There Is an Epidemic of Assassinations Targeting Human Rights Defenders in Latin America

‘On October 18, human rights defenders José Ángel Flores and Silmer Dionisio were murdered after they left a meeting of peasant farmers in the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras. Both were organizers with the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), whose former president Johnny Rivas said “death squads chasing peasant families fighting for land rights” were behind the assassinations.
On September 18, indigenous environmental defender Máxima Acuña de Chaupe says she was attacked at her remote farm in the northern Andean highlands of Peru by private security under the employ of the Yanacocha mining company, a local subsidiary of the Denver-based Newmont Mining Corporation. Máxima has attracted international claim for her years-long resistance to the company’s campaign to transform her plot into the open-pit Conga gold and copper mine, and she says this latest incident is just one of many physical attacks she has endured.’
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