“‘They Are Killing Our Leaders One by One’”, 2^nd October 2019

…On September 27, 2019, Milgen Idán Soto Ávila was found murdered in the same location where INMARE, a private timber company that is currently prosecuting his relatives for protesting logging, has been at work.

Milgen was a…twenty-nine-year-old who was a constant presence in the Dignified Camp in Defense of Ancestral Territory, established by community members working with the Movimiento Amplio por la Dignidad y Justicia (or MADJ). The camp’s purpose is to stop the company from logging in the pine forest that has belonged to the Tolupán tribe since they were resettled to this area…

Milgen was the third person murdered in the same small community this year alone, and the ninth murdered in the conflict over logging since 2013…

Salomón and Samael Matute were murdered in February, but, “there has been no substantial advance in the investigation,” says Mario Iraheta, legal representative for the Tolupán community in the suit for protective measures and member of the legal team of MADJ. “The material authors [of the crime] continue to walk free in the area, without an order for their arrest.”

Instead, government resources are being used to criminalize the land defenders themselves, who are all beneficiaries of protective measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights…The charges against the Movimiento members is not an isolated case. Environmental defenders from Guapinol have been held in pre-trial detention for a month because of their opposition to a mining project.