WANDERLAND, Peru — After weeks of living in jungle tents, the few Mennonite families trying to find a new home deep in the Peruvian Amazon began to despair. As they tried to clear the forest, they were attacked by wasps. Heavy rains turned the road to their camp to mud.

As supplies ran out, some wanted to turn back. Instead, they worked even harder and eventually established an enclave.

“There is a place here where I wanted to live, so we came and developed part of it,” recalls Wilhelm Thiessen, a Mennonite farmer. “That’s what everyone did to have a place to live.”

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Today, seven years later, the collection of farms has become the thriving Wanderland colony, home to about 150 families, a church – which also serves as a school – and a cheese factory.

It is one of many Mennonite settlements that have taken root throughout the Amazon, transforming forests into thriving farms but also raising concerns among environmentalists about deforestation of a jungle already threatened by industries such as cattle ranching and illegal gold mining.

Mennonite communities have also come under the authorities’ scrutiny, including in Peru. Several of them are being investigated there. The communities are accused of clearing forest without permission. The communities deny any wrongdoing.

About a century ago, the first Mennonites from Canada began emigrating to Latin America after the country abolished exemptions from compulsory education and military service.

The then President of Mexico, Álvaro Obregón, sought to consolidate the rebellious northern regions after the Mexican Revolution. He gave the Mennonites undeveloped land and guaranteed them the right to live as they wished.

In the decades that followed, other Latin American countries extended similar invitations to Europeans in their efforts to expand their agricultural capacities.

Today, more than 200 Mennonite colonies in nine Latin American countries occupy about 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 experienced the fastest growth of any Latin American country and now has 120 Mennonite colonies, while in Peru, analysts say, half a dozen settlements have sprung up in the last decade, including Wanderland.

Mennonites have also claimed land in Suriname, a small South American country with rich, pristine forests, sparking protests from indigenous groups and the Maroons, descendants of enslaved people.

“They’re basically trying to find the last places on Earth where there are these huge, contiguous areas that can support their lifestyle, and those happen to be the forest areas in the Amazon,” said Matt Finer, a senior research specialist at Amazon Conservation, a nonprofit environmental organization.

On site, Wanderland looks like a page from the past. Horse-drawn carriages carry passengers along dirt roads. Men in overalls toil in the fields that stretch out behind simple wooden houses.

There is no electricity. At nightfall, families eat by candlelight after saying grace in Plautdietsch, a Germanic dialect spoken almost exclusively among Mennonites in America.

Fragments of what was once wild remain. A pet monkey on a veranda. A parrot in a cage. In a backyard shed, 73-year-old Johan Neufeld showed three lowland pacas, large rodents from the Amazon region valued for their meat. He caught them in the forest and wants to try breeding them.

Wanderland is an “Old Colony” settlement made up of Mennonites whose history dates back to an 18th-century settlement, Chortitza, which is now part of Ukraine.

Like other Mennonites, they follow the teachings of the Dutch priest Menno Simons, who was persecuted during the Reformation for opposing infant baptism and conscription. Over time, however, life away from the rest of the world and rejection of new technologies became hallmarks of the old colonies’ faith and culture – and migration a means of preserving it.

“Our ancestors thought that if we live far away in the countryside, we have better opportunities to control evil,” said Johan Bueckert, a farmer from the Old Colony who now lives in Providencia, a colony near Wanderland. “We want to live like them. We don’t want constant change.”

As Mennonite colonies in various countries become more populous and prosperous, the value of the surrounding land increases – and it becomes increasingly difficult to live a meager life as a farmer on cheap land. So groups split off to establish new settlements.

Thiessen helped found Wanderland after moving from Nueva Esperanza, one of Bolivia’s largest Mennonite settlements, because he had children who needed farmland to support their own families.

“In Bolivia there are many colonies, but almost no land left,” he said.

Worldly temptations, especially smartphones, are also making their way into daily life as Bolivian colonies become more densely populated, says Hernan Neufeld, 39, one of Wanderland’s religious leaders, known as bishops.

“Many brothers and sisters have lost their way,” he said. “So we looked for a more remote place to see if we can enforce our standards.”

Since the first Mennonite settlements appeared in the Peruvian Amazon in 2017, they have cleared more than 7,700 hectares of forest there, according to an analysis by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), which records deforestation.

This is only a fraction of the at least 370,000 hectares of forest that have been lost in Peru in recent years, most of it due to small-scale farming. The general deforestation of the Amazon region is a concern for many environmentalists, as the rainforest absorbs heat-trapping carbon emissions and is thus a crucial regulator of the global climate.

Mennonites interviewed in Wanderland and Providencia said they were unfamiliar with the term “climate change” and did not know what impact their practices would have on the Amazon.

Although their leaders acknowledged that parts of the forest had been cleared for their colonies, they did not believe that they had done anything wrong.

“Every colony clears a little forest, but it is very little,” said Peter Dyck, a farmer from Belize and leader of Providencia. “The forest is big.”

The colonies, he added, produced soy, rice and corn to sell in Peru, thus contributing to people’s nutrition and economic growth.

Nevertheless, the Mennonites are becoming the government’s target.

Peruvian authorities are investigating Wanderland, Providencia and a third Mennonite colony, accusing them of clearing forest without the required permits. They are demanding compensation and prison sentences for the colonies’ leaders, said Jorge Guzman, a lawyer representing Peru’s environment ministry in the case.

But the three colonies deny doing anything illegal, arguing that they did not need permits because they already had agricultural titles to the land issued by the regional government, said Medelu Saldaña, a local politician who advises the colonies.

The colonies bought their land from a logging company that had already cleared the forest of hardwood trees, Saldaña added.

But officials and experts said satellite images showed the colonies had cleared carbon-rich primary forest. And even if parts had been destroyed by deforestation, the colonies would still need permits and approvals because of the size of their operations.

“They want a piece of paper that trumps reality,” Guzman said.

Some Mennonite experts believe that Mennonite interests are being unfairly targeted because far larger areas of forest are being consumed for other activities in the Peruvian Amazon.

In Peru, palm oil and cocoa plantations that supply global corporations have already replaced large parts of the forest, while drug trafficking, illegal logging and gold mining are becoming increasingly widespread.

“I think the Mennonites are the focus of a lot of criticism right now because they are a distinct group of people,” says Kennert Giesbrecht, a Canadian and former editor-in-chief of a German-language biweekly newspaper that is widely read in the Mennonite diaspora.

A few hours downstream from Wanderland, a new Mennonite village, Salamanca, is being built.

Cornelius Niekoley, a farmer and bishop from Mexico, traveled to Peru to consider purchasing property for his adult children and their families.

“Good price and nice land,” he said. “Not too many stones. If there are too many stones, it is difficult to clear the land.”

Niekoley was born in Belize to a Mexican father and a Canadian mother. He and his children live in a colony in Quintana Roo in southeastern Mexico, where some of his neighbors have already moved to Salamanca in search of cheaper land.

Looking at the village, Niekoley said: “There are not many yet, but more will come.”

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