After weeks of living in tents in the jungle, the handful of Mennonite families trying to establish a new home deep in the Peruvian Amazon began to grow desperate. Wasps attacked them as they tried to burn and clear parts of the forest. Heavy rains turned the road to their camp into a quagmire.
Running out of supplies, some wanted to turn back. Instead, they worked harder and eventually created an enclave.
“There was a part of the land here where I wanted to live, and we came in and freed up a small part of it,” recalled Wilhelm Thiessen, a Mennonite farmer. “That’s how everyone has done it to have a place to stay.”
Today, seven years later, the group of farms forms a thriving colony called Wanderland, home to about 150 families, a church—which also serves as a school—and a cheese factory.
The colony is part of a series of Mennonite settlements that have taken root across the Amazon, turning forests into thriving farms but also raising concerns among environmentalists about the deforestation of a rainforest already threatened by industries such as cattle ranching and illegal gold mining.
Mennonite communities have also come under official scrutiny, such as in Peru, where authorities are investigating several of them, accusing them of clearing forests without the necessary permits. The colonies deny any wrongdoing.
Mennonites began immigrating to Latin America from Canada about a century ago, after the country ended its exemptions from education and military service requirements.
Mexico’s then-president, Alvaro Obregon, eager to consolidate the rebellious northern regions after the Mexican Revolution, gave the Mennonites uncultivated land and guarantees that they could live as they wished.
In subsequent decades, other Latin American countries, eager to expand their agricultural frontiers, made similar invitations.
Today, more than 200 Mennonite colonies in nine Latin American countries occupy almost 4 million hectares, an area larger than that of the Netherlands, where their name first emerged, according to a 2021 study by researchers at McGill University in Montreal.
Bolivia has seen the fastest growth of any Latin American country and currently has 120 Mennonite colonies, while half a dozen settlements have sprung up in Peru in the past decade, including Wanderland, according to analysts.
Mennonites have also sought land in Suriname, a small South American country rich in virgin forests, prompting protests from indigenous groups and Maroons, the descendants of enslaved people.
“They’re basically trying to find the last places on Earth where there are still huge, continuous areas that can support their way of life, and it just happens to be Amazon rainforest,” said Matt Finer, a research specialist at Amazon Conservation, a nonprofit environmental organization.
On the ground, Wanderland seems like something out of the past. Horse-drawn wagons ferry passengers along dirt roads. Men in overalls toil in the fields that stretch out behind simple wooden houses.
There is no electricity. As night falls, families eat dinner by candlelight after saying a prayer in Plodich, a Germanic dialect spoken almost exclusively among Mennonites in America.
Fragments of what used to be wild life still linger. A pet monkey on the porch. A caged parrot. In a shed in the backyard, Johan Neufeld, 73, displays three common pacas, a large Amazonian rodent prized for its meat. He captured them in the rainforest and wants to try breeding them.
Wanderland is an “old colony” settlement formed by Mennonites whose history dates back to an 18th century settlement, Chortitza, now part of Ukraine.
Like other Mennonites, they follow the teachings of a Dutch priest, Menno Simons, who was persecuted during the Reformation for opposing infant baptism and compulsory military service. Over time, however, living apart from the rest of the world and rejecting new technologies became hallmarks of the faith and culture of the old colony, and migration became a way of preserving them.
“Our ancestors thought that if we live far away, separated, in the countryside, there is more possibility to control evil,” said Johan Bueckert, a farmer from the old colony who now lives in Providencia, a settlement near Wanderland. “We want to live like them. We don’t want change all the time.”
Members of the Providencia community gathered in the kitchen of a house.
As Mennonite colonies in different countries have become more populated and prosperous, the value of nearby land increases and adhering to an austere agricultural life on cheap plots becomes more difficult. So groups split up to build new settlements.
Thiessen helped found Wanderland after moving from Nueva Esperanza, one of the largest Mennonite settlements in Bolivia, because she had children who needed farmland to support their own families.
“In Bolivia there are many colonies but there is almost no land,” he said.
Worldly temptations, particularly cellphones, were also creeping into daily life as Bolivian colonies filled with residents, said Hernan Neufeld, 39, one of Wanderland’s religious leaders, known as bishops.
“Many brothers and sisters have been lost,” he said. “That is why we have looked for another place further away to see if we can carry out our standards and not lose brothers and sisters.”
Since Mennonite settlements first appeared in the Peruvian Amazon in 2017, they have cleared more than 6,800 hectares of rainforest, according to an analysis last year by the Monitoring the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), which tracks deforestation.
This is just a small part of the at least 149,000 hectares of rainforest that have been lost in recent years in Peru, most of it to small-scale agriculture. The widespread deforestation of the Amazon is a cause for concern for many environmentalists, as the forest absorbs heat-trapping carbon emissions, making it a crucial regulator of the global climate.
Mennonites interviewed in Wanderland and Providencia said they were unfamiliar with the term “climate change” or how their practices affect the Amazon.
Their leaders acknowledged that they had cut down part of the forest for their colonies, but they did not believe they had done anything wrong.
“Every colony clears the forest a little, but it is not much,” said Peter Dyck, a farmer from Belize and leader of Providencia. “The forest is very big.”
The colonies, he added, produce soybeans, rice and corn to sell in Peru, which help feed people and grow the economy.
Wanderland is an “old colony” settlement formed by Mennonites whose history dates back to an 18th century settlement, Chortitza, now part of Ukraine.
But Mennonites remain under government scrutiny.
Peruvian authorities are investigating Wanderland, Providencia and a third Mennonite colony, accusing them of cutting down trees without the necessary permits. They are seeking reparations and prison sentences for the colony leaders, said Jorge Guzman, a lawyer representing Peru’s Environment Ministry in the case.
But all three colonies deny any wrongdoing, saying they did not need permits because they already had land titles issued by the regional government, said Medelu Saldaña, a local politician who advises the colonies.
The colonies bought their land, Saldaña added, from a logging company that had already stripped the forest of hardwood trees.
But officials and experts said satellite images showed the colonies had cleared tracts of carbon-rich primary forest. And even if some parts had been destroyed by logging, the colonies still needed permits and authorizations because of the size of their operations.
“They want paper to surpass reality,” Guzmán said.
Some Mennonite experts say they are being unfairly targeted, given that other activities in the Peruvian Amazon are devouring much larger tracts of forest.
In Peru, palm and cocoa plantations supplying global corporations have already replaced large swathes of rainforest, while drug trafficking, illegal logging and gold mining continue to expand deeper into the forest.
Authorities are investigating Wanderland, Providencia and a third Mennonite colony, accusing them of cutting down trees without the necessary permits.
“I think Mennonites are the focus of a lot of criticism right now because they are a different group of people,” said Kennert Giesbrecht, a Canadian and former editor of a German-language biweekly widely read in the Mennonite diaspora.
Several hours downriver from Wanderland, a new Mennonite village, Salamanca, is forming.
Cornelius Niekoley, a farmer and bishop from Mexico, traveled to Peru to evaluate whether he should purchase property for his adult children and their families.
“Good price and the land is nice,” he said. “There are not too many stones. With too many stones it is difficult to clean the land.”
Born in Belize to a Mexican father and a Canadian mother, Niekoley and his children live in a neighborhood in Quintana Roo, in southeastern Mexico, where some of their neighbors have already moved to Salamanca in search of more affordable land.
Looking around the settlement, Niekoley said: “There aren’t many yet, but more are coming.”
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