How brutal wildfires, violent rivalries and controversial reforestation are reworking rural Mexico | EUROtoday

At 4am I wake in my hammock. I slip right into a pair of labor trousers and muddy boots and stand exterior Don José’s home within the pitch black.

Within minutes, I’m picked up by a quad bike and we drive in the direction of the village corridor in Cinco de Febrero, a tiny hamlet within the south-east Mexican state of Campeche on the Yucatán peninsula, about two hours’ drive from the closest metropolis.

Outside the constructing, teams of males collect with massive machetes and loaded rifles. I recognise just a few of the native farmers, standing in caps and enormous rubber boots as they shiver within the early morning chilly. It looks as if the plan to confront a rival village, legally or not, is lastly coming to fruition.

There has been speak locally for days about splitting males up into night time watches to search for arsonists within the jungle borders of their land. Now we’re going through a three-hour drive on quad bikes by way of dense forest to get there.

I’m staying with Don José, probably the most senior elder of Cinco de Febrero and a farmer whose household have been in Campeche for generations. I used to be informed to set my alarm if I needed to tag alongside on the raid. When I wake to the sound of crickets and monkeys, José is already out of the home and gathering his forces on the village corridor.

This flurry of daybreak exercise is all linked to fevered hypothesis over the reason for rampant wildfires which have ravaged the land lately.

The spark that triggers the hearth

Just a few days earlier, I attend a gathering of locals satisfied that the reason for this destruction is the individuals of Laguna Grande, neighbouring farmers allegedly hooked on arson.

As I watch for the discussions to begin in a breezeblock constructing within the sweltering warmth, I gaze out on the horizon. In the far distance, clustered subsequent to a sequence of hills, I see rows of fire-blackened tree stumps rising out of the mist.

In the foreground, I spot dense clusters of orchard saplings sprouting fruits and flowers. 100 yards away, contrasting sharply, is the Tren Maya, a recently-built excessive pace railway screeching throughout the land — slicing it in two.

Cinco de Febrero itself could be very small, with not more than 800 to 900 individuals. It is made up of flat-roofed homes, some painted in vivid chalky major colors. Others are extra utilitarian, gray blocks with easy iron roofs, tucked in amongst the inexperienced of the jungle.

The village sits inside an enormous lowland tropical forest that fades out to scrubland on its edges. The land beneath the settlement is made up of karst limestone that sucks water underground, inflicting extremely dry seasons that explode into forest fires.

“I’ve heard it’s all very political. I’ve heard the narcos might be involved,” says Jorge, wearing a straw sombrero and white vest, musing on the fires. He is an elder of the village, his title, an epithet of respect from days passed by; nonetheless, he’s eager to carry forth.

Several younger males exterior the corridor, clutching rifles and machetes or sitting on motorbikes, solid aspersions on Jorge’s fears. “There are no narcos here,” they inform me — Campeche is one in all Mexico’s most secure states: out of the best way of drug cartels’ smuggling routes. Instead, insist the youths, the wildfires are nearly actually being brought on by Laguna Grande.

Based on the proof gathered by the lads, Laguna Grande has taken to felling bushes and constructing charcoal ovens on Cinco de Febrero land, by chance sparking wider conflagrations within the forests. There are many theories as to why one village may invade one other’s land to fell bushes and produce charcoal.

At the acute finish, some imagine charcoal burners are linked to cartels and coerced into extraction from the forest. However, it’s extra doubtless that Laguna Grande’s residents are being compelled into unlawful logging by financial incentives: the drying up of different money crops, a scarcity of forest in their very own areas and unclear authorized boundaries between totally different villages’ claims on land.

The locals, or ejidatarios, gathering collectively on this sizzling day, belong to an ejido: a Mexican communal land holding that has its roots in pre-Hispanic indigenous methods. The fashionable ejido, nevertheless, finds its origins within the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, when rights to communal land have been embedded into the structure underneath Article 27.

The farmers of Cinco de Febrero acquired their territory in 1963 in the course of the 16-million-hectare land reforms of left-wing president Adolfo López Mateos. Recently they got beneficiant authorities compensation to the tune of £236,400 after 124 hectares of their land was snapped up for the practice that now screams by way of their village.

The fledgling orchards I spot are the work of the Mexican authorities’s controversial agricultural reforestation programme, Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life).

The undertaking goals to redress each rural poverty and deforestation by immediately paying Mexican farmers round 5,000 pesos a month to put aside 2.5 hectares of their land for the cultivation of timber, fruit bushes and low. But its detractors warn it has cultivated a brand new breed of farmer, depending on handouts.

Such a mixture of quickly rising wildfires, large infrastructure initiatives and authorities intervention in previously subsistence-level farming are reworking these remoted, primarily indigenous Mayan-speaking settlements past recognition — some say for the higher, others for the worst.

The ejido gathers

Inside the corridor, Don José holds courtroom. I’m met by a dozen middle-aged and aged Mexican males carrying caps and broad-brimmed canvas hats. In the passage, youthful males crowd the doorways: peering into the proceedings. Off to the aspect sit a cluster of aged girls who largely stay silent — sometimes strolling over to nudge their husbands into talking.

Don José, full identify José del Carmen García Góngora, guarantees the meeting he’ll take pictures and names of these from Laguna Grande and refer them to the environmental company.

After a couple of minutes, he places a plan to organise patrols into the deep forests to search for arsonists to a vote: there are murmurs of dissent and a few heavy questioning from Don José’s brother — however lastly the movement is handed.

Jose ends proceedings by emphasising the significance of Cinco de Febrero’s massive tracts of unspoiled forest now underneath menace from wildfires.

He additionally highlights how unlawful charcoal burning has been a difficulty for many years, solely not too long ago spiralling out into lively wildfires, threatening habitats which are important for ecotourism and future authorities funding.

Indeed, the ejido was awarded a conservation award from the Mexican ministry of the setting in 2024 for voluntarily sustaining 16,000 hectares of forest out of the 32,000 they got within the 60s.

This award permits them precedence entry to foyer for presidency grants given out by the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) and simpler entry to NGO programmes.

But conservation of forests is in fixed stress with unlawful logging. According to native newspapers, over 8,000 hectares have been illegally cleared within the final decade alone, largely for wooden and charcoal.

The ejido have made a number of unsuccessful makes an attempt to petition the state authorities in San Francisco de Campeche.

Cinco de Febrero – on the intersection

While in Campeche, I drive out to the ECOSUR (College of the Southern Border) campus exterior of city. ECOSUR is a analysis centre for scientific investigations into points affecting Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala and Belize.

Hidden within the jungle inside an enormous white modernist constructing, I meet Claudia Monzón Alvarado. Alvarado is a researcher specialising within the setting and native communities within the Yucatán.

Alvarado factors out the ejido’s place as an intersection between the Sembrando Vida experiment and the wildfires.

With a slicing knife-like movement, she slashes her hand throughout a map with Cinco de Febrero within the centre: “It’s also been divided by Tren Maya, a Mexican government mega project. Everything is there.

“Wildfires are a big thing in the peninsula,” she provides. “But there are no clear strategies around restoration of forests: is the forest resilient enough to fix itself? Or should we intervene?”

Alvarado factors out that it was typically the Mayans who have been initially blamed for conflagrations: “The main narrative around the causation of wildfires is that it is [linked] to the production of milpa (Mayan maize production) which requires slash and burn agriculture.”

However, she provides: “Cattle raising is [also now] causing fire,” alongside different parts like “extractive activities in the forest: wood for charcoal, hunting, land reclamation, land invasion, territorial occupations [and] disputes.”

Living alongside hearth

Fires have all the time been current on the Yucatán peninsula. From pre-Hispanic instances, Mayan farmers would observe managed burns throughout crop rotation to clear trimmed vegetation to develop maize, beans and squash.

These managed burns traditionally created nutrient-rich soil and aided biodiversity helpful for people. Sometimes small slash-and-burn operations bought out of hand and brought about wildfires — however this was uncommon.

Effectively, hearth was simply one other instrument for the Mayan farmers: an environment friendly method to clear land with out resorting to laborious machete work.

But now, wildfires are accelerating in each quantity and frequency. Rates of conflagration within the peninsula are spiky, however over time progressively rising.

Wildfires within the area quickly worsened within the aftermath of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, which left an enormous quantity of gas in felled bushes, sparking large fires the next 12 months.

Ten years later, there was one other spike, when fires set by farmers and drug traffickers spiralled uncontrolled, exacerbated by drought brought on by the El Niño climate system.

The resultant blazes burned by way of a patch of land the scale of Delaware and reworked Mexican attitudes to fireplace — prompting large-scale funding in coaching, analysis and coordination of group efforts to stem conflagrations.

This coaching would are available in helpful in 2023 when “the worst Mexican wildfire” of that 12 months, in line with native reporters, broke out in Cinco de Febrero, culling 2,600 hectares of bushes.

In response, personnel from the National Forestry Commission and the navy have been drawn from surrounding states together with Quintana Roo, Yucatán and Veracruz to fight the blaze.

Changing instances, change in authorities

Recently, Campeche’s state authorities has skilled one thing of a political sea change. After 93 years of dominance by the hands of the centrist PRI celebration, the individuals of Campeche elected Morena, a left-populist organisation, to energy.

Layda Sansores, the brand new Morena governor, has a blended file — rhetorically supporting crackdowns on unlawful forest clearance by sending out armed National Guard items, whereas deforestation accelerates.

Those I speak to in Cinco de Febrero really feel little is being performed by the ostensibly progressive authorities on this problem. But others are optimistic in regards to the financial advantages the left-wing Morena has introduced.

Don José’s predecessor, comissario Efraín Cú, not too long ago informed an area journalist whereas protesting within the capital, that anybody caught illegally logging on his village’s land or beginning fires would “be lynched by [his] comrades. Enough of the indifference of the state and the federal government, we will take justice into our own hands”.

And this is not just a problem for Cinco de Febrero. According to the NGO Global Forest Watch, the state of Campeche has lost 950 kilohectares (kha) of jungle – an area slightly larger than Cyprus – between 2001 and 2024, overtaking other southern states like Quintana Roo (650 kha) and Oaxaca (470 kha).

The region in which Cinco de Febrero resides, Champotón, is the third worst hit in the state by deforestation.

Living the Sembrando Vida

Sembrando Vida is the flagship programme of Mexico’s former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) who led Morena into government for the first time in 2018.

Introduced a year later, the policy was supposed to solve deforestation, help farmers diversify away from subsistence agriculture, redistribute wealth from the cities to the countryside and from the north to the south; and prevent rural populations from having to migrate to the USA for work.

It has transformed living standards in rural Mexico — a good number of people in Mexico City remarked to me how, between visits to the countryside, the eternal practice of employing donkeys and carts had suddenly been exchanged for quadbikes and motorbikes.

Indeed, the whole ejido buzzes with the sound of motorbikes, weaving in and out on jungle roads: “Before Sembrando Vida, a lot of people here didn’t have work,” adds Don Jose. “Those that did work often didn’t know when, or if, they were getting paid.”

This is a physical manifestation of AMLO’s motto: “por el bien de todos, primero los pobres.” (For the good of all, the poor first.)

However, critics worry that these transfers are creating clientelism and undermining the democratic autonomy of ejidos, making them dependent on local Morena politicians.

Importantly, the land has to be barren to be eligible for the programme. This led to a set of flawed incentives pushing farmers to cut down trees and clear previously forested plots to access government funding.

This style of deforestation, which involves rapid clearing of the land and replanting of saplings, also massively increases the risk of wildfire — young orchards are carbon rich, but lack the foliage cover of mature forests to trap moisture.

Sembrando Vida has been continued by AMLO’s successor President Claudia Sheinbaum and will probably last as long as her administration, which ends in 2030.

The forces of climate change and transformative government policy mean the stakes in places like Cinco de Febrero are high — Morena has bet the reputation of their government on the success of these places: poor, rural, southern, mostly indigenous.

In consequence, ejidos now matter to Mexico City’s pundit class more than ever: as a measure of the government’s success and the country’s direction.

And despite recent violent protests against her administration last year, Sheinbaum still polls approval ratings of nearly 70 per cent, testament to Morena’s reach in the campo.

Living among rural transformation

On a bright summer’s morning, I’m met in the Campeche city of Escárcega by Don José and Rose Mabille, a French postgraduate researcher based in Cinco de Febrero, before being driven for several hours to Don Jose’s home.

Don José’s family, all fluent Mayan-speakers up until recently, have lived on Cinco de Febrero’s land for generations. But ejidos, often conceived of as frozen-in-time by Mexico City elites, are rapidly changing: reacting to climate change and social change.

The Góngora family are relatively recent converts to the evangelical protestant Jehovah’s Witnesses — part of a growing move away from the traditions of folk-Catholicism in the region.

José’s daughter Gicela is a trained teacher. For now, she instructs the ejido’s children in a slanted alcove attached to José’s house.

However, later this year she plans to get married and move four hours away to Merida, effectively escaping the danger zone for wildfires.

“There have been many changes here since AMLO was elected,” says Don José. “Economic developments: direct transfers to farmers, cellular coverage, more efficient maize production.”

As he talks, we sit around a table covered in a purple cloth, a fan is running while dogs and semi-domesticated turkeys runvaround my feet: outside thunder cracks in the sky, rumbling its way closer.

It’s the rainy season in Cinco de Febrero, and aggressive downpours occur like clockwork at around 5pm in the afternoon. The real wildfire season in Campeche runs from February till May, when the rain stops and the forests dry out — creating explosively dry fuel in the process.

After the rain cools off, allowing the wifi to work again, Don José finds his phone and shows me photos of the charcoal sites on the far eastern fringes of the ejido.

He flips through his phone, displaying images of charred tree stumps, piles of logs, abandoned kilns and armed National Guards inspecting the site. “Nothing ever happens when we complain,” he says.

Money for birthday presents

A few hours later, Rose takes me by quadbike to talk to the manager of the government owned store in the ejido. She doesn’t want to give her name, but tells me that: “Sembrando Vida is very useful… I now have cedar, yucca and banana trees.”

These trees feed into a virtuous system for the shop manager, and link her to a wider system of direct transfer benefits pioneered by AMLO’s welfare programme and ministry.

The money she earns goes towards cleaning products, gasoline, seeds and birthday presents for her children.

When I ask the shopkeeper whether any Sembrando Vida technicians have ever asked her to cut down trees, or clear forest, to be eligible for the programme, she shakes her head.

Because much of the land available in Cinco de Febrero is barren, it has “not been necessary to clear the forest with machetes or controlled burns,” she tells me.

Indeed, most of the Sembrando Vida plots I visit are far away from the deep jungle, clustered within a 30-minute motorbike drive of the settlement.

According to the World Resources Institute, 5,500 hectares of forest were cleared in Campeche in 2019, the first year of Sembrando Vida — an area the size of Oxford.

Perhaps Sembrando Vida officials were more careful to not encourage the clearance of land for the replanting of orchards in an ejido so close to a state nature reserve: Balam Ku. There is also a sense that the programme has improved since 2018.

Back then there was controversy about government officials applying a blanket approach to reforestation — pushing trees that withered and died in the wrong soil, producing even more fuel for wildfires.

The shopkeeper tells me the local organisers of Sembrando Vida in the nearby town of Xpujil have made an effort to understand the ecology of Cinco de Febrero with groups of researchers visiting every month.

But she agrees that wildfires have got worse in the region over her lifetime (she’s about 50). She tells me she worries about her brother who is often called up during frontline efforts to fight wildfires with just a machete and bucket of water.

Out in the fields surrounding Cinco de Febrero, I meet a forestry group involved in the programme. There are a dozen motorbikes parked outside a gated orchard. A sign out front reads “cacicazgo (chiefdom) Los Humildes — Sembrando Vida”. There are several middle-aged Mexicans gathered under a palm-fronded hut, about equally split between men and women.

While I chat to them about the programme, they stand together and mix a fertiliser for the project’s orchards. I spot that one guy is wearing a Morena hat, while another has a t-shirt bearing a Movimiento Ciudadano (MC) party logo.

The MC and Morena are at different ends of the political spectrum — so I ask if they get on. “Oh these? Politicians just give them out: very useful as work clothes,” replies the ejidatario in the Morena hat.

There is only one person under the age of 40 in the group, a 24-year-old guy sitting perched on a table. He immediately stands out amongst the grizzled grey beards and salt and pepper hair of his elders.

While Sembrando Vida aims to stem the flow of young ejidatarios migrating to Merida, Mexico City and the USA through the provision of work, welfare and environmental protection: it’s only so successful.

Campeche, according to the government office for population, ranks low on international migration levels. However, Champotón (the area Cinco de Febrero is in) ranks as one of the highest in the state for migration, with an average emigrant age of 26.

One for all, all for one

Not all Sembrando Vida work is collaborative. Don José’s father-in-law, José Roberto, controls a parcel of land far outside the main settlement.

We find him carving wood with a machete under a corrugated tin roofed shack, while telling off a crowd of goats penned into a holding with metal wire.

A few yards down the road lies his Sembrando Vida plot, probably the biggest and most developed in the ejido.

There are ranks of mature orchards, neatly plotted out in rows and columns. Many of the trees are ripe with avocados and limes. Roberto’s granddaughter, Gicela, tells me that he undertook a lot of this work before Sembrando Vida started in 2019 — so he’s something of a pioneer.

Yet, in the distance, I can see the start of the dense forest, or the “el monte”, and burnt out stalks of dense jungle.

“There was a forest fire here four years ago,” Roberto tells me. “It was an accident started on a neighbouring field. This parcel of land used to be a sheep farm before the reforestation.”

Notably, Roberto, like the store manager, sells his produce locally in Cinco de Febrero. When I ask him if he reaches further afield, say in Escárcega, he tells me “no.”

Clearly, Sembrando Vida in Campeche has developed into something of a circular economy — these are not orchards aimed at international export.

Indeed, many years before the reforestation plan was introduced, Roberto grew maize and beans — traditional milpa foods cultivated by the Mayans. “This was our work,” he tells me.

When asked him if he prefers growing trees or traditional Mayan plants, he tells me he prefers the Milpa: “It was quicker, orchards take time.”

But what about the Mennonites of Mexico?

As I travel through the state of Campeche via train, crossing through small towns like Hecelchakán and Calkini, I spot vast fields of soybeans cutting through the scorched jungle.

These fields are owned by white bearded men in broad brimmed hats, braces and boots that I spot in nearby towns. “Communities of Mennonites arrived in Campeche about thirty years ago,” says Carlos Samayoa, head of Mexico field operations for Greenpeace, over the phone.

Indeed, large communities of these strict Christians were allowed to move to Campeche from northern Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s by the then governor Abelardo Carrillo Zavala.

The first Mennonite colony was set up in 1987 near Hopelchén and called itself ‘New Progress.’ As of 2025, there are now over 15,000 Mennonites in the state. But the Mennonites’ history in Mexico is much older, the first populations moved from the USA and Canada in the 1920s.

“Everyday you can see fires lit by the Mennonites to clear land and remove trees,” Samayoa claims. “There is massive commerce in seeds in the Campeche campo.”

Indeed, Campeche has witnessed increasing conflict between Mayan and Mennonite communities driven by the latter’s industrial-scale, intensive, export-orientated farming.

Over the last thirty years of trade liberalisation, including NAFTA and USMCA, it has been the Mennonites, not the Mayans, who have got the upper hand in export-led production aimed at an American market.

According to Mayan ejidatarios, Mennonite farming practices frequently lead to deforestation and the pollution of waterways with pesticides.

An elderly farmer in Cinco de Febrero tells me he has witnessed Mennonites fill glass Coca-Cola bottles with gasoline and launch them into the forest to clear land for soy beans.

To prove the point, he goes into his shed to find his phone, coming out and showing me pictures of makeshift Molotov cocktails sent to him by friends over WhatsApp.

I can’t verify that these handmade grenades were made by Mennonites — but various outlets report having seen the protestant community clear land with fire, without permission.

A 2017 study conducted in Universidad Veracruzana found that Mennonite land holdings in Campeche had rates of deforestation four times higher than ejidos.

Between Campeche and Cinco de Febrero, in the small town of Escárcega, I witness clusters of Mennonites, tight family groups dressed up in dungarees and dresses, dining on tacos in a cafeteria.

Despite the deforestation and religious suspicion of the modern world, Mennonite farmers frequently come into Mayan communities to sell their surplus goods — sustaining a delicate compact between the groups.

Rural transformation – for better, for worse?

In Mexico City, I meet Alex González Ormerod at a cafe in Colonia Noche Buena in a narrow street of colourful houses next to a park.

He is the editor of The Mexico Political Economist, a site dedicated to the country’s current affairs. Over coffee, and then a long walk in Parque Hundido, González Ormerod expresses his scepticism about Sembrando Vida.

“It is forcing communities to import from outside once trees are cut down,” he tells me. “Peasant communities become reliant on Morena as a political force. Which effectively allows for greater clientelism.

“USMCA, the 2020 free trade agreement between the USA, Mexico and Canada, has [basically] destroyed Mexican agriculture. Morena needs to subsidise subsistence farming now.”

Indeed, because the Mexican government, bound by the USMCA, can’t protect indigenous maize producers from the effects of large-scale American corn imports into the country, alternatives have to be found.

Others are more positive. Commentator and political scientist Viri Rios, who runs the Mexico Decoded site, tells me: “The programme is solving real problems with cash transfers.”

She goes on to say that it is aimed at “solving an issue of epochs— centuries of poverty in the campo Mexicano”.

However, she is sceptical that government programmes are going far enough: “Sembrando Vida goods are only circulating locally at the moment.”

Rios says small farmers still don’t have access to international markets: “Walmart buys from small farmers in Costa Rica, [but] in Mexico, Walmart buys from massive-farm exporters. [So] how do we get wage growth for small farmers in this situation?”

She adds that ejido land is yet another historical constraint to rising wages in the Mexican countryside: “Often ejido land is the worst land, landlords kept the best property during the Mexican Revolution. When ejidos do make money [it’s] not from agriculture — but from selling land to develop housing.”

Ivet Reyes Maturano, an anthropologist and activist with Articulación Yucatán (a group focused on the environment and local development), says Sembrando Vida was well intentioned.

“[It] was an acknowledgement that after all the neoliberal reforms [of the last thirty years] farmers had been the worst affected. That farmers are the first people affected by climate change.”

But she adds: “Some grassroots [activists] see Sembrando Vida as a way to prevent mobilisation against megaprojects… as an [emotive] appeal to the memory of the land.”

Mexican contradictions

Back in Cinco de Febrero, day breaks and it’s time for the menfolk to go out on patrol. Farmers are gathered around the hall with machetes and old-fashioned rifles.

As I’m gearing myself up for a three hour drive and potential violence, the raid is called off. It seems last night’s rains were so heavy that the narrow jungle road leading east has been blocked off by floods.

Don José shrugs and cancels the patrol. Campesinos yawn and hop back on their motorcycles, driving towards their beds and a full night’s sleep.

For now, Cinco de Febrero remains in stasis. Suspended between local government indifference, megaprojects, environmental degradation and land invasions.

In contrast, there seems to be a large amount of good will among the ejidatarios for the national government. Programs like Sembrando Vida have transformed the deep southern campo of Mexico, creating a de facto rural welfare state and moving millions of people away from subsistence farming and towards something that looks more sustainable.

The problem of mass deforestation caused by the project doesn’t seem to have disrupted this ejido either. Instead, the biggest threat to both the people and the environment of Cinco de Febrero remains wildfires: a force that is, by nature, chaotic and unpredictable.

The irony is inescapable: Sembrando Vida has introduced bikes, money transfers, infrastructure and a reanimated dignity to Cinco de Febrero — locations like this are actually legible to the Mexican state. But dignity means little if the forest that sustains it burns.

The ejidatarios are concurrently rising orchards whereas defending their jungle from charcoal burners. They’ve accepted authorities cash whereas remaining ignored by authorities officers. They’ve been granted conservation awards for forests which are disappearing.

In Cinco de Febrero, as maybe throughout rural Mexico, progress and destruction have turn out to be inconceivable to untangle — two sides of the identical growth undertaking, racing towards an unknown end line.