Brutally attacked for his work as one of the Dominican Republic’s leading land defenders, Polanco says the next generation must fight environmental destruction
While making his way from his home in Loma de Blanco, a mountain in the middle of the Dominican Republic, to the nearby town of Bonao, Esteban Polanco was attacked by a group of about 10 men. They threw a molotov cocktail at the car in which he was travelling with two of his children, before running off. The family survived, but Polanco suffered terrible burns.
“I was close to death, and it took a year to recover,” he says of the 2007 attack. Some, but not all, of the perpetrators were later imprisoned.
