Luis Borja
Luis Borja is a teacher and an environmental human rights defender of the province of Bolívar, Ecuador. Luis started his work of human rights defence as a student leader back in 1987. Since then, he has worked around his province and country participating in meetings, forums, conferences and pacific protests related to the defence of human rights and the wellbeing of students, communities, workers, craftsmen, and nature.
In 2019, Luis started to participate in public meetings and pacific protests in favour of indigenous and campesino communities, and nature threatened and affected by the activities of Curimining mining company, subsidiary of Canadian companies Adventus Mining Corporation and Salazar Resources Corporation.
Due to his active work of defence of human rights, Luis Borja has been constantly crimnalized, being condemned to prison in March of 2024 for the crime of illicit association despite the lack of solid evidence against him, which has limited his work and affected him at a public and private level.
Human rights defenders have been victims of a wide range of violations in Ecuador, such as police brutality, judicial harassment, arbitrary detentions, smear campaigns, threats, harassment and the oppression of indigenous and campesino communities. Recent incidents have shown that the situation for human rights defenders in Ecuador is precarious. Throughout the month of August 2015 thousands of people gathered in different parts of the country to protest against President Correa's proposed amendments to the constitution that would allow him to run for re-election indefinitely. During this demonstration, many HRDs were detained and beaten by the police.
