The gendered criminalization of land defenders in Ecuador

Abstract

Shingre . . . These are just a few names out of the long list of environmental and land defenders that have been killed across Latin America over the last few years. Unfortunately, this list continues to grow, with new names added to it almost every week.The violence against land and environmental defenders, activists, and communities that oppose extractive activities is a soaring problem. 1 Worldwide, an average of four defenders died every week in the period 2014(Butt et al. 2019. These cases generally remain unresolved, as impunity prevails ( Maestro 2020 ). Global Witness (2020 ) reported that Latin America is the region where most murders are reported: of the 212 murders that occurred globally in 2019, 147 were in Latin America. This figure reflects widespread opposition to the large number of extractive projects in the region ( Le Billon & Lujala 2020 ;Temper et al. 2015 ), but also strong forms of activism and solidarity in Latin America that allow for better monitoring ( Global Witness 2019 ).The blatant murders of Latin American environmental defenders are, however, only a fraction of the violence they experience. Generally, these murders are embedded in multiple practices of "passive" violence against activists and leaders, most of which do not make it to the headlines (see Menton et al., this volume). This violence may consist of daily hostilities by public forces or private security guards, bullying, impediment of free mobilization, and destruction of crops, which may escalate to unruly arrests, militarization of communities, criminalization of dissent, sexual assaults, or threats of violence against family members.Our research focuses on the violence -widely understood -against environmental defenders in Ecuador, particularly its Amazon region. Here, the longstanding oil exploitation and the more recent expansion of large-scale mining have faced fierce resistance ( Sawyer 2004 ;van Teijlingen & Hogenboom 2016 ). Since the 1980s, Amazonian grassroots organizations and Indigenous and peasant communities have denounced the destructive effects of these activities on the environment, their territories, and their livelihoods. Although the violence

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