The High Price of Privatized Security in the Amazon

When the state abdicates its primary duty to uphold law and order, private entities inevitably step into the void. In the remote hinterlands of Latin America, this basic rule of governance now carries a heavy body count. According to the latest annual report from Global Witness, 124 land and nature defenders were killed in 2025—a rate of one murder every three days.

While the total marks a numerical decline from 196 deaths in 2023 and 142 in 2024, the broader trends reflect institutional failure rather than genuine progress. Latin America remains the primary theater of violence, accounting for 85 percent of all recorded fatalities. Colombia topped the global ranking with 39 killings, followed by Brazil with 26 and Honduras with 12. In Asia, the Philippines led with 12 deaths, many occurring during state crackdowns. Since data collection began in 2012, total global casualties stand at 2,375—a figure resembling the losses of a low-intensity war.

Organized crime groups and professional hitmen were implicated in more than a third of last year's deaths. The underlying driver is straightforward market expansion: drug trafficking networks are systematically pushing deeper into remote territories, blending narcotics logistics with illegal logging and wildcat gold mining. In Peru’s Ucayali basin, coca production surged by 600 percent between 2019 and 2023. As syndicates open illegal trails through the forest, local police and municipal politicians are routinely paid off to look the other way.

Deprived of reliable state protection and facing a drop in international assistance—following the Trump administration’s decision to dismantle USAID programs that supported indigenous territorial stewardship—vulnerable communities are privatizing their security. Indigenous people and small-scale farmers made up almost three-quarters of those killed last year. In response, many are establishing local defense units. The Kakataibo Indigenous Guard in Peru, for example, expanded from a few dozen recruits in 2022 to over 150 volunteers across ten bases, despite having six of its leaders murdered since 2020.

Yet taking over the state's security mandate is a perilous venture. Seven indigenous guards were murdered in 2025, with at least five of those cases directly tied to criminal syndicates. Meanwhile, military crackdowns championed by rightwing governments tend to worsen the security landscape by driving cartels further into the borderlands of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. Western commentators may praise local conservation efforts, but on the frontier, defending property without state enforcement remains a lethal proposition.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com