7/7/2017 Fracking, mining, murder: the killer agenda driving migration in Mexico and Central America https://theconversation.com/fracking-mining-murder-the-killer-agenda-driving-migration-in-mexico-and-central-america-67822 1/6 Author Ariadna Estévez Professor, Center for Research on North America, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Academic rigour, journalistic flair On January 19, Mexican indigenous activist Isidro Baldenegro López, who in 2005 won the Goldman Environmental Prize for his efforts to protect ancestral old growth forests from logging, was gunned down in Chihuahua State. His murder follows that of fellow Goldman recipient Berta Cáceres, whose March 2016 death in Honduras appears to have been “an extrajudicial killing planned by military intelligence specialists linked to the country’s US–trained special forces”, according to a recent investigation by The Guardian. These assassinations, and their murky circumstances, have brought light to the hard truth that Latin America is the world’s deadliest place for environmentalists and given renewed relevance to this prescient article, originally published on November 23, 2016. Fracking, mining and murder Hundreds of small-scale miners are scraping out tiny quantities of increasingly precious gold in El Corpus, southern Honduras. Edgard Garrido/Reuters November 23, 2016 7.19am GMT • Updated February 28, 2017 3.33pm GMT Fracking, mining, murder: the killer agenda driving migration in Mexico and Central America