The latest tally from Global Witness is a grim ledger. In 2024, at least 146 people were killed or disappeared while defending land, water and forests. That brings the total to at least 2,253 deaths and disappearances since 2012, a steady toll that turns local acts of stewardship into mortal hazards. The organization’s report reads less like an activist’s briefing than a casualty list from a slow-moving war.

Latin America remains the deadliest region. Of the 117 killings documented there last year, 48 took place in Colombia, which has led the world in such murders for three years running. Guatemala recorded 20 deaths, Mexico counted at least 18, Brazil 12, and the Philippines seven. Four people—one each in Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines—vanished without a trace. Around a third of those attacked were Indigenous, though Indigenous peoples make up only about 6% of the global population.

Behind the numbers are lives abruptly cut short or left in limbo. Julia Chuñil, a 72-year-old Mapuche leader from southern Chile, spent years fighting to secure her community’s ancestral land rights. She disappeared last November after setting out from her cabin in the Valdivian forest; her dog returned, but she did not. Her family has faced harassment and suspicion even as they search for answers. Julia’s absence now hangs over a community whose forests are being eaten away by plantations and whose defenders feel unprotected by the state.

Most cases were tied to land or land reform, with mining, logging, and agribusiness featured prominently. Organized crime was the leading identified perpetrator, followed by private military forces and hired gunmen. Yet the report also notes a rise in non-lethal tools of repression. Across democracies as well as autocracies, governments are passing sweeping laws, bringing terrorism or tax charges, and handing down harsh sentences to environmental protesters. Such criminalization may not leave bodies, but it chills dissent and isolates communities.

Global Witness argues that these attacks are symptoms of deeper systems: weak legal protections for land rights, impunity for assailants, and the tendency of governments and firms to treat defenders as obstacles rather than partners.

Laura Furones, the report’s lead author, calls it “unspeakable violence” against people “defending life itself.”

Without stronger safeguards and accountability, the group warns, violence will persist even as the planet’s ecological crisis deepens.

As Colombian defender Jani Silva puts it, most do not choose to be defenders; they become so because “our homes, land, communities and lives are under threat.”

For now, that choice too often carries a death sentence.

This article originally appeared in Mongabay.