Published in Devex

By Atila Roque

About four decades ago, as day broke on the morning following Chico Mendes’ assassination, demands for justice were already on the desks of government officials around Brazil. The environmental movement’s response reached them before the news, and our demands were simple: Do something. Defend environmental defenders. Refuse to accept these deaths as inevitable.

Now, with the climate crisis escalating and its impacts becoming increasingly severe, underscored by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ landmark advisory opinion highlighting states’ legal obligations to protect current and future generations from climate change, the urgency of these demands and the critical role of digital tools in amplifying them have never been clearer.

Chico Mendes was not the first environmental defender murdered for his work. Nor was he the last. But the news of his killing was likely the first to be turned into an international story — and rallying cry — in real time. It reflected the beginning of a new era for the environmental movement, and the world beyond.

The immediate response to his assassination, in late December 1988, was possible because of an early version of the internet. I was living in Japan, working as a researcher for the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis, aka IBASE, the host of Alternex, the first provider of publicly accessible dial-up service in Brazil, and the time difference meant that while Brazil slept, I could be one of the first to spread the word of the killing and mobilize an international response. When government officials arrived at work the next morning, protest faxes greeted them there.

In those early days of the internet, my colleagues and I understood it to present radical possibilities: A challenge to the cultural and political hegemony of the transnational corporations that otherwise controlled the flow of information. At IBASE, we worked to democratize access to this new internet, bringing it beyond the walls of universities or statehouses and into ordinary communities everywhere. We understood its democratic potential — if not yet the threat it would one day pose.

In other words, the internet, then, was more a practice than a place: A deliberate decision to connect with someone else, somewhere else. It was direct, intentional, and unmediated contact: Anyone with a modem and an internet service provider could connect to anyone else, no matter who or where they were.

Today, almost forty years after Chico Mendes’ death, we stand at another crossroads. Environmental defenders continue to face grave threats, and the internet, now largely controlled by a handful of corporate gatekeepers, is only accelerating them, enabling the spread of dangerous misinformation and heightened surveillance of vulnerable communities routinely denied safe, reliable digital access.

The numbers are staggering: Between 2012-2023, more than 2,100 environmental defenders were killed for their work, with the vast majority of these killings taking place in Latin America. Colombia and my native Brazil top the list — and Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and environmental activist communities are disproportionately targeted.

Reappropriating digital tools for social good

In light of these grim realities — and the ever-accelerating pace of both climate catastrophe and technological advancement — we must begin to reimagine technology’s role in our work. Rethink who it serves and how. Reappropriate digital tools for social good.

This work begins with a simple acknowledgement: The internet should be a public good, a resource of, by, and for ordinary people. That means the internet should not exist as an extension of corporate control, but should instead be widely accessible, and make it possible for communities to control their own narratives and tell their stories.

Today, 35 million Brazilians lack internet access, and in some communities, even landline phones — which means that we must begin with expanding access, and from there build digital resilience, and ensure that the tools these communities use meaningfully serve them.

This work involves supporting initiatives that have been dedicated to fostering a more just digital and environmental ecosystem for decades. A primary strategy employed by various groups in this space involves advocating for robust data protection and the democratic regulation of digital platforms and AI tools, ensuring that technology serves human needs and empowers individuals, rather than exploiting or marginalizing them. Another critical approach is to investigate and expose the environmental and social impacts of big tech companies, particularly how their operations, such as mineral extraction, threaten local communities. This sheds light on corporate accountability and pushes for more ethical practices within the technology industry.

Furthermore, significant efforts are dedicated to developing and implementing alternative digital models that are directly usable and effective for communities. Take the experience of Brazil’s quilombola — Afro-Brazilian residents of quilombo settlements — and Indigenous communities who reside in the Amazon and who experience the daily realities of violence and exclusion. Instituto Nupef, which focuses on the effective use of information and communications technology, supports these communities in building autonomous data centers and hosting platforms, allowing movements long kept at the margins to shed light on the threats they face. Instituto Nupef and others are also leading efforts to help guardians of the forest harness trusted tools such as community radio and walkie-talkies to flag incidents with a central hub, which channels complaints into official systems.

Across all these efforts, this work is defined by a fundamental commitment to using all available tools — low-tech, high-tech, or no tech — for environmental defense, and approaching the governance of those tools in a way that accounts for historical injustices and uplifts the voices of those most marginalized.

In the face of technology that is now so often weaponized against vulnerable communities, both through the aggressive proliferation of misinformation about defenders and their causes and through surveillance of defenders and their activities, we must reclaim these tools and use them for the support of the public good. In Brazil, Black women leaders in particular regularly face grave threats for their work, and technological solutions and digital education led by civil society organizations, such as those developed by Olabi and Instituto Da Hora, present a potential way to map, monitor, and mitigate these physical and digital attacks.

I think back to the moments after Chico Mendes’ assassination often — to the promise of a new, powerful tool for justice. At that moment, we were reeling, mourning a terrible loss, but we were also looking ahead, toward a world we could build — a world of access and connection, community empowerment, and environmental protection that we are still yet to fully realize. We saw then a truth that remains resonant now: that telling these stories — online, in person, and all over the world — is an essential part of creating a world where there are no more of them. A world where defending the environment is only life-sustaining — and never life-threatening.

All of these years later, even as we face obstacles of proportions we could not have anticipated then, I remain hopeful. Because we can look to the work being done in Brazil, across Latin America, and around the world, and see progress, creativity, and commitment. We can look to our local organizations, among them Comitê Chico Mendes, a youth-empowerment organization led by Mendes’ daughter, and see the makings of a resilient digital environment, in service of a resilient physical environment.

And because of Chico Mendes and his descendents’ collective devotion, we can see the path forward — the ways we can intervene, as they have, across space and time, to use new and old tools alike to defend the defenders, to tell their stories. And we can see, in them and in each other, how to return to the idea of the internet as more a practice than a place once more — a practice we can refine, protect, and use to secure our collective future.

Read at Devex