*Written by Wendy Rayón Garay.
09.05.2025 /cimacnoticias.com/ Mexico City.- Today, Mesoamerican Initiative of human Rights Defenders (Defensoras) announced that last May 3 the Water Defender Karina Ruiz Ocampo, belonging to the state of Jalisco, was found lifeless. The organization denounced that it had previously been threatened by its work, which continues to be criminalized in Mexico.
According to Im-Defensoras, Karina Ruiz disappeared on April 13 when several unknown people broke into their home to take it to force and twenty days later her body was found in the municipality of Amatitán, Jalisco.
The defender was part of the organization La Cima our priority and her struggle was aimed at defending the right to water in the La Cima subdivision, in the Arenal, where she lived and where there is constantly a shortage of water since 2012 thanks to an debt of the construction company with the Federal Electricity Commission.
The situation of the community bordered them to create the organization and since then Karina participated in different mobilizations and live broadcasts through social networks to make calls to denounce the authorities and companies involved.
The discomfort generated through its struggle and the echo that it managed to replicate in the community caused that it received threats through its accounts in social networks, which were multiplied until it feared for their safety. On March 23, 2025, it was his last participation in a public demonstration.
According to data from the Mexican Institute for IMDEC ACC community, in Jalisco, 4 defenders killed in the course of 2025 are added. Criminalization against defenders is not an isolated event, it is a practice that threatens their rights to safeguard the life of nature, water, rivers, mountains, forests, seeds and the diversity of animal species.
However, it is aggravated when it comes to women because their existence as political subjects challenges patriarchal mandates and consequently choose to threaten their lives to prioritize the interests of powerful groups, according to im-defense stations in their report “The Earth, for whom they work and defend it” of 2025.
“The human rights defenders, with our peoples, communities and organizations, organize ourselves in different territories to resist the violence that stalks us, protect life and collective well -being and build hope and alternatives of decent life” -Mesoamerican Initiative of Women’s Defenders of Human Rights (Im -Defensor)
The organization indicates that, the majority of those who defend the land are indigenous, garífuna or Afro -descendant women who live in rural areas, so they have had to work on the land as long as they were historically excluded from being a priority of these and making decisions about the territories before the colonial policies that have ended up eliminating the worldviews of several native peoples.
The organization points out that in Mesoamerica lives under an economic, political and cultural model of colonial inheritance that causes structural oppressions and the historical continuity of patriarchal, capitalist and racist violence in the bodies and territories of women. It also aggravates its contexts of economic inequality, violence, poverty and impact on climate change.
In the last 13 years, im-defense detected an increase in violence and attacks on the women’s defenders, the territory and natural assets causing 22.3% of the total of the 43 thousand 186 aggressions against defenders that the organization documented between 2012 and 2024 in Mesoamerica were perpetrated against defenders that defend these rights.
They also pointed out that Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala The aggressions against women represented 13.4%, 12.7% and 12.3% respectively, but in Honduras it had a 62% rise. In that same period, 738 aggressions related to defense actions of the rights of indigenous peoples, Afro -descendants and other ethnic groups were documented.
In 2023, the Global Witness report reported that Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua are among the 10 countries in the world with the greatest amount of murders for defending land and the environment.
In adherence, in Central America 80.2% of socio -environmental conflicts are related to minerals and construction materials, land use for agriculture, fishery, livestock and forestry activities; Water management, fossil fuel and climate change, as mentioned in the state of the region.
The defense analysis indicates that the evolution of aggressions against land and territory defenders between 2012 and 2024 is distributed into three inflection points: the first in 2017, the following year to the murder of Berta Cáceres; the second in 2020, characterized by the authoritarian responses of the governments before the Pandemia by COVID-19; and the third in 2022, marked by the deepening in the policies of militarization of the territories and the increase of the evictions.
Given the panorama in the region, the National Network of Human Rights Defenders in Mexico and the Defensoras demanded that the authorities investigate the kidnapping and subsequently the murder of the Defensor Karina considering her work of defense and human rights as a main line of investigation with a gender perspective.
«We embrace the family and environment of the defender, joining ourselves in pain and indignation for its loss. We also recognize the fundamental work of the family and inhabitants of the La Cima subdivision who organized to locate it and disseminate their search sheet »-Esoamericano -American Infensor of Human Rights Defenders (IM -DEFENSORAS).
From the Mexican Institute for Community Development (IMDEC) and Justice Center for Peace and Development (CEPAD) the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office was required that Karina’s murder is not in impunity; provide protection measures to their relatives; guarantee the right to water and sanitation in the La Cima subdivision; and implement comprehensive, effective, preventive and immediate protection policies to safeguard the integrity, security and life of defenders, who consider the differentiated risks they face.
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