WANDERLAND, Peru — After weeks of living in tents in the jungle, the handful of Mennonite families trying to build a new home in the Peruvian Amazon began to feel hopeless. Wasps attacked them as they tried to clear the forest. Heavy rains turned the road to their camp into mud.
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With supplies nearly exhausted, some wanted to turn back. Instead, they worked harder and created an enclave.
“There is a place here where I wanted to live, so we came and opened part of it,” said Wilhelm Thiessen, a farmer.
Today, seven years later, the collection of farms is a thriving colony, Wanderland, home to about 150 families, a church—which doubles as a school—and cheese-processing facilities.
It is one of a series of Mennonite settlements that have taken root in the Amazon, turning forest into thriving farms but also raising concerns among environmentalists about the deforestation of a rainforest threatened by industries such as cattle ranching and illegal gold mining.
Mennonite communities have also come under official scrutiny, including in Peru, where authorities are investigating several, accusing them of clearing forest without the required permits. The colonies deny any wrongdoing.
Mennonites began migrating to Latin America from Canada about a century ago, after the country ended its exemptions from educational requirements and military service.
Alvaro Obregon, then President of Mexico, eager to consolidate rebellious northern regions after the Mexican Revolution, gave the Mennonites uncultivated land and assurances that they could live as they wished. In the decades that followed, other Latin American countries seeking to expand their agricultural frontiers extended similar invitations.
Today, more than 200 Mennonite colonies in nine Latin American countries occupy 3.9 million hectares, an area larger than the Netherlands, where their denomination originated, according to a 2021 study by McGill University in Montreal.
Bolivia has seen the fastest growth of any Latin American country and now has 120 colonies, while half a dozen settlements have sprung up in Peru in the past decade, analysts say.
“They’re basically trying to find the last places on Earth that still have these huge, continuous areas that can support their way of life, and it just happens to be the forested areas in the Amazon,” said Matt Finer, a senior research specialist at Amazon Conservation, an environmental nonprofit.
Wanderland seems like a page from the past. Horse-drawn carriages ferry passengers along dirt roads. Men in overalls work in the fields. There is no electricity. As night falls, families dine by candlelight after saying grace in Plautdietsch, a Germanic dialect spoken almost exclusively among Mennonites on the American continent.
Wanderland is an “old colony” settlement, formed by Mennonites whose history dates back to an 18th century settlement, Chortitza, today 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 military conscription. Over time, living apart from the rest of the world and rejecting new technologies became distinctive features of the faith and culture of the old colony, and migration became a means of preserving them.
“Our ancestors thought that if we lived far away in the countryside, we had a better chance of controlling evil,” said Johan Bueckert, an old colonial farmer who lives in Providencia, a colony near Wanderland.
Thiessen helped found Wanderland after moving from Nueva Esperanza, a settlement in Bolivia, because she had children who needed farmland to support their families. “There are a lot of settlements in Bolivia, but there is almost no land left,” she said.
Since Mennonite settlements first appeared in the Peruvian Amazon in 2017, they have cleared more than 6,880 hectares of forest, according to a 2023 analysis by the Andean Amazon Monitoring Project, which tracks deforestation.
Deforestation in the Amazon is a cause for concern for many environmentalists because it absorbs heat-trapping carbon emissions.
Mennonites interviewed in Wanderland and Providencia said they were not familiar with the term “climate change” or how their practices affect the Amazon. Their leaders acknowledged that parts of the forest were cleared for their colonies, but they did not believe they had done anything wrong. “Each colony clears the forest a little, but it is very little,” said Peter Dyck, a leader in Providencia.
The colonies, he added, produce soybeans, rice and corn to sell in Peru, helping to feed people and grow the economy.
The three colonies argued that they did not need permits because they had agricultural titles to the land, said Medelu Saldaña, a local politician who advises the colonies.
Several hours downriver from Wanderland, a new Mennonite village, Salamanca, is forming. Cornelius Niekoley, a farmer from Mexico, traveled to Peru to see if he should buy property for his adult children and their families. “Good price and nice land,” he said.
He lives in a neighborhood in Quintana Roo, in southeastern Mexico, where some of his neighbors have moved to Salamanca in search of affordable land.
“There aren’t many yet, but more will come,” he said, looking out at the village.
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