Madre Tierra: Indigenous Environmental Defenders in Latin America Are Fighting For Their Land

When a megaproject is established on cleared-out land, the government collects taxes, corporations profit from resource extraction—timber, precious metals, hydroelectric energy, and industrially produced goods—and cartels profit from protection rackets that extort payments from those same companies. In many cases, small indigenous communities are the only ones fighting these powerfully aligned forces to defend the natural world.

Doing so can come with challenges. In January 2023, on a highway outside Ostula, a white Honda car was found riddled with bullet holes; the bodies of its two passengers, the anti-mining activists Ricardo Lagunes and Antonio Díaz, were missing. Their faces still appear on posters demanding their safe return. The Jalisco Cartel was operating in the area where they disappeared, near an iron mine. “My father fought for social justice all his life, and the government tells me it is working to get him back, but I don’t see any sign of that,” Keyvan Díaz, Antonio’s son, said. “No one has even been prosecuted for kidnapping him.”