August 2022. Indigenous ‘life and territory’ defenders from across Abya Yala ¹ gather in the Yat Wala (big house) of ACIN ² – to exchange experiences and knowledge on protection and care in the face of violence. During a tour of ACIN’s premises, we halt at the office of the organization’s Tu’thenas (councillors). One councillor seat is empty. Felipe, ACIN’s staff member who documents what the Indigenous Nasa from southwest Colombia call territorial disharmonies (killings, forced displacements and other human rights violations), explains that the seat “belongs to our Tu’thenas Miller. He was taken away from us in March this year”. In 2022, the names of both councillor Miller Correa and Kiwe Thegnas (Indigenous Guard) founder Albeiro Camayo were added to the ever-growing list of martyrs of ‘the process’, as insiders call the struggle for Indigenous autonomy. The assassinations struck at the process’s heart, but somehow simultaneously, its members experienced an atmosphere of relief and cautious optimism following the election of a ‘government of change’. Gustavo Petro’s campaign promise of ‘Total Peace’ would quickly give rise to peace dialogues with a plenitude of non-state armed groups, including with EMC ³ , the FARC ⁴ dissident group laying claim to North Cauca and currently responsible for the brunt of the violence aimed at destroying the Indigenous movement.

Ever since I spent the pandemic lockdown living with an Indigenous family in North Cauca, my position has been split between collaborative ethnographic fieldwork and on-the-ground accompaniment of ‘the process’ as a PhD researcher interested in protection and care strategies; providing training for NGO and state practitioners on environmental human rights across Latin America; case work in Panama and Uganda for a Dutch environmental justice NGO; and freelance assignments for private sector actors HRIE’s and scoping fieldwork in complex environments. I do not neatly belong to any of these spaces, but continuously moving between them has allowed me to develop a unique perspective on how to give shape to protection for defenders in violent and/or repressive contexts. Scant academic research has been done on the protection of defenders, studies focussing on international law (Saura-Freixes, 2022; Oral, 2024), NGO strategies (Grant and Le Billon, 2021) or state-led protection mechanisms (Wesche, 2022). The discussion on policy and governance frameworks in support of land and environmental defenders needs to integrate the knowledge and lived experiences of defenders themselves.

Flash forward from the 2022 encounter to Christmas 2024, I find myself wielding a spade and moving earth. I am at another siembra (funeral), helping to return the body of the murdered Indigenous Guard Alexander Pilque to Uma Kiwe (Mother Earth). The optimism felt amongst the Nasa in 2022 had, by now, vaporised into thin air, and the scenario looks increasingly disheartening despite Petro’s government extending legal protections for EHRD’s ⁵ (Krause et al., 2025). The ceasefire with EMC ended abruptly in April 2024, after combatants belonging to the Dagoberto Ramos Front shot the Indigenous Guard Carmelina Yule in the head for trying to stop a teenage boy from being recruited and trafficked away. Since 2022, over 500 Indigenous children, sometimes as young as 11 years old, have been recruited in North Cauca alone, according to ACIN’s internal database ⁶ . As expressed bluntly by Rosalba Velasco, the woman Alexander was assigned to protect through a UNP (National Protection Unit) scheme, “our children and youth are groomed, trafficked away, and once they’re inside, there is no way out. They are indoctrinated. And when they return, they kill their own elders and [Indigenous] authorities” ⁷ .

On top of the escalating violence on the ground, dark political clouds are gathering. Colombia’s first left-wing government has largely failed to deliver. Anonymous, upvoted comments on far-right social media spaces provide a warning of what may lay ahead in a country with a long history of state-sanctioned illegal violence and in a world where genocidal action once again takes place with impunity. Posts like “we need social cleansing NOW, like we had in the early 2000’s”; “when we get rid of the indians, we get rid of the guerrilla”; and “if there is any group that deserves genocide it is this band of murderers, mafias, thieves, little girl rapists” represent just a small selection of the hate speech I continue to encounter in online spaces. Colombia, not escaping a wider trend, stands at risk of falling prey to the predations of violent and racist authoritarianism. Indigenous defenders worldwide are–and will be, for the foreseeable future–amongst those who receive the heaviest blows, as Global Witness (2025) is showing year after year.

To bring their own knowledge on protection to the forefront, I will return to the 2022 minga (collective work) of Indigenous life and territory defenders with participants from the Nasa, Wayuú and Bari (Colombia), Mazehual (Mexico), Maya Ch’orti’ (Guatemala), Lenca (Honduras), Rama (Nicaragua), Wampís and Awajún (Peru), and Guaraní (Paraguay) peoples, co-organized between ACIN and myself as part of a collaborative research process. After gathering at ACIN’s Yat Wala, the group departs to Gualanday, an estate recuperated from a settler-landowner and now converted into an Indigenous Guard training site. Laurencio, ACIN’s Defense of Life staff member with a gift for the spiritual and for plant-based medicine, awaits us with a bucket of water containing an herbal mixture he prepared in advance. We’re all getting sprinkled to be cleansed from the sucio (negative energy) before we may proceed. During the week, we will be alternating between brainstorm activities with sheets, post its and markers, and group discussions around the fireplace. Their experiences are manifold ⁸ .

Some of the participating defenders, such as Nicaragua’s Becky McCray, denounce the influx of armed settlers into their ancestral territories. Others are resisting hydroelectric projects or monocrops. Others still are dealing with gold mining–both industrial mines and the illegal miners that often follow in their wake. Illicit use crops - coca and marihuana - are the key substances at play in the active Colombian conflict zones of Cauca and Catatumbo. But the similarities transcend the differences: entwinement between the institutional and the criminal. State indifference or participation. Territorial/environmental degradation undermining traditional livelihoods. “The exploitation of the communities”, as pointed out by Berta Zuñiga from Honduras: the utilization of human beings as a disposable resource, used for manual labour and for the repression of their own people. Intra-communal ontological and identitarian rupture and erasure, often along generational lines, undermining Indigenous autonomy in the present and for generations to come. Many of the participants themselves have been stigmatized, criminalized, displaced, or have lost close family members and friends to deadly violence. In the words of late Jakeline Romero Epiayú, “we all carry a backpack. A backpack of feelings, of suffering, weights that we carry”.

We discussed many topics, beginning with the role of the state, where we found that even as authoritarian governments pose the greater threat, progressive governments have traps of their own, such as the co-optation of leaders and the creation of dependency through monetary transfers. Safeguarding Indigenous autonomy is paramount. (Ex) police and military are rejected for protection duties: following pressure from the Indigenous movement, Colombia’s National Protection Unit is unique as it now matches women defenders to women bodyguards and Indigenous defenders to Indigenous bodyguards. Katerine Romero Ipiayú: “protection schemes without a women’s lens and without an Indigenous lens are destined to fail”. But states all fail to implement or support collective protection initiatives. Collective protection should address the root causes of violence, and therefore requires supporting alternatives to the hegemonic economic model based on the exploitation of Indigenous territories and bodies.

Regarding the role of international solidarity, we found that solidarity initiatives need to include and/or upscale their support for defenders’ emotional and psycho-social wellbeing. This is a dimension that defenders themselves often overlook, but ultimately necessary to keep up under sustained periods of stress and trauma. Permanent relocation (e.g., seeking refugee status abroad) is unwanted: a last resort option for some but rejected altogether by others. Options that require support are shelters/safehouses and temporary rest and respite programs abroad. Indigenous movement members from Cauca can count on longstanding solidarity from the Basque government in this regard. ⁹ Furthermore, there is a strong desire to strengthen horizontal solidarity across different contexts of territorial defence, including bridging the communications gap between Indigenous struggles in Abya Yala and Turtle Island. ¹⁰

Much of our discussion centred around self-organized collective protection, where the collective is understood as a whole: the human beings that constitute an Indigenous people; their institutions of self-government; the beings of nature, including the spirits; the territory that houses people and beings; and the relationships between all these. Collective protection is not only about practical organization, such as having support networks in place, the swift flow of information, or the application of restorative Indigenous law–but it also very much entails a process of collective identity building (also see Chaves et al., 2018). Strengthening social cohesion shields communities from the risk of internal divisions which can, and will be, exploited.

On self-care and wellbeing, we found that even though specific practices vary from Nation to Nation, spirituality, for example, by staying attuned to one’s dreams and to the signs given by nature, as well as orientation by the elders, helps ‘sharpen the senses’ to identify risks, and helps maintain the willpower to continue during periods of strain. In the words of a Barí defender: “to safeguard our people, we sit with our elders to potentialize us from the spiritual side. And we keep our bow, symbol of our people, with us always”. In addition, the defenders recognized that assuming leadership roles in community struggles can be a lonely endeavour. To prevent isolation, defenders highlight the importance of participation in their community’s cultural life, such as its rituals and festivals. Revitalizing those is a form of collective protection on its own.

Women defenders do not only face threats from outside actors, but may also face them from within the movements they participate in. Agustina, from Perú, shares her experience that is readily recognized by the other women defenders: “to be an Indigenous woman is very difficult in political spaces and in the workspace (.) doors are closed before us because of gender discrimination”. The creation of women-only political spaces within social movements and organizations, working with men to change their attitudes and banning abusive men from leadership positions is key to promote inclusive change.

Eleven years after Bennett et al. (2015) argued that protection mechanisms often lack a holistic, gender sensitive approach, not much has changed. What Indigenous defenders need is a holistic approach to protection, which includes, crucially, support for their own initiatives for (collective) protection and care to flourish. But getting there requires the bridging of worlds, and that requires an attitude shift across a broad spectrum of actors.

Why are Indigenous defenders at heightened risk worldwide (Le Billon and Lujala, 2020), including in countries considered safe and adhering the rule of law such as Costa Rica (Sylvester and Clark, 2025)? Over the past decade, I have dealt with private sector E&S officers, Latin American judges and public prosecutors, European foreign affairs staff, and DFI representatives and their complaint mechanisms. In the worst of cases, they reproduce outright erroneous (“human rights are not legally binding”) ¹¹ or colonial/racist attitudes (“they’re sitting on all that wealth but do not harness it … do not they want to buy new clothes once in a while?“; “that community is not really Indigenous because they no longer speak the dialect!“; “they are surely manipulated by communist militants!“) ¹² . And oftentimes, they are simply ignorant of Indigenous life worlds. The latter is ignorance born out of privilege–not knowing what it means to have to face on a daily basis, to borrow an apt term wielded by W.E.B. Du Bois over a century ago (Itzigsohn and Brown, 2015), societal contempt on the grounds of one’s ethnic/racial identity, not knowing what it means to be threatened or displaced, or to have to bury one’s loved ones whose lives were ended prematurely and violently by state, private or criminal actors.

There is a fuzzy line between privileged ignorance and reproducing structural (environmental) racism. The E&S consultant who does not understand heightened due diligence measures such as organizing discreet meetings at secure locations with project-affected people may not hear dissenting voices. Development bank complaints offices may not receive valid complaints when they cannot guarantee anonymity. Judges and prosecutors ignorant of Indigenous rights or Indigenous justice systems may end up criminalizing defenders. These actors all write reports and make decisions that carry power, possibly making the difference between the protection or destruction of livelihoods, between freedom or imprisonment, and between life or death. If we want to protect defenders, we need to learn to listen to them first.