States have murdered environmental activists to seize minority lands and resources

Evidence

“Among the recent cases of environmental injustice and human rights violations in the Third World are: the murder of Wilson Pinheiro and Francisco ‘Chico’ Mendes in the Amazon rain forest, the massacre of Father Nery Lito Satur and several others in the Philippines, and the public hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) in November 1995 in Nigeria. The subsequent detention, torture, and repression of other members of MOSOP are among the most compelling cases of environmental and civil rights transgression in developing nations monitored by Human Rights Watch, Natural Resources Defense Council, Amnesty International, and other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). There have been several other cases of government agents especially in the Third World, adopting a policy of systematic genocide against members of minority groups in order to appropriate their lands and natural resources.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 871

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s accumulated theme of extractive violence against Indigenous minorities as a colonial pattern (Things Fall Apart’s land seizures).
• SEED: A possible essay angle: the industrialized-necropolitics framing of who gets to die for resource extraction — the Sierra Gorda and the ‘genocide for appropriation’ pattern as a definition of ecocide.
• SHARE: The Texaco-Ecuador detail and the ‘banned in home country, sold in Third World’ list (pharmaceuticals, pesticides, baby formulas) is exactly the sort of fact one specific activist-acquaintance would want.