Introduction: A Typology of Ecopoliticide
The level of violence against environmental defenders has been shockingly high and shows no signs of abating. Environmental defenders can be described as “community activists, members of social movements, lawyers, journalists, NGO staff, indigenous peoples, members of traditional, peasant and agrarian communities, and those who resist forced eviction or other violent interventions.” The Global Witness Report (2023) names 200 environmental defenders murdered in 2021 alone–an incomplete list, doubtlessly, as many cases go unreported. In 2020, the number was equally troubling, with at least 227 land and environment defenders killed. In certain regions, “environmental activists have higher death rates than some soldiers.”
In 2021, we defined such defenders’ oppression as a “sphere of ecoviolence,” but this heightening violence animates us to establish a new term to describe it. We suggest “ecopoliticide,” which conveys acts of extreme violence, including murder and human rights violations, and denotes the intimate link between environmental defenders and the ecosystems they seek to protect. Our definition of ecopoliticide aims to explore how the acts of campaigning against, protesting, and resisting ecocide lead to violent retribution as well as the antecedents of such retribution by way of intimidation, harassment, and other attacks.
A typology of ecopoliticide would cover a range of violent actions. Local cases include the murders of individuals who resist land grabs and ecological transformation. Land grabs are arguably one of the more pernicious drivers of ecopoliticide today–they are large-scale acquisitions of land for commercial or industrial purposes with limited consultation with local communities and little regard for environmental sustainability and equitable access to natural resources. Unsurprisingly, the largest land acquisitions occur in countries with weak governance structures.
On a larger scale, ecopoliticide would include the violence perpetrated by organized crime groups and cartels, violence organized or sponsored by private corporations, and violence carried out by “security” operations undertaken to limit opposition to development projects. On the state level, large-scale oppression and dispossession of people from their land and culture, systemic oppression of freedom of speech, and the use of police, justice, and incarceration mechanisms are often involved. Just as with genocide and other crimes against humanity, we can often see ecopoliticide emerging as a strategy in real time, as our case studies below suggest.
Ecopoliticide Along the Venezuela-Guyana Border?
A key example of evolving (state-led) ecopoliticide is the territorial dispute between Venezuela and Guyana, which has led both sides to use various forms of violence to suppress and silence opposition leaders, activists, and journalists. The territorial dispute can be traced back to 1899 and has been a source of constant tension between the two countries, which has in turn been harnessed by politicians on both sides.
Opposition Leaders and Activists in Venezuela
In 2023, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro re-launched an effort to annex Essequibo, an oil-rich territory that is internationally recognized as within Guyana’s borders. Maduro held a referendum to annex Essequibo, which 95 percent of voters supported, albeit amid notably low voter turnout. The timing of this vote is important, given ExxonMobil’s discovery of massive oil deposits in 2015. Raúl Gallegos, the associate director of the political consulting firm Control Risks, argues that the Venezuelan government, military, and investigative police have been targeting all those who oppose Maduro’s claim to Essequibo. In December 2023, the Venezuelan government ordered the arrest of fifteen opposition leaders for allegedly accepting money from ExxonMobil in an attempt to sabotage his referendum. While the government has yet to present evidence to support its claims, opposition leaders have been charged with treason, conspiracy, money laundering, and criminal association. Critics argue that these bogus charges are, in fact, linked to the opposition’s resistance to Maduro’s attempted land grabs and their efforts to protect Guyana’s ecological sovereignty.
Similarly, in February 2024, Maduro claimed the local office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had been used by the international community to criticize the country. He was excoriated by the UN agency when human rights activist Rocio San Miguel was illegally detained by the Venezuelan police force and accused of conspiring to assassinate him in an American-backed coup attempt. Rights activists, journalists, and soldiers have been implicated in the assassination plan. Miguel, the founder of Citizen Control, had been investigating the disappearance and death of citizens by Maduro’s security forces and had damning evidence of the military’s involvement in illegal mining operations.
The charges laid against the opposition leaders and Miguel’s detainment add flesh to the theoretical bones of an ecopoliticide framework, suggesting how the oppression of environmental defenders is part of an elaborate system that silences those who try to protect land and resources. Environmental defenders’ activities are often labeled as unpatriotic as evidenced by Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, who accused these defenders of undermining democratic Venezuelan institutions.
Journalists in Guyana
On the other side of the border, Exxon Mobil’s discovery of oil has prompted opposing political parties to voice grave concerns about how the recently oil-rich nation will pursue development projects. In turn, Guyana’s ranking in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index fell from thirty-four to sixty between 2022 and 2023. In March 2023, President Mohamed Irfaan Ali of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic held a press conference during which reporters were heckled and verbally intimidated after asking questions about energy policies and accountability in the oil and gas sector. The Coalition for Women in Journalism (CFWIJ) has documented cases of women being threatened and intimidated by Ali’s supporters: Tamica Garnett, a reporter for The Guyana Chronicle, was threatened when she tried to interview a politician about a local government election, while Nazima Raghubir, the first woman to become president of the Guyana Press Association (GPA), was victim to cyberbullying and personal attacks on state-controlled media and Facebook pages. For Raghubir, the recent discovery of oil has placed tremendous restrictions on freedom of the press in Guyana, and as a result of inadequate access to information laws, women journalists are disproportionately impacted by various forms of violence in the media ecosystem.
Mendes-Franco (2023) reports that critiques of resource extraction in Guyana have resulted in increased death threats and other forms of intimidation against female journalists for speaking out against mining, fossil fuel extraction, and sexual violence. In July 2023, Guyana issued a statement supporting environmental activists and journalists, which was eventually endorsed by climate justice movements such as 350.org and Instituto Climainfo. Entitled “Touch One, Touch All,” the statement condemns any acts to silence activists.
Conclusion: Policy Implications
The International Criminal Court has deliberated on the idea of adding ecocide to the Rome Statute since its inception. Despite recent progress on the European front toward formally outlawing ecocide, this shift has yet to occur on an international scale. Ecopoliticide as a crime, which is a more precise conceptualization aimed at protecting the human security of environmental defenders, may be a more easily accepted innovation. Since many cases of murder related to environmentalism are overlooked by national authorities, regional and international tribunals might be the more appropriate legal venues for prosecution. Governments have an obligation not only to protect environmental activists within their own borders but also to ensure that nationally based corporations are not encouraging or facilitating this violence abroad. In the case of Venezuela and Guyana, the actions of both governments, as well as Exxon Mobil, should be under tight scrutiny.
During the Third Conference of the Parties (COP3) to the Escazú Agreement in April 2024, a new action plan was proposed by Latin American and Caribbean countries to protect environmental defenders. State parties, civil society organizations, activists, and indigenous environmental defenders conferred on strategic measures for countries to uphold Article 9 of the Escazú Agreement, urging states to recognize and protect the rights of environmental defenders. While sixteen countries have ratified the Escazú Agreement, much more work needs to be done to enshrine the rights of these groups by way of capacity-building and cooperation for national implementation; knowledge creation on the nexus between environmental/human security; and ongoing evaluations of progress in these areas.
Our most poignant concern is that ecopoliticide becomes normalized as part of the business of resource-intensive development. In the United States and Canada, militarized responses to indigenous people defending land from pipeline construction have become so routine that the media barely flinched when protestors of the Dakota Access in Standing Rock, North Dakota, were sprayed with fire hoses in sub-zero temperatures in late November 2016. Similarly, it is doubtful that many consumers are aware of the price paid by environmental defenders like Homero Gómez González, who was killed for defending a monarch butterfly habitat from cartel-driven avocado and illegal timber operations in Mexico in 2020. More work must shed light on this form of violence and its many human consequences. Courageous human lives cannot be reduced to discarded externalities of economic growth.
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Delon Alain Omrow
Délon Alain Omrow is a professor and Postdoctoral Fellow at Centennial College and Ontario Tech University, respectively. His research and teaching focus is on eco-violence, green criminology, and racialized ecologies; debt-for-nature swaps; and the androcentric and anthropocentric symbiosis of trauma on Indigenous bodies and land. He has published in many academic journals, including The Journal of Philosophy and Culture, Nature Sustainability, the Journal of Media and Communication Studies, and the European Journal of Research in Social Sciences. With P. Stoett, Omrow edited Ecoviolence Studies: Human Exploitation and Environmental Crime (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).
Peter Stoett
Peter Stoett is the Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University, Canada. He has worked extensively with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and other organizations. He currently holds a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for his work “Transnational Environmental Crime, Human Security, and Biosecurity.” His recent books include Representations and Rights of the Environment (with S. Lamalle; Cambridge University Press, 2023); Spheres of Transnational Ecoviolence: Environmental Crime, Human Security, and Justice (with D. Omrow; Palgrave MacMillan, 2021); and Global Ecopolitics: Crisis, Governance, and Justice (University of Toronto Press, 2019).
Image Credit: Ecologist
