At 4am I wake in my hammock. I slip into a pair of work trousers and muddy boots and stand outside Don José’s house in the pitch black.
Within minutes, I’m picked up by a quad bike and we drive towards the village hall in Cinco de Febrero, a tiny hamlet in the south-east Mexican state of Campeche on the Yucatán peninsula, about two hours’ drive from the nearest city.
Outside the building, groups of men gather with large machetes and loaded rifles. I recognise a few of the local farmers, standing in caps and large rubber boots as they shiver in the early morning cold. It seems like the plan to confront a rival village, legally or not, is finally coming to fruition.
There has been talk in the community for days about splitting men up into night watches to look for arsonists in the jungle borders of their land. Now we’re facing a three-hour drive on quad bikes through dense forest to get there.
I’m staying with Don José, the most senior elder of Cinco de Febrero and a farmer whose family have been in Campeche for generations. I was told to set my alarm if I wanted to tag along on the raid. When I wake to the sound of crickets and monkeys, José is already out of the house and gathering his forces at the village hall.
This flurry of dawn activity is all linked to fevered speculation over the cause of rampant wildfires that have ravaged the land in recent years.
The spark that triggers the fire
A few days earlier, I attend a meeting of locals convinced that the cause of this destruction is the people of Laguna Grande, neighbouring farmers allegedly hooked on arson.
As I wait for the discussions to start in a breezeblock building in the sweltering heat, I gaze out at the horizon. In the far distance, clustered next to a series 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. A hundred yards away, contrasting sharply, is the Tren Maya, a recently-built high speed railway screeching across the land — cutting it in two.
Cinco de Febrero itself is very small, with no more than 800 to 900 people. It is made up of flat-roofed houses, some painted in vivid chalky primary colours. Others are more utilitarian, grey blocks with simple iron roofs, tucked in amongst the green of the jungle.
The village sits within a vast 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, causing incredibly 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, dressed in 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 gone by; still, he’s keen to hold forth.
Several young men outside the hall, clutching rifles and machetes or sitting on motorbikes, cast aspersions on Jorge’s fears. “There are no narcos here,” they tell me — Campeche is one of Mexico’s safest states: out of the way of drug cartels’ smuggling routes. Instead, insist the youths, the wildfires are almost certainly being caused by Laguna Grande.
Based on the evidence gathered by the men, Laguna Grande has taken to felling trees and building charcoal ovens on Cinco de Febrero land, accidentally sparking wider conflagrations in the forests. There are many theories as to why one village might invade another’s land to fell trees and produce charcoal.
At the extreme end, some believe charcoal burners are connected to cartels and coerced into extraction from the forest. However, it is more likely that Laguna Grande’s residents are being forced into illegal logging by economic incentives: the drying up of other cash crops, a lack of forest in their own areas and unclear legal boundaries between different villages’ claims on land.
The locals, or ejidatarios, gathering together on this hot day, belong to an ejido: a Mexican communal land holding that has its roots in pre-Hispanic indigenous systems. The modern ejido, however, finds its origins in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, when rights to communal land were embedded into the constitution under Article 27.
The farmers of Cinco de Febrero received their territory in 1963 during the 16-million-hectare land reforms of left-wing president Adolfo López Mateos. Recently they were given generous government compensation to the tune of £236,400 after 124 hectares of their land was snapped up for the train that now screams through their village.
The fledgling orchards I spot are the work of the Mexican government’s controversial agricultural reforestation programme, Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life).
The project aims to redress both rural poverty and deforestation by directly paying Mexican farmers around 5,000 pesos a month to set aside 2.5 hectares of their land for the cultivation of timber, fruit trees and coffee. But its detractors warn it has cultivated a new breed of farmer, dependent on handouts.
Such a combination of rapidly increasing wildfires, massive infrastructure projects and government intervention in formerly subsistence-level farming are transforming these isolated, primarily indigenous Mayan-speaking settlements beyond recognition — some say for the better, others for the worst.
The ejido gathers
Inside the hall, Don José holds court. I am met by a dozen middle-aged and elderly Mexican men wearing caps and broad-brimmed canvas hats. In the passage, younger men crowd the doors: peering into the proceedings. Off to the side sit a cluster of elderly women who mostly remain silent — occasionally walking over to nudge their husbands into speaking.
Don José, full name José del Carmen García Góngora, promises the assembly he will take photos and names of those from Laguna Grande and refer them to the environmental agency.
After a few minutes, he puts a plan to organise patrols into the deep forests to look for arsonists to a vote: there are murmurs of dissent and some heavy questioning from Don José’s brother — but finally the motion is passed.
Jose ends proceedings by emphasising the importance of Cinco de Febrero’s large tracts of unspoiled forest now under threat from wildfires.
He also highlights how illegal charcoal burning has been an issue for decades, only recently spiralling out into active wildfires, threatening habitats that are vital for ecotourism and future government funding.
Indeed, the ejido was awarded a conservation award from the Mexican ministry of the environment in 2024 for voluntarily maintaining 16,000 hectares of forest out of the 32,000 they were given in the 60s.
This award allows them priority access to lobby for government grants given out by the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) and easier access to NGO programmes.
But conservation of forests is in constant tension with illegal logging. According to local newspapers, over 8,000 hectares have been illegally cleared in the last decade alone, mostly for wood and charcoal.
The ejido have made several unsuccessful attempts to petition the state government in San Francisco de Campeche.
Cinco de Febrero - at the intersection
While in Campeche, I drive out to the ECOSUR (College of the Southern Border) campus outside of town. ECOSUR is a research centre for scientific investigations into issues affecting Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala and Belize.
Hidden in the jungle inside a vast white modernist building, I meet Claudia Monzón Alvarado. Alvarado is a researcher specialising in the environment and local communities in the Yucatán.
Alvarado points out the ejido’s position as an intersection between the Sembrando Vida experiment and the wildfires.
With a cutting knife-like motion, she slashes her hand across a map with Cinco de Febrero in 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 adds. “But there are no clear strategies around restoration of forests: is the forest resilient enough to fix itself? Or should we intervene?”
Alvarado points out that it was often the Mayans who were 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 adds: “Cattle raising is [also now] causing fire,” alongside other elements like “extractive activities in the forest: wood for charcoal, hunting, land reclamation, land invasion, territorial occupations [and] disputes.”
Living alongside fire
Fires have always been present on the Yucatán peninsula. From pre-Hispanic times, Mayan farmers would practice controlled burns during crop rotation to clear trimmed vegetation to grow maize, beans and squash.
These controlled burns historically created nutrient-rich soil and aided biodiversity useful for humans. Sometimes small slash-and-burn operations got out of hand and caused wildfires — but this was rare.
Effectively, fire was just another tool for the Mayan farmers: an efficient way to clear land without resorting to laborious machete work.
But now, wildfires are accelerating in both volume and frequency. Rates of conflagration in the peninsula are spiky, but over time gradually rising.
Wildfires in the region rapidly worsened in the aftermath of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, which left a huge amount of fuel in felled trees, sparking massive fires the following year.
Ten years later, there was another spike, when fires set by farmers and drug traffickers spiralled out of control, exacerbated by drought caused by the El Niño weather system.
The resultant blazes burned through a patch of land the size of Delaware and transformed Mexican attitudes to fire — prompting large-scale investment in training, research and coordination of community efforts to stem conflagrations.
This training would come in useful in 2023 when “the worst Mexican wildfire” of that year, according to local reporters, broke out in Cinco de Febrero, culling 2,600 hectares of trees.
In response, personnel from the National Forestry Commission and the navy were drawn from surrounding states including Quintana Roo, Yucatán and Veracruz to combat the blaze.
Changing times, change in government
Recently, Campeche’s state government has experienced something of a political sea change. After 93 years of dominance at the hands of the centrist PRI party, the people of Campeche elected Morena, a left-populist organisation, to power.
Layda Sansores, the new Morena governor, has a mixed record — rhetorically supporting crackdowns on illegal forest clearance by sending out armed National Guard units, while deforestation accelerates.
Those I talk to in Cinco de Febrero feel little is being done by the ostensibly progressive government on this issue. But others are positive about the economic benefits the left-wing Morena has brought.
Don José’s predecessor, comissario Efraín Cú, recently told a local journalist while protesting in the capital, that anyone caught illegally logging on his village’s land or starting 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
s-Sembrando-Vida-supported-plot-north-of-Ejido-Cinco-de-Febero-Campeche-2025-Samue.jpeg)
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 brought motorcycles, cash transfers, infrastructure and a reanimated dignity to Cinco de Febrero — places like this are now legible to the Mexican state. But dignity means little if the forest that sustains it burns.
The ejidatarios are simultaneously growing orchards while defending their jungle from charcoal burners. They've accepted government money while remaining ignored by government officials. They've been granted conservation awards for forests that are disappearing.
In Cinco de Febrero, as perhaps across rural Mexico, progress and destruction have become impossible to untangle — two sides of the same development project, racing toward an unknown finish line.
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