When José Isidro Tendetza Antún’s body was found in a shallow, unmarked grave last Dec. 2, his friends and colleagues were shaken but not necessarily surprised. A member of the Shuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Tendetza helped lead a campaign against the Mirador mine, a Chinese-financed project to tap a copper deposit underlying what the Shuar regard as the last remnant of their homeland within Ecuador. He had gone missing Nov. 28, the eve of a planned trip to the COP-20 climate summit in neighboring Peru.

“At first, the prosecutors said he had drowned,” says Salvador Quishpe, the prefect—a post akin to governor—of Zamora Chinchipe, Ecuador’s southernmost province. “But we put pressure on them, and they did another autopsy. Then they said he had been strangled. Since then there has been no news.” (See Q&A--this issue.)

Tendetza’s alleged murder remains unresolved six months later. It was one of three activist fatalities in the Ecuadorian Amazon since 2009 that were spotlighted in a complaint filed in February with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCRH) by a coalition of Ecuadorian indigenous and human rights groups.

Climate of violence alleged

An OHCRH report on the complaint says the groups claimed oil and mining projects operate on indigenous lands “without prior consultation.” It says they also denounced the “harmful impact of such projects on the environment and the situation of risk, violence, criminalization and stigmatization of indigenous leaders and defenders who seek to protect the rights of their peoples.”

Says Esperanza Martínez, co-founder of the Quito-based green group Acción Ecológica: “The new [so-called] delinquent terrorist saboteurs are the defenders of nature because they are the ones putting the finger on the sore spot.” She cites the sentencing in February of anti-mining activist Javier Ramírez to 10 months in prison on a charge of rebellion.

It wasn’t always thus. When Ecuador rewrote its Constitution in 2008, President Rafael Correa won praise for endorsing clauses on the rights of nature and indigenous peoples. Inaugurated for his first term a year earlier, Correa proposed an international fund to compensate Ecuador for not drilling for oil in the ecologically sensitive Yasuní region, home to indigenous people of the same name. “The government started out very friendly with the indigenous movements,” says former Ecuadorian Vice President Rosalía Arteaga Serrano.

The Yasuní-protection fund was cancelled and oil development approved after commitments from international contributors fell far short of the hoped-for US$3.6 billion. Critics accuse Correa, reelected to a third term in 2013, of executing an about-face and mimicking earlier regimes by pushing hard for natural-resource extraction. Some speak of an earlier shift. “Starting back in 2007, when the state presence in the oil sector was reinforced, you began to see strong repression of a whole range of protests,” says Luis Xavier Solis Tenesaca, a lawyer with the Human Rights Commission of Orellana, a rights group in northeastern Ecuador. In 2007, Correa was referring to environmentalists as “childish” and “romantic,” and at one point said: “Everyone who opposes the development of the country is a terrorist.”

Full accounting demanded

Two names aside from Tendetza’s were included in the complaint that indigenous and rights groups sent to the OHCRH. One was Bosco Wisum, an ethnic Shuar who died in a protest against government policies in 2009. The other was Freddy Taish, another Shuar, who indigenous leaders claim was shot by army soldiers on patrol in 2013. “We demand to know the truth about what happened to these three compañeros,” Quishpe says.

Meanwhile, Correa continues to draw fire for expelling or closing advocacy groups in 2013. Among those shut down was the Pachamama Foundation, a domestic nonprofit that helped the Sarayaku prevail against the government in an oil-exploration dispute before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Correa also is accused of persecuting perceived foes such as former legislator Cléver Jiménez, who was outspoken on indigenous and environmental issues, and Fernando Villavicencio, a journalist who has reported on foreign investment in the Amazon. When a government espionage case launched against the two men was languishing in 2013, Correa’s personal lawyer sued them and a medical doctor, Carlos Figueroa, for libel over statements related to incidents surrounding a well-known rebellion of police officers in September 2010.

The three received prison sentences and US$140,000 in fines, and were ordered to make public apologies. In March a judge commuted the sentences, though the fines and apology order remain in force. Villavicencio says Correa has asked prosecutors to reopen the espionage case. “[It] looks like the regime is prepared to continue its persecution of me,” he says. Interview requests to the Office of the President and the Justice Ministry were unsuccessful.