Indigenous rights activist killed in northern Mexico

MEXICO CITY — An Indigenous rights activist who campaigned against illegal logging has been killed in northern Mexico, prosecutors say, five years after his activist brother also was slain.

Prosecutors in the border state of Chihuahua state said Friday that Jose Trinidad Baldenegro was attacked when he left his house in the settlement of Colorada de la Virgen to go to work on Monday. Witnesses heard shots and saw several gunmen.

Hours later, the house was burned.

Baldenegro, 47, was part of the Tarahumara people who for years have fought illegal logging and mining in their territory, where drug gangs often cut down forest to plant narcotics.

Prosecutors say he had not asked for protection nor had were they aware of threats against him.

His brother, Isidro Baldenegro, whose campaign against illegal logging won him a Goldman Prize for environmental activism in 2005, was murdered in 2017. A year later, Julián Carrillo, another Tarahumara leader, was slain. Four of Carrillo’s relatives had been killed.

Isela González of the Sierra Madre Alliance rights group said Baldenegro had been less active in the Indigenous movement since his brother’s murder.)

She said continuing violence in the Tarahumara mountains since 2009 has led to the displacement of more than 200 people from the Colorada de la Virgen community.

In the first three years of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government, 96 human rights activists were killed, human rights undersecretary Alejandro Encinas said in December. More than 90% of the crimes have gone unpunished, he said.