Latin America

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Dan Collyns in Wanderland
Sat 10 Sep 2022 19.00 EDT

A brush with the law has alarmed the community of about 100 families who fear losing the land they have made their home


Were it not for the ebullient fecundity of the Amazon rainforest surrounding it, Wanderland could almost be a stretch of Dutch farmland from the 19th century; a straight muddy track bisects rows of neatly spaced farmyards with perpendicular houses and barns.

A typical morning begins as horse-drawn buggies driven by smiling blond-haired, blue-eyed boys collect shiny churns of fresh milk from farm gates to be made into cheese. The name given to this pastoral idyll carved out of thick foliage of the jungle seems to need little translation, even from Plautdietsch, the mixture of Low German and Dutch spoken by its inhabitants.

But there is unease in this rustic paradise. It is one of three Mennonite communities being investigated by Peruvian prosecutors over accusations of illegally deforesting more than 3,440 hectares (34 sq km) of tropical rainforest in the past five years. The brush with the law has alarmed the community of about 100 families who fear they could lose the land which they have made their home.

Abraham Thiesen, 44, who arrived to Peru with his wife and six children in 2015, is among several hundred of the secretive Anabaptist Christian group which traces its origins to 16th-century Friesland who migrated from Bolivia, along with others from Belize, where they have long-established populations.

Thiesen, president of the Wanderland Mennonite association, says they acquired the land in good faith for agricultural purposes on the understanding that they would be granted legal titles once the area was cleared for farming.

. . .

But these Old Order Mennonites, the most orthodox of the pacifist sect, which has spread from Canada to India in their search for isolation and grand expanses of land to farm, may have fallen afoul of the notorious informality and corruption often linked to land-titling in the Peruvian Amazon.

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More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/11/mennonites-peru-deforestation-permits

(In time, watching Peruvian news, you'll realize why Peru has had such a wildly corrupt, powerful, racist legislature so long. )