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assassination

The Goldman Murders

From Seattle

Environmental activism in Latin America very frequently pits indigenous local leaders against rapacious companies backed by foreign money and the full military weight of the state. As IB’s Brian Hagenbuch writes here, the separate murders of two recent winners of the prestigious Goldman Prize over the past year, in Mexico and Honduras, threw a spotlight on a much larger pattern of violence and intimidation that claimed dozens of lives in the region.

Mark Baumer’s final blog post on January 21, 2017 was morbidly prophetic.

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The Man Who Chose the Forest, and Died For It

From Etiqueta Negra

One day, Peruvian electrician Edwin Chota abruptly abandoned the life of the city, and the various children he had failed to raise, for the jungle and for an indigenous tribe whom he adopted as his own. For over a decade he lived under death threats for denouncing illegal logging on his lands. His pleas for protection were ignored. In the end, the timber traffickers murdered him.

Those who knew him said that Edwin Chota had a wide, exaggerated and contagious smile, with a prominent gap where a front tooth was missing.

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