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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Human rights officials said Friday an indigenous environmentalist leader shot to death over the weekend had fled his community almost 10 years ago and was killed when he returned to visit a sick relative.
Isidro Baldenegro, a leader of the Raramuri indigenous group, which is known to the outside world as Tarahumara, was the second winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize to be slain in two years.
The U.N. Human Rights High Commissioner and Mexico's National Human Rights Commission said Baldenegro left the community of Coloradas de la Virgin after receiving threats and was shot when he returned Sunday.
Baldenegro, 51, led an anti-logging campaign in the Tarahumara mountains, which are home to some of northern Mexico's last old-growth forests.
"This killing is another alert about the vulnerable situation" that activists in Mexico suffer, said Jan Jarab, the Mexico representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The office said in a statement that three other anti-logging activists in Baldenegro's community were killed last year. Baldenegro's father, Julio Baldenegro, an activist who opposed logging, was slain in 1987, a killing that remains unsolved.
Isidro Baldenegro was jailed in 2003 for alleged illegal arms and marijuana possession, but the charges were dropped a year later after prosecutors said police committed abuses. At the time, Baldenegro accused influential local loggers and ranchers of persuading the police to trump up charges against him.
In an interview in jail in 2003, Baldenegro said, "If one of us dies for some reason, other people will carry on the struggle."
Authorities have said Baldenegro was shot to death by a 25-year-old man at his uncle's home. Prosecutors in northern Chihuahua state say they have identified the killer and are searching for him.
Honduran activist Berta Caceres, who won the Goldman prize in 2015 for organizing opposition to a hydroelectric project on her Lenca people's ancestral lands, was slain last March 3 when armed men forced their way into her home in the middle of the night and shot her four times. A visiting Mexican activist was wounded in the attack.
Observers say killings of land activists are common in Latin America. According to the London-based group Global Witness, more than 450 were slain in the region from 2010 through 2014.
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