“Martyrs”, “true guardians of the Amazon”, “defenders of the rainforest. . .” These are just some of the terms used to describe four Peruvian indigenous leaders who were assassinated earlier this month, but “Dead Friends of the Earth”, a term used by NGO Global Witness for people killed defending their land or the environment, might be another.

The four men – Edwin Chota Valera, Leoncio Quincima Meléndez, Jorge Ríos Pérez and Francisco Pinedo, from the Ashéninka people – are widely believed to have been killed by loggers, although regional indigenous organisation Orau acknowledges “narco-traffickers” may have been responsible. Led by Chota Valera, the Ashéninkas had been fighting for years to gain legal recognition of their territory and had repeatedly denounced illegal logging and logging concessions on land claimed by their community, Alto Tamayo-Saweto.

Chota Valera himself had received numerous death threats, sometimes sought refuge across the border in Brazil, and requested protection from Peru’s authorities. He was killed only a few days after a visit from government officials documenting illegal logging in his territory.

Earlier this year, Saweto filed a lawsuit against the regional government over its land title claims. According to Chris Fagan, from the USA-based NGO Upper Amazon Conservancy (UAC) which works with the community, Saweto had an agreement with the regional government’s titling agency to make it “the first indigenous community to gain title under Ucayali’s [the name of the region] new decentralized system.” However, final approval has been rejected by the government because the agency has refused to cancel the concessions, Fagan told the Guardian, “despite unequivocal evidence of blatantly illegal logging in the concessions and the government’s willingness to cancel other concessions elsewhere in Ucayali.”

The four widows and several children of the assassinated men travelled from their homes in a remote area near the Brazil border to one of the largest towns in Peru’s Amazon, Pucallpa, where they reported the tragic news. They issued a statement which included this demand:

“. . . that Peruvian authorities recover the bodies of [our] slain family members and provide protection to the families that stayed, and continue threatened, in the village.”

Another statement, issued in the community’s name, describes their battle for land title as the “principal cause of the insecurity we have experienced for over a decade and which has brought with it the systematic violation of our individual and collective fundamental rights”, and requests that the government completes the land-titling process “quickly and definitively.”

Chota Valera’s sisters, Sonia and Luz, have also publicly responded by commenting at the bottom of a National Geographic website article about their brother. “We are desperate. . . The authorities in my country didn’t do anything to help the Asháninka people. . . Now it’s too late, but I ask for justice for my brother and our people,” Sonia writes.

National indigenous organisation Aidesep reacted to the news by calling the four Ashéninkas “true guardians of the rainforest” and stating “they lamentably join a long list of martyrs who have fallen in defence of their ancestral territories.”

“We urge the Peruvian state and Judicial Power to find those responsible and punish them with the full weight of the law,” Aidesep requests.

The UAC calls the men “defenders of the rainforest” and highlights that Saweto “lives in constant threat by loggers and drugs traffickers.” While the families of the assassinated men “fled downriver to the regional capital of Pucallpa,” UAC states, “the remaining members of the community persist in Saweto, surrounded by illegal loggers who continue to issue death threats over the radio.”

The widows, Orau, the vice-president of local indigenous organization Aconamac, Rodil Orlando García Odicio, and the government’s Vice-Minister for Inter-Culturality recently met in Pucallpa. According to Aidesep, García Odicio stressed the importance of giving land title to indigenous communities and “demanded concrete actions because there are other leaders in neighbouring communities receiving death threats.”

The existence of those threats has been confirmed by relatives of the assassinated men who say that many people in neighbouring communities are extremely scared.

Peru’s Culture Ministry has issued statements lamenting the Ashéninkas’ deaths, condemning those responsible, claiming the safety of the surviving families will be guaranteed, and reporting that it is addressing the logging concessions issue, coordinating with civil society organisations and other state institutions in Ucayali, and that police helicopters have flown to the region in an attempt to recover the bodies.

Several recent reports by European NGOs – Global Witness, Friends of the Earth, Front Line Defenders – have highlighted the rise in the number of people being killed for defending their land or the environment, or the risks associated with doing so. As of 31 December 2013 Global Witness placed Peru in fourth position globally, with almost 60 such killings since 2002, behind Brazil way out in first place, Honduras in second, and the Philippines in third.