Indigenous environmental activist Isidro Baldenegro L\u00f3pez. 2005 Goldman Prize ceremony. All rights reserved.<\/i><\/p>\n
Isidro Baldenegro L\u00f3pez\u00a0was shot dead on January 15 in the Coloradas
\nde la Virgen community in the Guadalupe and Calvo municipality of Chihuahua
\nstate. The murder quickly drew attention to collusion between drug trafficking
\ncartels and the illegal timber industry, which L\u00f3pez was known for speaking out
\nagainst.<\/p>\n
"Tribal figures [cacicazgos] involved with the illegal timber trade
\nand organized crime are the material and intellectual authors" of the
\ncrime, a human rights activist told BBC Mundo under condition
\nof anonymity as a safety measure.<\/p>\n
For years, criminal groups have used illegal logging in the region as a
\nmeans of laundering the dirty money obtained from marijuana and opium poppy
\ncultivation. According to the Proceso correspondant Patricia Mayorga, the
\nillegal trade is not only used to generate profit from the wood sales but also
\nto build houses for those who control the plantations and the drug trafficking,
\nreported La Sierra.<\/p>\n
L\u00f3pez attempted to defend the Sierra Tarahumara for years. But the area
\nwhere the states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua converge is one of the main
\nmarijuana and poppy producing regions in Mexico. This has created fertile
\nground for the illegal timber trade, as well as
\ngrowing violence and corruption in the area.<\/p>\n
The murder of\u00a0Baldenegro L\u00f3pez is the latest illustration of the
\nuphill struggle for the protection of the Mexican environment, which has been
\nchallenged by the illegal extraction of resources and criminal groups operating
\nin the region.<\/p>\n
One of the few success stories for environmental activism in Mexico took place in 2011 in Cher\u00e1n,
\na town of 20,000 inhabitants in the state of Michoac\u00e1n. Tired of being harassed
\nand abused by criminal groups from the illegal timber and drug trades, the town
\ntook up arms to defend their land. But although the violence has since
\nsubsided, the community leaders that led movement are still under threat.<\/p>\n
L\u00f3pez' path followed that of his father, who was murdered in 1986 by
\ncriminals involved in illegal logging. L\u00f3pez was threatened and persecuted a
\nnumber of times, and was even detained fifteen months on marijuana possession
\ncharges that were never proven.<\/p>\n
Despite the recognition from international organizations that his
\nenvironmental activism brought him — L\u00f3pez received the Goldman Prize in 2005 — the
\nactivist's life ended brutally. Just like Berta C\u00e1ceres, the Honduran
\nenvironmental activist who was murdered in March 2016,
\nL\u00f3pez has become a symbol of the frontal collision between environmental
\nactivism and organized crime.<\/p>\n
In 2015, 66 percent of the environmental activists killed worldwide were
\nmurdered in Latin America, according to Global Witness. Brazil is particularly affected by this
\nissue; an estimated 80 percent of its timber trade is illegal and the country
\naccounts for 25 percent of the illicit trade worldwide worth $30 billion. Just
\nas in Mexico, this creates a strong
\ncriminal incentive for illegal loggers to move into rural and poor communities.<\/p>\n
According to that same non-governmental organization, there were 150
\nmurders of Brazilian activists since 2012, making the country the most dangerous in the world for such
\nadvocates. The most recent case was that of Luis Alberto Ara\u00fajo; the government
\nofficial's murder in the state of Par\u00e1 in 2016 showed that even prominent
\nfigures are vulnerable to such threats, not only in the Amazon but across the
\nregion.<\/p>\n
This article was published previously by InsightCrime.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Indigenous environmental activist Isidro Baldenegro L\u00f3pez. 2005 Goldman Prize ceremony. All rights reserved. Isidro Baldenegro L\u00f3pez\u00a0was shot dead on January 15 in the Coloradas de la Virgen community in the Guadalupe and Calvo municipality of Chihuahua state. The murder quickly drew attention to collusion between drug trafficking cartels and the illegal timber industry, which L\u00f3pez…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}