Six indigenous farmers were brutally killed in Peru by land traffickers trying to make way for a palm oil plantation, adding to the more than 120 environmental and land defenders who have been murdered around the world in 2017 alone.
“It was a night-time ambush. They bound them by their hands and feet, then they killed them and threw them in a river,” Robert Guimaraes, president of the local indigenous federation Feconau, told The Guardian.
“The police report says most of the men had shotgun wounds to the neck and at least one was found bound by the hands and feet. … An eyewitness told the police the victims were attacked by up to 40 armed men who had their faces covered,” said The Guardian.
Palm oil appears in more than half of the products on grocery store shelves, including processed foods and cosmetics, as Jocelyn Zuckerman lays out in FERN’s latest story, “The makeover,” which was co-produced with Vogue. The demand for palm oil has spurred mass deforestation and land grabs in tropical countries around the world. To read more about the death of activists trying to fight back, see Zuckerman’s story with FERN and The New Yorker, “The violent costs of the palm oil boom.”