous communities in Honduras and to protect their territory.” Lesbia’s campaign was to prevent the Aurora hydroelectric project, which would be detrimental to the Lenca people and local ecosystems. Police claimed her murder had been part of the theft of her expensive bike, but her fellow activists disagreed, calling her death a “political femicide,” linking it to her activism and pointing out the pattern of COPINH agents who’d already been killed that year. Within a week, 3 men had been arrested in connection with her death.

José Raimundo Mota de Souza – colloquially known as Junior – was a 38-year-old farmer, and an activist for ecology and human rights in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Junior worked for the 'Movement of Poor Farmers of Bahia' as a regional coordinator. According to the New Internationalist, "He had been a staunch defender of agro-toxin-free farming techniques. He was also a Quilombola – a descendant of Africans who fled enslavement and formed communities in the Brazilian countryside." And according to HRD memorial, he "had undertaken courses in community leadership and legal studies so that he could help in the struggle to legally establish the land rights of his Quilombola community." After the murder of another activist, a man called João Bigode, 15 months earlier, Junior was doubly motivated to carry on the torch and continue fighting for his people's rights. Junior was gunned down in a drive-by shooting while working with family members in the fields. His brother and nephew only survived by hiding in a ditch. An examination revealed that he had been shot ten times by the assassins – four men who were believed to be motivated by the possibility of the Quilombola people establishing their land rights in the area.

Tomas García is the fourth Honduran martyr in this project, belonging to the same organisation, COPINH, as the other three – Berta, Nelson and Lesbia. Tomas was a community leader of the Lenca people, as well as an activist campaigning against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, whose construction would have caused a sacred river, the Gualcarque, to dry up. The river is also essential for the daily needs of the local inhabitants – without it there would be no water for farming, drinking, cooking or cleaning. And of course, the drying of the river would have huge ecological implications for the region. Tomas, a father of seven preparing to celebrate his 50th birthday, was on his way to participate in a peaceful demonstration at the sight of the dam, when a member of the Honduran military opened fire on the Indigenous protestors. Tomas’ son was merely wounded by a bullet across his abdomen (the scar can be seen in the above photograph). His father wasn’t so lucky. The protest, on the 15th of July 2013, took place near Río Blanco, in the department of Intibucá, and a crowd of several hundred people was witness to Tomas’ death. Needless to say, Tomas was unarmed and completely peaceful. Nevertheless, he was shot three times in broad daylight, simply for protesting the construction of a dam. In a rare case of justice for Honduran activists, the officer responsible for Tomas’ death, Kevin Yasser Saravia, was convicted of assassination and sentenced to between 15 and 20 years in prison. According to Both Ends, “The negative publicity this caused led Sinohydro to withdraw from the project and the World Bank to cancel its planned funding.” And a few years later, following the deaths of several more Lenca activists including Berta Caceres, all investors withdrew, leaving the river undisturbed. Tomas did not die in vain.

Dudunyabo Machongani Célestin is one of the youngest environmental martyrs on this list. Having joined the anti-poaching rangers in 2011, at the age of 24, he worked in the force for six years before his tragic death on the 16th of July, 2017. On that day, Célestin was travelling through the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with several fellow rangers, when they were ambushed by a group of Mai Mai rebels. Célestin was captured, and his body was later discovered in the forest, on Sunday. The bodies of four other rangers from the same park had been discovered on Saturday, along with that of a porter, all killed by the same group. The Mai Mai rebels are a loose band of Congolese militia which coalesced following the 1996 civil war, and are notorious recruiters of child soldiers. Like many other criminal groups, their activities are often environmentally destructive, and the rebels frequently come into conflict with the rangers over poaching and mining operations. A series of restrictions which had been recently announced, designed to make the Okapi Reserve more protected, provoked these attacks. Célestin left behind a wife and two children - a baby and a four-year-old.

The assassination in 2017 of Wayne Lotter, a 51-year-old South African conservationist, was devastating, although not surprising to those who knew him. The activist and father of two had been receiving death threats for his work to protect African wildlife and forests for the past decade at least. But when Wayne was assassinated in the former capital of Tanzania on the 16th of August four years ago, the rest of the world was left reeling in shock. Jane Goodall herself described him as a courageous hero of hers, and the Duke of Cambridge called his death a “senseless loss.” After attaining a Master of Nature Conservation degree in the 90s, Wayne went on to work as a ranger, and then in the wildlife protection sector generally. In 2009, Wayne helped to establish the PAMS Foundation which, according to Global Initiative, “…has helped to protect some 42,000 elephants and 7,000 giraffes; confiscated 1,153 firearms; and educated 4,200 children on environmental issues…” On the PAMS website, Wayne is described as, “a conservation warrior, a strategist, a trailblazer with resolute determination and courage.” A few years later, Wayne helped to fund the Tanzanian National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit, which went on to investigate and uncover several key figures in the ivory trade, arresting 2,000 poachers from 2012 to 2017 alone. As a pure testament to his humble and generous character, Wayne suggested in 2016 that rangers from the PAMS Foundation be interviewed for the Netflix documentary The Ivory Game, rather than him. Wayne was travelling to the airport of the former Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, in a taxi, when he was gunned down by assassins. Fortunately, Wayne’s killers were brought to justice, with eight men being charged with involvement in his death just sixth months later. However, they have yet to be convicted.

On the 22nd of December 1988, Chico Mendes was shot in his home in cold blood, precisely a week after his 44th birthday, leaving behind a wife, two daughters and a young son. A former rubber tapper turned anti-logging activist living in the Amazon basin, Chico was the 90th environmental advocate murdered in Brazil that year alone.Chico was killed by a local rancher, Darci Alves da Silva, angered by his fight to protect the rights of Indigenous rubber tappers and prevent the destruction of the rainforest. Chico had been the president of the Xapuri Rural Workers Union, of which he was a founding member in the 70s. He also encouraged rubber tappers to rely on a range of more sustainable practices, rather than the rubber trade alone, and to send their children to school (he himself had never received a formal education). He was recognised for his work just before his death, making the UNEP's Global 500 Roll of Honour in 1987, and winning the National Conservation Achievement Award of the NWF, only months prior to the assassination.The world might not have seen the tragedy coming, but Chico certainly did. He famously joked that he would "not live until Christmas." Unfortunately, he was right. The year after his death, Fight for the Forest: Chico Mendes in His Own Words was published.

Renato Anglao was killed in the Philippines, which is the second most dangerous country in the world for environmentalists.
Renato was fighting not only to preserve a forest, but also to ensure the rights of his indigenous tribe.
We originally posted this on the fourth anniversary of his death, when his child would have been nine years old, having lost their father at the age of five.
- Tragically, quite a few of the assassinations on this list occurred in the presence of the activists' children.

Waldomiro Costa Pereira was a Brazilian land rights activist, killed in the state of Para on Monday the 20th of March, 2017. He was in hospital recovering from a previous attack when assassins entered the premises and overwhelmed the guards: he was shot in cold blood.

He had been a member of the Landless Workers Movement - known by its Portuguese acronym, ‘MST.’ The organisation said, “with immense sadness... we mourn his death... [we stand] in solidarity with his wife, children and all his family in this moment of pain.”