‘Defenders of Nature’ – a Comparative Study on Indigenous Women’s Struggle for Ecological Justice in Mexico and Columbia

The current climate crisis not only poses a risk to the planet's livelihood, but also threatens those particularly committed to environmental protection and ecological justice. For example, the latest Global Witness report reveals that 177 murders of environmental activists were committed worldwide in 2022. These murders occurred exclusively in the Global South, primarily in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, with 36% of the victims being members of Indigenous groups and nations. Although ‘only’ 11% of the victims were women, they are doubly at risk due to their commitment to ecological justice and their gender.

This presentation project aims to discuss cases of ‘defenders of nature’ – Indigenous, Black, and peasant women environmental activists – in Latin America, who face racialised, colonial, and gender-specific persecution and violence through a comparative study in Mexico and Columbia. Building on critical globalisation, development, and global inequality studies, we will present a specific case study in each country, where infrastructural, development, and neoextractivist projects appropriate territories of Indigenous, Black, and peasant communities. To address the gendered, colonial, and racialised dimensions of these processes of dispossession and ‘green colonialism’, we will draw on decolonial and feminist theory from Latin America, developed in conversation with Indigenous cosmology. Particularly, the cuerpo-territorio approach of Indigenous Guatemalan feminist Lorena Cabnal allows us to describe how colonisation and ongoing dispossession negatively impact both the territories and the bodies of Indigenous women.

The comparative dimension of this presentation aims to foster a deeper understanding of the similarities in dispossession processes in the region and to highlight the protagonism of subalternised populations and communities – specifically Indigenous, Black, and peasant women – in the struggle for climate and ecological justice.