The death squads hunting environmental defenders

Between 2012 and 2022, around the world, one environmental defender was killed every other day, according to international human rights group Global Witness. That’s nearly 2,000 peasants, farmers, fisherfolk and activists murdered for defending their land from some of the biggest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions — including mining, logging and agribusiness corporations — as well as hydropower projects, which have their own ruinous environmental impact.

Let whatever history remains note that we didn't go down without a fight. We saw the environmental destruction, we protested, we raised alarms, we acted and defended the planet with our lives.....

May God have mercy on the souls of these Gardeners and Shepherds, and may we never forget their on-going sacrifices.

While the State Department condemns such killings — and, in 2017, even formed an interagency working group to monitor and address violence against environmental defenders — in practice, the United States has almost never had to take accountability for the local killings of activists by the governments it supports.

But when a U.S. citizen like Brandon Lee is shot, the public begins following the path back to America to look for answers.

Climate change is coming for us all, and livable land is going to be harder and harder to come by. I've moved us somewhere that hopefully gives us a bit more time, but I'm not under any illusion that we'd get to stay as soon as the powerful want it. They don't need their own guns, my tax dollars pay for their military and their own police.

It's comforting: what's going to do is in isn't broad apathy or ignorance. It's just the greedy few, yet again.

This is why environment activists that are facing death squads need to get armed. Obviously the other side has more resources, but it's an uphill battle either way. Guns do act as a deterrent, and they make it easier to defend oneself. Pacifism obviously does not provide protection or deterrence. This is why there is a history of even pacifist activists being protected by armed members.

In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, Charles E. Cobb Jr., himself a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), tells the history of how the civil rights movement was girdled with armed protection. In the Deep South, rural African American communities had developed a long tradition of staving off murderous assaults with weapons; when the movement took root and began to deliver concrete benefits, it faced the same threat to physical survival. Klansmen and other white supremacists would surround movement bases in the night, assassinate activists, ambush marches and seek to drown the budding civil rights in blood. Too much was on the line for black communities to let that happen. Hence they produced stockpiled guns, refurbished movement bases – ‘freedom houses’ – into veritable fortifications, provided armed escorts for field secretaries from SNCC and CORE, organised armed caravans to and from mass meetings. Guns in hand, black people chased away Klansmen in the night, guarded picket lines from a distance, accompanied marches and voter registrations not in opposition to but in unison with the civil rights movement. Committed pacifists from the North tended to adapt to these realities. Even the reverend did: visiting Martin Luther King in his parsonage, soon after his home had been bombed, a journalist was about to sink into an armchair when he was alerted to a couple of loaded guns on it. ‘Just for self-defence,’ King explained.

• Andreas Malm, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline", 2021, 1st edition

The hidden nature of the killings and the entanglement of military, paramilitary and local police makes it hard enough to trace state complicity, let alone track them back to more powerful geopolitical actors — such as the neocolonial U.S. military apparatus that has long cleared the way for resource extraction, and the global corporate and financial interests that ultimately profit. Yet, in many states — including the Philippines and much of Latin America — the wars on terror and drugs under which these executions are carried out are extensions of U.S. hegemony and conducted with U.S. weapons and training.

While the State Department condemns such killings — and, in 2017, even formed an interagency working group to monitor and address violence against environmental defenders — in practice, the United States has almost never had to take accountability for the local killings of activists by the governments it supports.

This is an unbelievable take. Openly stating that the "neocolonial US military apparatus" is to blame for murders in the Philippines - not because any US entity actually did anything, but because it has "cleared the way for resource extraction and global corporate interests" - is absurd. As is the notion that the US needs to be held personally accountable for the murder of activists in countries it supports.

The Philippines is a democracy, not some banana republic propped up by the CIA. It's almost insultingly infantilizing to claim that the US should be held ultimately accountable.

I'm engaging with this specifically because the bulk of the article, in terms of word count, is a critique of the US's Leahy vetting proces, rather than a critique of the Philippines.