Issue 19 — The Death Squads Hunting Environmental Defenders
Issue 19 — The Death Squads Hunting Environmental Defenders
Around the world, government forces regularly attack environmental activists with impunity—and U.S. support.
Before the day’s light had begun to dim, Brandon Lee picked up his phone and texted Sister Genny. “Even until now,” he told the nun, “I feel like I’m being watched.”
It was Tuesday, August 6, 2019, and the habagat season was pulling tropical storms across the mountains of the Cordillera, the rural interior of the Philippine island of Luzon. In Lee’s home province of Ifugao, the threat of a deluge had passed, leaving behind leaden skies and the sticky heat of the wet season. For a week, after a fraught decision made with his wife, Bernice, Lee had hardly left their home in the municipality of Lagawe. He no longer went to work at the office down the road, no longer walked his niece and daughter to school, no longer went anywhere on foot.
As Lee texted Sister Genny, he reheated chicken and rice, sharing the meal with his 7-year-old daughter, Jesse Jane. At around 5:45 p.m., Lee stepped outside to feed his dogs. As he scraped meat from the leftover chicken bones, he heard a thunderous crack. His body crumpled. A deafening buzz filled his ears. Then Jesse was outside, screaming.
Until that day, Lee, a Chinese-American activist from the San Francisco Bay Area, had called the Cordillera home for nearly a decade. It was where he fell in love, married Bernice and started a family. It was also where he became involved with the Ifugao Peasant Movement (IPM), an alliance of groups organizing local farmers and indigenous people against corporations that occupied and stripped resources from their ancestral land.
The Philippines is among the world’s most mineral-rich countries. Since the passage of a 1995 law allowing 100% foreign ownership of land, the Philippine government has prioritized mining and development companies over its people and the environment. The Cordillera, with its undulating mountains, terraced rice fields and valley-carving rivers, is full of minerals to be mined and waterways to be harnessed. And as deep-pocketed corporations desiccate rivers and destroy peasant livelihoods in a nationwide plunder supported by the state, it’s also a place where human rights are abused with impunity.
In Ifugao, that had already meant the killing of two indigenous IPM leaders in four years: William Bugatti in 2014 and Ricardo Mayumi in 2018. Both had been involved in human rights and environmental organizing, including, for Mayumi, fighting a hydropower project that would dam the rivers, displace communities and impede locals’ ability to grow rice. Both had received death threats, and in both cases, their assailants were never found. But Philippine activists recognized familiar signs that suggest the military was involved.
When Lee, who’d been living elsewhere on Luzon, attended Bugatti’s 2014 funeral, his IPM comrades asked him to move back to Lagawe and continue the activist’s work. But Lee’s return marked the beginning of heightened surveillance and harassment of IPM by members of the 54th Infantry Battalion — one of numerous Philippine armed forces units that have received U.S. funding and support. In late July 2019, Lee said, a battalion leader visited his home and office, knocking relentlessly while he hid quietly inside. A week later, Lee was shot in his own backyard.
As Jesse ran back inside, blood pooled around Lee’s collapsed body. He could move his head, eyes and mouth, but it was getting hard to speak. When his brother-in-law arrived, Lee had to sound out each letter of his wife’s name, asking him to call Bernice. They rushed first to a small local hospital, then to a regional hospital an hour away. Neither could help; Lee needed a hospital three and a half hours farther. Somewhere amid the peaks and drops of the narrow mountain roads, the ambulance broke down. Then Lee ran out of oxygen and began vomiting blood.
Bernice caught up with the ambulance, and Lee, thinking of his daughter’s scream, apologized again and again.
When they finally arrived at Baguio General Hospital, some six hours later, medical staff asked Lee what had happened. He hadn’t seen the gun or the person aiming it. But in his last conscious moments, Lee told them what he felt certain was true: “It was the military.”
Read the full story online at In These Times.
A few weeks ago, this investigation, one I have worked on for the past year, was published online at In These Times (it was also in the June print issue of the magazine). I hope you’ll take some time to read it this week or over the weekend.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing a little more about the process of reporting this piece including the dataset I collated and which you can explore here.
If you feel compelled to do so, you can make a donation to help support the Lee family and Brandon’s ongoing care needs, here.
Thank you for reading this issue of Defender.
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Rage On. ❤️🔥