BOGOTÁ, September 17 — The bodies keep coming back to Cauca. In the southwestern Colombian department that has become the grim center of a global crisis, residents describe a landscape where defending a river, a forest or an ancestral plot can get you killed. Global Witness confirmed at least 124 land and environmental defenders were killed worldwide in 2025, and Colombia once again sits at the top of that list with 39 deaths — just under a third of all cases worldwide, according to the report’s lead author, Toby Hill.
The figure is lower than the two previous years, when 142 defenders were killed in 2024 and 196 in 2023. But Hill warned against reading the drop as progress.
“We need to be cautious about interpreting this indicator as an improvement,” he said, noting that killings may go unreported and are harder to investigate in repressive, increasingly authoritarian contexts that have expanded in recent years.
A pattern that has not changed since 2012
Latin America remains the deadliest region for activists and environmental defenders, accounting for 85% of confirmed cases. That pattern has not changed since Global Witness began publishing its reports in 2012. Colombia’s 39 killings represent a decline from 48 in 2024 and a historic 79 in 2023, but the country has remained on what the report describes as a tragic podium.
Almost half of those killed in Colombia were Indigenous, and 15 were smallholder farmers. Thirty-five of the 39 deaths were related to land conflicts, with signs of organized crime involvement in 17 cases and five defenders executed by hired gunmen.
Cauca is again the department with the most killings: 13, including four members of the Indigenous guard. Since 2012, 171 killings related to defending the environment and land have been documented in Cauca alone. Hill said Colombia is at the heart of cocaine trafficking and that the presence of organized crime is repeatedly associated with greater lethality in reprisals.
Brazil and Honduras see killings double
Brazil follows with 26 murders, double the 2024 figure, and Honduras recorded 12, also double its 2024 figure. Honduras once again holds the distinction of having the highest murder rate relative to its population. In the six countries with the highest number of cases — five of which are in the region — researchers were able to trace deaths linked to organized crime.
Land disputes were behind more than half of the deaths, 84 in total, followed by opposition to extractive projects: 11 were linked to mining, eight to logging and six to agribusiness. Nearly three-quarters of those killed were Indigenous people and smallholder farmers, and seven of the former were members of an Indigenous guard group.
Of the 124 killings verified, 109 were men, 14 were women and one was a non-binary person. Among the named victims: Cándido Esaú Román Pérez, a leader and protector of communal lands in Cihuatlán, in the state of Jalisco in Mexico, was killed in November 2025. In February 2025, Suyapa Guillén and her husband, José Luis Hernández, members of a peasant cooperative, were killed in Honduras’s Caribbean region.
Aida Damaris Flor Camayo, a member of the Indigenous guard in Cauca, Colombia, was killed over the past year, as was a Pataxó Indigenous person in the far south of Bahia, Brazil. The report, titled “Collective power: The struggle for protection for land and environmental defenders,” points to a region where the defense of land remains one of the most dangerous occupations.
What to watch next is whether the decline in verified killings reflects a real shift or simply a harder-to-document reality in countries where organized crime and land conflict continue to drive the violence.
