The murders this month of four men from a remote Asháninka community near Peru’s border with Brazil have sparked international condemnation, not least because they appear to fit a pattern of violence against Amazonian indigenous people who resist illegal logging and other incursions.

On Sept. 1, unknown assailants killed community leader Edwin Chota Valera and three other men—Leoncio Quincima Meléndez, Jorge Ríos Pérez and Francisco Pinedo—as they were making their way from their community, Saweto, on the Alto Tamayo River, to the neighboring Asháninka community of Apiwtxa, across the border in Brazil. The four men were walking at the time, on a journey that typically lasts two or three days and involves traveling both by boat and on foot.

By late this month, their bodies still had not been recovered from the lake where they apparently were thrown, according to Reyder Sebastián, president of the Association of Asháninka Communities of Masisea and Callería (Aconamac), the local indigenous organization that includes Saweto and six other communities. Sebastián blames illegal loggers, who he said had threatened Chota a number of times in recent years.

The four are among a growing number of such victims in the Amazon basin, where global hunger for natural resources such as hardwood, oil and minerals spurs conflicts between local communities and outsiders, including loggers, miners, ranchers and oil companies.

The danger is especially great along the heavily forested borders between Amazonian countries, where some of the last stands of valuable timber are located and where armed men transporting drugs also pose hazards.

“That border area between Peru and Brazil [where the Asháninka men were killed] is very isolated, remote and difficult to reach, and there is little government presence there,” says Francisco Estremadoyro of the nonprofit Peruvian group ProPurús, which has been helping the Asháninka people of Saweto gain formal title to their territory. “The wealth of resources and absence of the government attracts people who are involved in illegal businesses.”

In Brazil, 448 people were murdered in environmental and land conflicts between 2002 and 2013, according to Global Witness, a nonprofit human rights group. Honduras, a country with a population of just 8 million, saw killings of 109 people in such conflicts during that period. There have been 58 such killings in Peru, 52 in Colombia and 40 in Mexico, although Global Witness says its figures are probably low.

Logging incursions

Many conflicts involve illegal loggers. In August in Brazil’s Maranhão state, Ka’apor people reportedly drove loggers out of their territory when government officials failed to respond to their request for assistance.

In Brazil’s Acre state and Peru’s Madre de Dios region, nomadic groups have recently sought contact with outsiders, a move some experts say could be due to illegal loggers or drug traffickers encroaching on their territory.

And in Saweto, Chota had received death threats because of his efforts to drive illegal loggers out of two idle timber concessions that overlap the community’s land, Sebastián said. This month’s attack occurred just days after inspectors from Osinfor, the government’s forestry agency, had visited Saweto to investigate complaints made by Chota, who had requested protection for his community.

Just two Aconamac member communities hold title to their property, and one has only a small amount of land, Sebastián says. All seven are overlapped by timber concessions held by outsiders. But while the murders—reminiscent of the killing of Brazilian rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes across the border in Brazil in 1988—drew various pledges from the government after they made headlines, Sebastián is skeptical about the response.

“We want real, in-depth justice,” he says. That would include not only punishment of the murderers, but also land titles, suspension of timber concessions that overlap communities and sanctioning of government officials who allow loggers to transport illegal timber to sawmills. Remote indigenous communities also need better health care and schools, he says.

Interior Minister Daniel Urresti announced a police crackdown on illegal logging, but the problem goes beyond the loggers and trucks, says Julia Urrunaga, who heads the Peru office of the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency. Urrunaga’s agency published a report in 2012 documenting corruption and illegal practices in Peru’s timber industry.

Monitoring needed

Peru is pilot testing a computerized system for tracking the transportation of logs in real time, but Urrunaga and others say the system will not work without accurate, timely monitoring of concessions. Lack of such monitoring facilitates a black-market trade in documents that make illegally harvested timber appear legal. Sebastián says the problem is even more urgent because with commercial mahogany now scarce, loggers are taking any hardwood they can find.

Efforts to promote logging of “lesser-known” species to diversify the timber industry and relieve pressure on mahogany “has likely resulted in a whole set of new species that are now under pressure of economic depletion,” says Louis Putzel, a senior scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (Cifor) in Indonesia, who has studied the Peruvian timber trade. “New studies are needed to assess the degree to which species such as shihuahuaco (Dipteryx spp.), estoraque (Myroxylon balsamum), tornillo (Cedrelinga catenaeformis) and tahuarí (Tabebuia serratifolia) are already threatened,” he said in an e-mail.

Ultimately, protection of the forests and their defenders hinges on land rights, says Carlos Andrés Baquero, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia) in Bogotá, Colombia.

“Chota’s murder is not an isolated case,” Baquero says, noting that leaders of other Amazonian communities have been threatened or killed for pursuing legal title to communal lands. Although law enforcement is weak in the Amazon, having a land title gives communities greater legal backing to fight illegal activities in their areas, he says.