Dating back to when the World Health Organization announced the coronavirus turned into a global pandemic, at least five defenders of the environment in Latin America have been murdered.

The violence, as activists in Colombia put it, has not been quarantined.

Gradually, the coronavirus is growing in transmission, and rural communities are concerned about how to deal with it, given their precarious medical services and limited state presence. For the families in the forests, violence is the last thing they need.

Violence Has Not Been Quarantined

According to statistics by the Pastoral Land Commission, Maranhão state has the greatest number of rural conflicts, with cases that reached 2,539 from 1990 to 2018.

Some of these crimes are cold cases. Since the start of the century, 49 people from the Guajajara people have been killed.

Last month, a respected leader of the Guajajara people was killed by aggressors with a shotgun. Murdered on the way home, Zezico Rodrigues Guajajara had just been chosen as director of the Commission of Indigenous Chiefs and Leaders in the Indigenous Territory of Araribóia.

Zezico was also among the 120 indigenous volunteers in the Guardians of the Forest, a group of historic promoters. They protect the forest and lands from illegal loggers that seek to exploit the territory.

Similarly, in Colombia, two Emberá indigenous people were killed in cold blood last March. Omar and Ernesto Guasiruma Nacabera were invited for a meeting, according to a report by Mongabay Latam. The assailants shot them as they were about 20 meters from the door. Two other family members were injured.

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Deforestation and Conservation of the Environment Can Influence Disease Emergence

Specialist in natural resource David Boyd said earlier this month that factors that raised the risk of future pandemics, and consequently more major human rights violations, included "deforestation, industrial agriculture, illegal wildlife trade, and climate change."

These are mostly done to expand agriculture and economy through developing large areas of land for livestock or industrial crops. These raw materials are used for exportation and trades in Latin American countries.

In an investigation conducted by Gustavo Faleiros for Infoamazonia and Diálogo Chino, the numbers of registered cattle have swelled by 22% in the Amazon forest in northern Brazil in as short as a decade. In a separate report, it was shown that exports of Brazilian beef account for over 65,000 hectares of deforestation annually.

Environmental degradation is one of the ways a new disease chain can form. The abrupt change in land use and the destruction of ecosystems increases the likelihood of the emergence of infectious diseases caused by zoonotic parasites, a study from the Johns Hopkins University concluded.

However, the solution to preventing another pandemic is simple to understand. It may be more challenging to do on a macro scale, nonetheless.

A team researching infectious diseases that are led by Bard College ecologist Felicia Keesing found in their study that biodiversity fundamentally functions to protect organisms, including humans, from diseases. They concluded that "Preserving biodiversity in these cases, and perhaps generally, may reduce the incidence of established pathogens."

The greatest protectors of natural resources like the biodiversity in Latin America are the defenders of the environment in local communities.

Protecting them, and their rights, by ensuring that conservationists continue to take care of the forests and lands, means protecting biodiversity as well, including ourselves from harm.