WANDERLAND, Peru — After weeks of living in jungle tents, the handful of Mennonite families trying to make a new home deep in the Peruvian Amazon began to despair. Wasps attacked as they tried to clear forest. Heavy rains turned the road to their camp to mud.
Running low on supplies, some wanted to turn back. Instead, they worked harder and eventually carved out an enclave.
“There’s a place here where I wanted to live, so we came and opened part of it up,” recalled Wilhelm Thiessen, a Mennonite farmer. “That’s what everyone did to have a place to live.”
Today, seven years later, the cluster of homesteads is now a thriving colony, Wanderland, home to roughly 150 families, a church — which doubles as a school — and a cheese-processing facility.
It is one of a string of Mennonite settlements that have taken root throughout the Amazon, turning forest into thriving farms but also raising concerns among environmentalists about deforestation of a jungle already under threat from industries such as cattle ranching and illegal gold mining.
Mennonite communities have come under official scrutiny, as well, including in Peru, where authorities are investigating several, accusing them of clearing forest without required permits. The colonies deny wrongdoing.
Mennonites first started migrating to Latin America from Canada about a century ago, after the country ended their exemptions from education requirements and military service.
The president of Mexico at the time, Álvaro Obregón, eager to consolidate rebellious northern regions following the Mexican Revolution, gave Mennonites uncultivated land and guarantees that they could live as they wished.
In subsequent decades, other Latin American countries, seeking to expand their agricultural frontiers, made similar invitations.
Today, more than 200 Mennonite colonies in nine countries in Latin America occupy some 9.64 million acres, an area larger than the Netherlands, where their denomination 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 now has 120 Mennonite colonies, while in the past decade a half dozen settlements, including Wanderland, have emerged in Peru, according to analysts.
Mennonites have also sought land in Suriname, a small South American country rich in pristine forests, setting off protests from Indigenous groups and Maroons, the descendants of enslaved people.
“They’re basically trying to find the last places on Earth that still have these just huge, continuous areas that can support their lifestyle, and that just happens to be forested areas in the Amazon,” said Matt Finer, a senior research specialist at Amazon Conservation, an environmental nonprofit.