By Emma Camarlinghi, CHRD intern
Across Latin America, local communities continue facing threats from large-scale extractive industries, environmental degradation and shrinking civic space. But communities are not standing by in silence. They are defending their territories through local organizing, legal action, and powerful cross-border collaboration.
This year the Community Resource Exchange (CRE) held a series of webinars on grassroots legal defense, co-organized with Earth Law Center, Instituto de Defensa Legal (IDL) and the Asociación Interamericana para la Defensa del Ambiente (AIDA). These sessions created spaces to exchange ideas, hear directly about local struggles, and map tools and strategies that communities can adapt to their own realities.
Four Stories, One Common Challenge
- Cajamarca, Colombia: The Right to Decide
Cajamarca is an agricultural region in Colombia’s Cordillera Central, known for its fertile soils and abundant water sources. In the early 2000s, multinational company AngloGold Ashanti acquired mining titles there without proper consultation with local communities.
As Jefferson, a community leader, put it: “We didn’t know anything about mining… we had to learn what extractivism meant for our water and our livelihoods.”
The community organized grassroots education and mass mobilizations, showing urban residents how their food systems depend on Cajamarca’s farmland. In 2017, residents held a Consulta Popular, a legal referendum tool, and overwhelmingly rejected the proposed megamining project.
But despite winning at the ballot box, Cajamarca’s people have faced ongoing lawsuits and corporate pressure. The case highlights the need for stronger legal protections that respect community decisions.
- Marañón River, Peru: Recognizing Nature’s Rights
The Marañón River, a major tributary of the Amazon, holds deep cultural and spiritual significance for the Kukama people. Supported by Earth Law Center, Kukama women filed a strategic lawsuit to recognize the river as a legal subject with rights to flow freely, remain unpolluted, and sustain life.
Their argument drew on international human rights law, including the Inter-American Court’s Advisory Opinion 23, which affirms the intrinsic value of nature and the right to a healthy environment. The campaign combined local organizing, legal tools like the Amicus Curiae, and international advocacy.
After years of effort, the Peruvian court issued a landmark ruling in 2024: the Marañón River’s rights were officially recognized, and the Kukama communities were named its legal guardians.
Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, the president of the Kukama Women’s Federation was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her leadership, a testament to how Indigenous cosmovision and community litigation can lead to global recognition.
- Punchana, Peru: Environmental Injustice and Structural Remedies
In Punchana, a district in the Loreto region, residents from marginalized neighborhoods faced severe contamination from untreated hospital and market waste flowing into canals. Families, many living in extreme poverty, suffered chronic exposure to polluted water, especially during the rainy season.
Community leaders, supported by local allies, played a crucial role in connecting residents with legal teams and pushing the case forward. Together, they argued that the situation violated fundamental rights to health, dignity, and a clean environment.
In a landmark ruling, the court declared an “unconstitutional state of affairs,” recognizing the systematic failure of local and regional authorities to address the problem. The decision ordered immediate action to stop waste discharges and required an inter-institutional plan to build basic sanitation infrastructure.
While this was a legal breakthrough, real change has been painfully slow. Waste continues to accumulate, drainage systems remain unbuilt, and residents are still waiting for meaningful remedies, highlighting the need of sustained pressure and monitoring.
- La Oroya, Peru: A Landmark Inter-American Case
La Oroya, once home to a major metallurgical complex, has long been one of Latin America’s most polluted cities. For decades, industrial emissions exposed residents to dangerous levels of lead and other heavy metals, leading to chronic health problems, especially for children.
Communities, together with organizations like AIDA, brought the case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights after years of national inaction. In a historic ruling, the Court found that Peru violated the right to a healthy environment and failed to protect life and health.
This ruling broke new ground by directly addressing the long-term health impacts of environmental pollution, including the “latency period,” when diseases linked to toxic exposure may appear years later. The Court also recognized the social and psychological harms faced by residents, who were stigmatized and marginalized for seeking justice.
Although implementation remains a challenge, the decision sets a crucial precedent for holding states accountable for protecting environmental rights.
What Do These Cases Have in Common?
Despite their different contexts, these stories reveal common patterns:
- Communities were excluded from decisions that directly affect their land, water, and health.
- Legal tools like referendums and rights-of-nature frameworks offer hope but remain fragile if not defended and enforced.
- Environmental defenders face threats, intimidation, and criminalization.
- Women and Indigenous leaders are often the backbone of community organizing and legal strategies.
- Local struggles gain strength when connected to regional and international legal networks that bring visibility, solidarity, and technical support.
Tools and Lessons for Stronger Action
These webinars surfaced practical ways to strengthen collective defense:
- Combine legal action with community organizing. Lawsuits alone aren’t enough, ongoing mobilization and media visibility help protect communities and hold decision-makers accountable.
- Build cross-sector alliances. Local leaders, lawyers, environmental NGOs, and international partners help balance the power held by corporations, states and development finance institutions that impose development projects across the global south.
- Use regional frameworks. Agreements like the Escazú Agreement strengthen access to information, participation, and protection for environmental defenders.
- Create spaces for learning and analysis. While standing up for their land, water, and health, communities are also seeking to share knowledge for collectively pushing structural change.
Webinar ends, But Conversation Goes On
The webinars showed that defending territories, rivers, and communities is never a solo fight. It grows stronger through shared learning, and collective commitment. More than a series of online sessions, we experienced a living example of how we strengthen each other by listening, exchanging ideas, and standing together. While billions of dollars are funneled through development banks like the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank to sustain top-down, extractivist development models, communities prove every day that meaningful change comes when they are in charge of their own development.
Throughout the webinar series, useful tools and resources were shared:
- Plataforma de Litigio Climático para América Latina y el Caribe by AIDA
- Global Atlas of Environmental Justice by EJ Atlas
- FAIME database on mining projects by Find An Independent Mining Expert (FAIME)
Every story shared reminds us that defending land, water, and life is not just about resisting injustice. It is an act of dignity and hope that encourages us to keep building pathways for collective action, one community at a time.