Madre Tierra: Indigenous Environmental Defenders in Latin America Are Fighting For Their Land
· Time
Along the Pacific Coast of Mexico, in the indigenous community of Santa María de Ostula in the state of Michoacán, the Sierra Mancira mountain range rises. Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who toppled the Aztecs, had mined these very mountains for gold five centuries earlier. Global mining companies covet the minerals buried here, and the indigenous Nahua community in Ostula has been forced to protect their forests.
Cartels have routinely launched drones carrying C-4 explosives at them from across the valley, according to El Chopo, a Nahua guard commander from Ostula. “We use anti-aircraft guns to defend our people, forests, and jaguars,” he said in May 2023, pointing at the sky to indicate the flight paths of the drones. “They bomb this base to get us out of here.”
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Although they are sometimes forced to defend themselves with arms, such communities have primarily relied on the law. For years, they have lobbied peacefully for legal reforms—and have often succeeded. The proof is in the statues. On paper, Latin America boasts some of the most progressive environmental protections in the world: Bolivian law recognizes nature as a “rights-bearing subject,” and Mexico’s constitution grants indigenous communities self-governance rights over their lands.
Yet such changes, though welcome, have not been enough. The rampant destruction of ecosystems and the killing of environmental defenders persists and accelerates despite such legal triumphs. From drone-patrolled skies above Mexican mountains to intentional forest fires and mercury-poisoned rivers in the Bolivian Amazon, even the most innovative environmental laws fail to protect critical ecosystems.
This pushes the burden on to local people—environmental defenders, many of whom belong to small indigenous communities, which collectively represent only 5% of the global population but hold rights over 36% of the world’s intact forest landscapes, according to recent academic studies.
By some estimates, indigenous peoples protect as much as 80% of the biodiversity that remains on earth. Untapped natural resources on indigenous lands are coveted by governments, companies, and criminal groups, placing these communities on the frontlines of the global environmental war—one in which these custodians of the land often find themselves at the losing end. As El Chopo, from Ostula, put it: “Our community is isolated and has to develop its own solutions.”
The environmental war in Latin America
Latin America has become the global environmental frontline. Of the more than 2,200 killings of environmental defenders between 2012 and 2024, according to the investigative nonprofit Global Witness, over 70% were perpetrated in this region. Mexico and Bolivia illustrate how vulnerable communities are innovating legally despite the relentless campaign of assassinations.
In Mexico, more than half of the land is legally and constitutionally protected as tierra comunal or tierra ejidal—lands held and governed collectively. The Mexican constitution grants indigenous communities broad powers over their land and people, which they recently used to win landmark federal cases and forge a new form of self-governance, or auto-gobierno.
The story in Bolivia is similar. The country has become a global beacon for environmental rights after implementing progressive laws such as the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, known as Law 071, and the Framework Law of Mother Earth and Integral Development to Live Well, known as Law 300, which were passed in 2010 and 2012, respectively.
Spurred by these legal wins, citizen movements in Bolivia, such as Nómadas, CONTIOCAP and Ríos de Pie have documented the illegal burning of forests, land incursions, and illegal mining affecting protected areas and indigenous territories. During catastrophic forest fires that devastated the country’s eastern lowlands, volunteer firefighter brigades mobilized themselves, often with scant equipment and little governmental protection. Civic movements such as these blend public mobilization, environmental monitoring, and legal advocacy to expose environmental crimes.
Yet in both Bolivia and Mexico, as in so many other countries, the failure to enforce environmental law is often rooted in institutional corruption, leaving brave communities and precious ecosystems vulnerable to violent attacks.
There will be blood
Take Mexico. In Crescencio Morales, a self-governing town in Michoacán state, where national authorities are unable to enforce existing environmental laws, the burden to do so often falls to locals. The president of the town’s local council, Silvestre Chavez, drives around his community personally paying its fighters, many of whom carry powerful AR-15 rifles. “Cartel fighters are camped only three kilometers outside our town gates,” Chavez said. “But our fighters have secured the forests around us.”
It is an all too common state of affairs in the large swaths of Mexico that lie outside the government’s control. Self-governance allows communities to receive their budgets directly from state governments and avoid corrupt intermediaries. Communities such as Crescencio Morales have taken charge of their own security by forming Guardias Comunales, or Communal Guards, which sometimes provide security in the voids left by the government. These Communal Guards, answerable to locally elected assemblies, have restored peace and security to some of Mexico’s most cartel-ridden lands.
Communities have also repaired frayed social ties by investing their direct budgets to protect forests and rivers while building schools, kindergartens, and health centers. These innovations offer a model that could be replicated across other countries whose ecosystems and social fabrics are under threat, providing a legal foundation for environmental defense.
Each month, the Communal Guards of Crescencio Morales patrol the community’s borders to ensure that their oyamel fir trees, on whose branches the endangered Monarch butterfly spends its winters, stay safe. On one such patrol, dead butterflies carpeted the forest floor, frozen and hurt by a sudden hailstorm the previous day. A guard picked up a butterfly. The warmth of his palm revived the butterfly; it stirred back to life and flew off.
When Mexican communities exercise their broad legal powers to push back against extractive corporations encroaching on their lands, they often find themselves under attack from cartels. In Santa María de Ostula, the powerful Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación has attacked indigenous communities seeking to deny mining companies access to land rich in iron and gold. Ostula fights back against Jalisco, but cartels have forced out other Mexican communities.
One reason this keeps happening: cartels can open up land for mining far more quickly and cheaply than the lengthy legal processes that require corporations to offer communities reparations and compensation, explains Ximena Santaolalla, a Mexican novelist and lawyer in ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. And this climate of violence can make investigating payments from private companies to cartels incredibly dangerous. In the past decade, Mexico has ranked among the world’s deadliest countries for both journalists and environmental defenders—recording high numbers of assassinations for each group.
“Cartels have turned into an army promoting capitalist interests,” said Romain Le Cours Grandmaison, a French researcher who studies violence and business in Mexico. “When the law doesn’t favor megaprojects, organized criminals are summoned, and the government does little to stop them.” A report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime in January found that criminal organizations have “professionalized the exploitation of resources by leveraging sophisticated networks of violence, document fraud and political corruption, often in concert with private sector actors.
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.”
Ostula’s population is just over one thousand, but it has been forced into defending its land and people from attacks by the Jalisco Cartel, whose leader, El Mencho, was killed by Mexican forces in February 2026, apparently only after significant pressure from the United States government over the cartel’s involvement in drug trafficking. Ostula remains under attack after El Mencho’s killing. Its appeals for help go largely unheard by national and international institutions ostensibly responsible for protecting ecosystems and preventing a global climate catastrophe, the signs of which are becoming increasingly impossible to ignore.
The apathy isn’t limited to Mexico alone. When fires rage across Bolivia’s Amazon, animals often run screaming until they collapse and die. Sloths lie splayed over charred earth, their fur burned off. Monkeys cling to trees that are turning to ash. Macaws fly through endless smoke with nowhere to land. Recent images from the Bolivian lowlands have shown jaguars, macaws, and monkeys fleeing walls of fire as the Amazon and Chiquitanía regions burn.
The fires this time
For the past decade, forest fires have spread with terrifying speed, consuming forests and adjacent ecosystems in Bolivia, sometimes in just a few days. In the fall of 2019, fires in Bolivian lowlands Bolivia destroyed an estimated 13.1 million acres, with half the destruction in high biodiversity areas. And the fires in the fall of 2024 were even more devastating, burning more than 24 million acres in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia, close to Brazil. What may appear from afar as natural disasters are often driven by a combination of policies promoting the expansion of agricultural frontiers into forests, climate change, and systematic, illegal land grabs.
Bolivia has become one of the fastest deforesting countries on earth. Global Forest Watch ranks Bolivia among the top three nations worldwide for tropical primary forest loss, and second globally in several recent years, relative to its forest size. For indigenous communities, the ecological consequences are existential: forests that sustain their cultures and livelihoods disappear, rivers are contaminated, wildlife vanishes, and smoke sometimes blankets villages for a month or more at a time.
To address these issues, Bolivian civil society has mobilized with remarkable courage. The young volunteer firefighter, Pablo “Pablito” Suárez, died after inhaling toxic smoke while battling fires without adequate protective equipment. Across Latin America, environmental defenders are forced to substitute for the state. They do so without the vast resources and coordination mechanisms necessary to protect themselves and their ecosystems.
Criminal networks exploit the crises. Fires can serve as gateways for criminal land-trafficking networks, illegal mining, and political actors who profit when protected Bolivian forests become commodities: land that can be bought and sold. Land-trafficking mafias invade protected areas, often indigenous territories and public lands, accompanied by armed groups. They slash and burn trees to clear the land. The land is then sold, leased, or legalized through corrupt administrative channels, transforming previously intact ecosystems into speculative assets.
Investigations by environmental journalists at Mongabay have documented how land traffickers illegally carve protected forests into parcels, sell them to ranchers, agricultural companies, and speculators, and create powerful financial incentives to start and sustain new forest fires. Where governments are absent, criminal networks that seize land and extractive industries flourish.
And there is gold. Illegal gold mining, particularly destructive for the environment and public health, has spread across Bolivia’s forests. Miners use mercury to separate gold from impurities, poisoning Amazonian waterways that sustain indigenous communities and endangered wildlife. Along these riverbanks, miners tear into the earth using heavy machinery, carving out riverbeds and diverting waterways. The forests bear scars like open veins where they have been sliced through.
Soaring global gold prices and weak governmental oversight have contributed to the rapid expansion of this illegal gold mining. Mining camps operate deep within protected areas, deploying heavy machinery and bringing in hundreds of workers. Public health researchers have raised the alarm about the impact of mercury poisoning among indigenous populations that depend on riverine fish as their primary food source.
The central lesson from Bolivia, Mexico, and the vast Latin American environmental frontline is this: legal reform and environmental activism, no matter how courageous or innovative, cannot substitute for the international and national institutions tasked with protecting communities and ecosystems. When governments fail to defend indigenous land rights and national reserves by failing to regulate extractive industries and prosecute criminals, ecosystems are left vulnerable to exploitation. Brilliantly crafted laws that are not enforced do not defend forests, rivers, mountains, or the brave people risking their lives daily to protect them.
Even as global and national environmental institutions fall short of their mandates to protect environmental defenders and their ecosystems, decentralized governance and protection mechanisms present important opportunities. Digital tools that enhance peer connectivity, tracking, and support in such communities—many of which are remote and lack infrastructure such as reliable cell phone networks—could go a long way toward improving the survival rates of environmental defenders and their ecosystems alike.
“We fight to defend the Madre Tierra (Mother Earth),” said El Chopo, the community commander fighting the drone war to protect a mountain in Ostula. “We should all be fighting together, and we are tired of being bombarded. This is not a life.”