"The Death Squads Hunting Environmental Defenders", 10 July 2024

Before the day’s light had begun to dim, Brandon Lee picked up his phone and texted Sister Genny. “Even until now,” he told the nun, “I feel like I’m being watched.”...

In July 2019, Brandon Lee was confronted by four people who said they represented the 54th Infantry Battalion of the Philippine Armed Forces. A week later, he was shot in his backyard.…

Lee, a Chinese-American activist from the San Francisco Bay Area, had called the Cordillera home for nearly a decade…

It was also where he became involved with the Ifugao Peasant Movement (IPM), an alliance of groups organizing local farmers and indigenous people against corporations that occupied and stripped resources from their ancestral land...

In Ifugao, that had already meant the killing of two indigenous IPM leaders in four years: William Bugatti in 2014 and Ricardo Mayumi in 2018.…

Lee and IPM began organizing against a newly contracted dam project, the Alimit Hydropower Complex, which would straddle the Ibulao and Alimit rivers. The project is owned and operated by SN Aboitiz Power — a partnership between a Norwegian energy company and Aboitiz Power...

The company was made aware of the attacks on Mayumi and Lee through news reports, stating, ​“SN Aboitiz Power deplores any form of violence and harassment.”

The state, too, is frequently complicit — particularly in countries that label environmental defenders as “terrorists,” which casts extrajudicial killings as matters of national security…

In These Times tracked violence against environmental defenders from 2014 to 2024 in 10 hotspot countries.

We collected data from public sources to conservatively identify 573 killings of environmental activists. Of that number, close to half involved the state.…

The Philippines is considered the most dangerous country for environmental defenders in Asia.…

A very conservative assessment suggests evidence of state involvement in 109 of 210 such killings in the Philippines in the past decade — more than half. …