On a November morning, Julia Chuñil, 72, strode through her cabin door in Chile’s lush Los Ríos region in search of missing livestock, with her dog Cholito by her side.

They never returned.

As president of her Indigenous Mapuche community, Chuñil had led efforts to recover ancestral Mapuche lands and defend the evergreen Valdivian forest, rapidly being replaced by timber industry plantations. That made her a target and the subject of repeated harassment from a local businessman. More than one attempt was made on her life before she vanished.

Chuñil is one of 146 environmental defenders killed or disappeared last year, according to a new report from the watchdog group Global Witness.

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