Francisco Marupa did not die as he lived.
He had spent his years as a guardian of the forests and rivers of the Madidi National Park in Bolivia, walking its ancient paths as his ancestors had before him. His voice carried the weight of centuries, speaking for the Leco people, for the trees felled in silence, and for the waters choked by the sediments and mercury of illegal gold miners.
But in death, he was left discarded like an inconvenience—his body found by the banks of the Hondo River on February 14th. The brutality inflicted upon him was a cruelty beyond words, yet it was no mystery. He had been killed, it seems, for the same reason so many others have been: because he stood in the way.
For years, Marupa had resisted the creeping tide of destruction in his homeland. He had opposed land traffickers who sought to carve the forest into parcels of profit, miners who dredged the rivers and left them poisoned, and loggers who stole from the earth with impunity. The Leco had been under siege for years—houses burned, crops destroyed, families forced to flee into the mountains. The threats against them were made in the open, a warning and a promise both. Yet the authorities looked past the perpetrators.
The government, when it spoke of his death, dismissed the idea that it had anything to do with illegal mining or land grabbing. It was, officials suggested, a personal dispute. There was an arrest—an Indigenous man, younger and poorer, who seemed barely to understand what he was being accused of. Confession came too easily, and the contradictions in his statements were too many to ignore. But in much of the world, including the Bolivian Amazon, it is easier to imprison one poor man than to unravel the web of corruption that lets entire industries flourish beyond the law.
Those who knew Marupa knew better.
The Indigenous Central of the Leco People of Apolo, the organization he had given his life to, was unequivocal: He had been killed for his defiance. International organizations echoed their call for justice.
Eighty groups, from within Bolivia and beyond, demanded that the investigation not stop at his accused killer but reach those who had ordered the act—the ones who had seen a 67-year-old man as an obstacle to be removed. They pointed to the Escazú Agreement, a treaty that should have protected him, that should have ensured the state took action before it came to this. But treaties and laws, like the forest itself, are only as strong as those willing to defend them.
The story of Francisco Marupa is not an isolated one. Across the Amazon, the defenders of land and life are hunted. The killing of Indigenous leaders is not just an act of murder—it is an economic equation, a calculation that weighs profit against the cost of a human life and finds the latter expendable. And yet, even in death, Marupa’s voice has not been silenced. In the grief and rage that followed, in the voices of his children and grandchildren, in the demands of his people, he speaks still. They will not forget.
