Cataloging Murder: Tracking Violence Against Public Figures in Central America

Laura Blume, University of Nevada, Reno

Research Grant, 2021–2022

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This award funded the creation and expansion of the Violence Against Public Figures (VAPF) dataset. This dataset tracks incidents of lethal violence in Central America against a broad array of public figures, all of whom are important to the functioning of democratic society. VAPF considers four main categories of public figures: members of the media (e.g., journalists and radio show hosts), politicians, judicial officials (e.g., judges, lawyers, and prosecutors), and activists. We are tracking violence against these four broad categories of public figure over a fifteen-year period (2008 to 2022) in all seven Central American countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.

While data verification is ongoing, our preliminary findings show that Honduras has the highest level of violence against public figures, followed by Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama, with Costa Rica and Belize having the lowest levels of violence against public figures. Violence increased significantly against Honduran public figures following the 2009 coup, and, while still extremely high, it has decreased since peaking in the postcoup period (2010–2013). Nicaragua has experienced increased violence, with over one hundred public figures killed since 2015, corresponding to rising repression and authoritarianism under the Ortega regime. Notably, the violence against public figures increased before the massive prodemocracy protests of 2018 drew international attention to increasing authoritarianism in the country.

This dataset tracks incidents of lethal violence in Central America against a broad array of public figures, all of whom are important to the functioning of democratic society.

Our data on the circumstances of these public figures’ deaths shows clearly that these are not incidents of people being in the “wrong place at the wrong time,” as most individuals in the VAPF dataset are killed in ways that clearly show they were specifically targeted (e.g., shot over ten times in their home).

In terms of who is being targeted, in Nicaragua as well as in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, we see that activists are the most likely targets of assassinations. The focus of the activists’ work varies, but overall, we see Indigenous, environmental, land rights, LGBTQ, labor and union leaders being the categories of activists most commonly targeted. Our preliminary data also shows that leftists (both activists and politicians) are disproportionately targeted in several countries throughout the region, most notably in the Northern Triangle, as well as to a lesser extent in Panama. Consistent with previous research (Del Bene et al. 2018; Glazebrook and Opoku 2018; Le Billon and Lujala 2020; Lynch et al. 2018), Indigenous activists and social leaders are disproportionately targeted.

Judicial officials are targeted slightly more often than activists in Panama and Costa Rica, with several of these incidents allegedly related to organized crime and drug trafficking. More broadly, we hope VAPF draws increased scholarly attention to violence against judicial officials since the targeted killing of judicial officials undermines already weak and overburdened judicial systems and increases the incidence of impunity. The highest rate of targeted killings of judicial figures occurred in Honduras, with 142 judicial assassinations.

While our data shows that over 80 percent of public figures who are killed are male, this is in part due to women still being underrepresented in many sectors. For example, a mere 3.2 percent of mayors and 12.7 percent of city council members in Guatemala are women. The assassinations of high-profile women have clear consequences for women in a variety of public/prominent positions and are likely to further hinder women’s efforts to gain equal representation in the region (Blume et al. 2023).

References

Blume, Laura, Diana Meza, and Piper Heath. 2023. et al., “Honduran Women Leaders in the Crosshairs.” Nacla, January 31. 

Del Bene, Daniela, Arnim Scheidel, and Leah Temper. 2018. “More Dams, More Violence? A Global Analysis on Resistances and Repression Around Conflictive Dams Through Co-produced Knowledge.” Sustain Sci 13: 617–633. 

Glazebrook, Trish, and Emmanuela Opoku. 2018. “Defending the Defenders; Environmental Protectors, Climate Change and Human Rights.” Ethics and the Environment 23 (2): 83–109. 

Le Billon, Phillippe, and Päivi Lujala. 2020, “Environmental and Land Defenders: Global Patterns and Determinants of Repression.” Global Environmental Change 65. 

Michael J. Lynch, Paul B. Stretesky, and Michael A. Long. 2018. “Green Criminology and Native Peoples: The Treadmill of Production and the Killing of Indigenous Environmental Activists.” Theoretical Criminology 22: 318–341.