When the corrupt plans of governments and corporations threaten people and the environment, rights activists oppose them.
However, engaging in this kind of activism can be extremely dangerous. This is because, in the absence of robust judicial institutions, corrupt and powerful organizations can remove obstacles to their ambitions by any means they like, and with probable impunity.
These corrupt political environments have contributed to the hundreds of murders of rights defenders that take place every year around the world. According to Front Line Defenders, at least 358 human rights activists were killed in 2021, and at least 401 were killed in 2022.
What contributes to the murder of activists?
Some 80% of the murders in 2022 occurred in five countries: Colombia (186), Ukraine (50), Mexico (45), Brazil (26), and Honduras (17). The 50 murders in Ukraine are undoubtedly due to the extraordinary circumstances this country has faced in 2022.
However, the high body counts of the remaining four countries can be attributed to systemic problems. All of these countries score poorly in Transparency International’s 2022 corruption perception index. They also house large and influential organized crime groups, with all except for Brazil included by the World Economic Forum among the 15 countries worst impacted by organized crime.
As well as this, they all contain large Indigenous populations. According to World Atlas, Mexico and Colombia are among the ten countries in the Americas with the largest Indigenous populations, with 27.5 million and 3.4 million, respectively. In 2022, 22% of human rights killings were of Indigenous rights defenders, and Indigenous defenders were disproportionately targeted in Colombia.
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By GlobalDataThese Latin American countries show that a combination of corruption, instability, and large Indigenous populations can produce a dangerous environment in which powerful organizations are more likely to encroach on human rights and illegally enforce their ambitions.
The role of corrupt conditions in recent killings
In 2023, at least 24 activists in Indigenous and rural areas have been killed, jailed, or disappeared across Central America. According to the Guardian, governments across Central America have been relying on extractive industries to quickly attract foreign investment in the wake of economic headaches caused by the pandemic.
This, combined with corrupt practices and organized crime that proliferates in these regions, has resulted in extractive companies encroaching more and more on land and resources upon which Indigenous communities rely.
According to the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, rural and Indigenous communities in Central America are rarely consulted over government and corporate projects that would appropriate the land and resources these groups have historically used.
In Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince’s lofty ambition for a $500 billion new smart city development project, NEOM, has resulted in the mass eviction of the Indigenous Huwaitat tribe and the murder of tribespeople directly opposing the project’s implementation.
One resident, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, was killed on April 13, 2020, for posting videos that highlighted NEOM’s encroachment on the Huwaitat’s rights and on the land they historically inhabited.
Saudi authorities claimed Abdul had been killed in a shootout with security forces. Reports citing eye-witness accounts have labelled his death as an “extrajudicial execution”. Later, in October 2022, three Huwaitat tribe members were sentenced to death after they refused to leave their homes and make way for the new smart city. Other Huwaitat people have been given life sentences in prison.
Systemic threats to a just state of affairs, such as corruption, organized crime, and overbearing authoritarianism, are very difficult to eradicate quickly, if at all. Indigenous peoples have limited platforms to speak out against encroachments on their rights, and the economic interests behind private and public sector projects regularly trump the environmental concerns they raise. These trends do not bode well for the human rights activists operating in corrupt regions.
