Advocacy group Survival International has launched a campaign to prevent the annihilation of tribal peoples in Brazil, to coincide with the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.
In a hotly contested incident, Nicaraguan army troops killed "Comandante Invisible," a campesino leader who had just announced he was taking up arms against the government.
Havana peace talks between Colombia's government and the FARC are stalled as the government refuses to acknowledge the existence of far-right paramilitaries.
Police opened fire on peasant protestors at the site of a coal-fired power plant project in the Chittagong district of Bangladesh, killing at least four.
Human rights group Global Witness ranked Honduras as the world's most dangerous country for environmental defenders, with 109 slain over the past five years.
Three were killed when security forces opened fire on farmers and lumad (indigenous people) who were blockading a highway in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.
Rights groups see an urgent threat that criminal gangs and paramilitary groups will fill the power vacuum in remote areas of Colombia as the FARC is demobilized.
Thirteen Maya villagers are to stand trial in Belize over their expulsion of a settler they said had illegally encroached upon the grounds of an archeological site.
Honduran activist Nelson Noe García Lainez was gunned down upon returning home following the Military Police eviction of a peasant squatter community on contested lands.
Inter-caste violence and protests mount in India as corporate interests seize untitled peasant lands, increasing economic pressure on rural communities.
Berta Cáceres, a prominent indigenous activist in Honduras who last year won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, was slain in her home at La Esperanza village.
Despite the peace process in Colombia, assassinations continue against leaders of the country's campesino and indigenous communities who stand up to landed interests.
