This story is published in partnership with Mutante and El Espectador. It was supported by the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in Latin America. The panic button hanging around Marcos’ neck evokes the death threat that pulled him out of the Mexican mountain forests of the Sierra de Manantlán and dragged him to the outskirts of Guadalajara. After years of intimidation, he fled his hometown after the body of his 17-year-old son was found lying on the side of a road. The boy was killed, the lawyers on the case say, because, like his father, he opposed the activities of the Peña Colorada mine, which since 1975 has been squeezing the Sierra in search of iron. Over the decades, the iron mine, Mexico’s largest, has depleted the region’s water reserves, deforested its hills, polluted its air, and created divisions in the community. At the end of each day, after wandering a city with walls, monuments, and kiosks covered with the faces of missing people, Marcos, who is part of the Indigenous Nahua peoples, takes off his panic button, a direct line to the local police. He rarely sleeps.
“My head pounds,” Marcos, whose real name Grist has decided to withhold due to recent death threats against him, said. He thinks of his wife, still at their farm in Ayotitlán, of the fallen fences, of the corn that nobody takes to town, of the coffee beans that rot because there is no one to pluck them, of his remaining children, of the cars that menacingly circle their house. The memory evoked by the device on his bedside table cannot be removed. It is a noose around the neck of a man who feels he’s been sentenced. Missing person posters line a street in Guadalajara, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, in 2022. Ulises Ruiz / AFP via Getty Images More than 13 defenders — mostly Indigenous — of the Sierra de Manantlán have been murdered since 1986, according to the nonprofit organization Tskini, which works with Marcos’ community to defend their lands and people. For centuries, the region’s residents have been massacred and disappeared for demanding their right to inhabit their ancestral lands. In recent decades, this task has gotten harder, as extractive industries plundered the mountains.
According to a report released this month from the watchdog group Global Witness, more than two-thirds of the 18 activists killed in Mexico last year were Indigenous, opposed to mining operations along the Jalisco-Colima-Michoacán Pacific coast, where the Sierra de Manantlán is located. The report named Latin America the deadliest region for environmental activists, accounting for 85 percent of the 196 land defenders murdered globally in 2023. But while public discourse and policy have focused on addressing the most egregious cases of violence against environmental activists — such as assassinations, threats, or forced disappearances — little to no attention has been paid to the invisible traumas and mental health impacts experienced by those who defend the lives of rivers, mountains, ecosystems, animals, and the communities that live within their bounds.
“Around the world, those who oppose the abuse of their homes and lands are met with violence and intimidation,” the Global Witness report reads. “Yet, the full scope of these attacks remains hidden.” Latin America’s environmental activists live amid a constant threat of violence that permeates their days and bodies and that, like polluted air, tears their insides apart. An environmental defender in Honduras holds a plastic shell shot at close range toward activists with the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations as they protested the Agua Zarca Dam. Giles Clarke via Getty Images Leaders experience…
