A 15-month old baby who came to symbolise the US government’s draconian policy of separating migrant families did not recognise his parents when they were reunited in Honduras on Friday, his mother has said.

Adalicia Montecinos said her son Johan had “suffered everything that we have been suffering” after spending five months in an Arizona shelter having been separated at the Texas border from his father, who was deported.

“I kept saying Johan, Johan, and he started to cry,” Montecinos said.

Johan soon warmed to his parents, however, laughing as he received kisses outside a centre where they concluded his final legal paperwork before heading home.

Montecinos said she could not be happier to have her son back, but expressed anger that he was kept from her for months, forced to watch him grow up via video.

“I will never see my son walk for the first time, or celebrate his first birthday. That’s what I lost, those memories every mum cherishes and tells their children years later.”

Johan’s case triggered international uproar when the Associated Press reported his appearance in a US courtroom earlier this year.

“I never thought they could be so cruel,” said Johan’s father, Rolando Antonio Bueso Castillo, 37, who had sought entry to the US in search of a better life, determined that his children would not grow up in the same poverty that he had endured since dropping out of the fourth grade to sell burritos to help his single mother support him and his four siblings.

Rolando’s younger brother had left the coffee-growing mountains of central Honduras for the US seven years ago and had thrived in Maryland with his wife and children.

His sister had followed and had also done well, the Associated Press reported. Their eldest brother was killed in a drive-by shooting in San Pedro Sula, one of Latin America’s most dangerous cities.

Rolando, who earned $10 a day as a bus driver, was well aware of the dangers of crossing Mexico. Scores of Central Americans have fallen to their deaths jumping on trains or have been murdered, kidnapped, robbed or raped on their way to the US.

He nevertheless paid a smuggler $6,000 out of the money his brother had sent to him and packed five onesies, three jackets, a blue-and-white baby blanket, lotion, cream, 50 nappies, two bottles and cans of formula for the clandestine trip.

The plan was for Montecinos, who was in her first trimester of pregnancy, to stay behind and sell baseball hats on her market stall with a view to her joining them a few months later.

Father and son made it as far as Tampico, Mexico, 300 miles from the Texas border, when the plan started to unravel. The smuggler drove them to a warehouse and told them to board a truck filled with scores of other parents and children from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru.

They spent three days locked in the truck, where buckets served as toilets. “We were carried like meat, but we had no choice by then,” Rolando said.

In the Mexican border city of Reynosa, they boarded a makeshift raft and floated across the Rio Grande to the US. They trudged through the Texas brush until a US Border Patrol agent spotted them and asked them where they were going.

Rolando said his response was simple: “We’re going to search for the American dream.”

The pair were taken to a detention centre, where they were held in a cell cordoned off by a chainlink fence and where they slept on a mattress under a thin, reflective blanket.

Rolando said he had to ask for three days before he was allowed to bathe Johan. “He was covered with dirt,” he said.

Individually, they are stories of courage and tragedy. Together, they tell a tale of a natural world under ever more violent assault.

The portraits in this series are of nine people who are risking their lives to defend the land and environment in some of the planet’s most remote or conflict-riven regions.

From the Coral Triangle and the Sierra Madre to the Amazon and the Western African Savannah, they are caught up in struggles against illegal fishing, industrial farming, poachers, polluters and miners.

The majority have seen colleagues, family or friends murdered or arrested. Two have bodyguards. Several say they wake up each day thankful to be alive. They are often criminalised, labelled terrorists or portrayed by their enemies as anti-development. All are determined to carry on their struggles despite almost ever-present and growing risks.

Last year, a record 207 defenders were murdered, according to a revised tally by Global Witness. Over the past 12 months, the Guardian has published the names and, where possible, the faces and stories of the victims in this list. To mark a year of this unique collaboration, Cape Town-based photographer Thom Pierce has been commissioned to take portraits of defenders in some of the world’s worst affected regions.

Although the campaigns often start locally and accidentally, several defenders saw themselves caught up in a bigger fight for the natural world.

“We didn’t realise this at first, but its global,” says Turkish forest defender Tu?ba Günal. “If you want to protect the environment, you are treated as a terrorist. It’s everywhere now.”

They are in the frontline of a battle between those who promote conservation and those who promote consumption. This conflict has become more violent as resources become scarcer. Extractive industries are financing the campaigns of a new generation of political strongmen: Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an in Turkey, Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in BrazilAll are committed to eroding the few legal protections that environmental campaigners and indigenous groups are able to use to hold back mines, farms and factories.

A large proportion of killings are linked to government security forces, particularly in the Philippines, which is the most dangerous country in Asia for activists. Many others are carried out by gangs, particularly in Latin America, which accounts for more than half of all deaths.

“All these 207 activists did was to question the way that business is done. They had the audacity to defend their rights and protect the environment. That they were murdered for that is a damning indictment of the way the goods we buy are produced,” said Ben Leather, a campaigner at Global Witness. “Governments and businesses are putting profits ahead of people and we, the consumers, should not just be outraged but push them to take responsibility.”

The regions with the greatest natural and ethnic diversity, have the worst records. Brazil, the biggest Amazon forest nation, has the most deaths followed by the Philippines, which is at the centre of the Coral Triangle. Next comes Colombia, another Amazon nation, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has Africa’s biggest forest, where almost all the victims were forest rangers. The greatest deterioration was in Mexico, where the government’s approval for mining and farming concessions in indigenous territory has contributed to a five-fold increase in deaths over the previous year.

Impunity is a major problem. Defenders are often cheated of land rights by corrupt lawmakers and local politicians. When they resist, they are criminalised. When they are killed, nobody gets punished.

The majority of the defenders here – and in the global tallies – are from indigenous groups and poor black communities, who have been pushed over decades or centuries to the fringes of society. Not coincidentally, that is where nature is most abundant, where resources remain untapped, where the law – if it is applied at all – tends to serve as a tool for exploitation rather than justice.

“It’s almost apartheid. Indigenous people are treated as nobodies,” said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN special rapporteur on indigenous rights, who was labelled a terrorist in her own country, the Philippines. “We can’t allow this to continue or the people who are working to protect the environment will disappear and those who extract will rule the world. We don’t want that.”

These low-intensity conflicts rarely make headlines because they are rarely black-and-white, they do not threaten the status quo and because local authorities and the companies that supply us are implicated, albeit often indirectly.

Most of these activists are fighting against our short-term interests and for our long-term well-being. On one hand, they are resisting the extractive businesses that provide consumers with coffee, palm oil, fish and the titanium, aluminium and copper in our laptops, mobile phones and cars. On the other, they are the most effective guardians of global biodiversity and climate stability.

Asked what message they have for readers, some urged consumers to shop carefully, to consider supply chains and boycott firms and products linked with violence. Most, though, said they needed broader political change – a greater global push for land rights, accountability, transparency, tighter regulations on companies and more efforts to punish the corrupt officials and gang bosses who are often behind the killings.

They also seek more international exposure and solidarity in what is increasingly resembling a series of last stands for nature.

“Something in happening in the world. Activists are being branded as terrorists,” says Fatima Babu in India, who recently saw her 24-year campaign against a copper smelter explode into violence with the police killing of 13 protesters. “This phenomenon of destroying people and the planet for profit is not just happening in India. It’s across the globe. We need to come together for future generations.”

• The Defenders portraits were commissioned by the Guardian. Logistical and financial support was provided by Global Witness and UN Environment

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