Mennonites in Mexico: Concern Over Deforestation and a Measles Outbreak

From northern Mexico to the dense jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula, a quiet transformation is taking place. Where there once stood centuries-old forests full of mahogany and cedar, bees and jaguars, there are now endless green fields of soybeans stretching to the horizon. This change is being driven by a small, tight-knit group of people who are not Maya, not Mexican, but Mennonite.

To understand how this community arrived here and why they are at the center of such intense debate, we have to go back a hundred years.

The Mennonites are a Christian group that began in Europe nearly five centuries ago. They believe in adult baptism, in living simply, and in pacifism. More importantly, they do not believe in allowing governments to dictate how they run their churches or schools. Facing what they considered religious persecution, they established a diaspora worldwide.

In the 1870s, many sailed to Canada. But by the early 1900s, the Canadian government passed laws requiring all children to attend public English or French schools. For the Mennonites, this was a threat to their identity. They sent scouts south to find a new home.

In 1921, they found one. The president of Mexico wanted to settle the unoccupied lands in the north. He promised the Mennonites freedom to practice their religion, to run their own schools, and to be exempt from military service. In 1922, the first trains carrying families arrived in the state of Chihuahua. They bought land, dug wells, and built villages. They planted wheat and corn and introduced a type of cheese that would become famous across Mexico.

In the 1980s, Mennonite colonies in the north were running out of good land. Some families began to look south toward the Yucatán Peninsula in larger numbers. The first major Mennonite migration arrived in the municipality of Hopelchén, Campeche. They bought land, cleared it, and planted crops.

At first, their arrival did not cause much concern. The state government welcomed them as modern farmers who could help the region produce more food. But the land they bought was not empty. It was the ancestral home of the Maya people, who had lived there for thousands of years.

The Maya farmers do not farm the way the Mennonites did. They practiced a traditional method of growing corn, beans, and squash together in small plots surrounded by the jungle. Many Maya families also kept bees. The Yucatán Peninsula is one of the best places in the world for honey, and the Maya had been keeping native bees since long before the Spanish arrived.

The Mennonites practice large-scale industrial agriculture. They cleared huge areas of forest to plant single crops. Starting in the 2000s, the main crop became soybeans. And not just any soybeans. According to reports, many Mennonite farmers began planting genetically modified soy, even after the Mexican government banned it in 2015 following a lawsuit by Maya beekeepers.

The beekeepers said their bees were dying. They said the pesticides sprayed on the soybean fields were drifting into the jungle and killing the insects that produced their honey. They argued that the deforestation was destroying the flowers that the bees needed to survive. A beekeeper named Everardo Chablé described watching the forest disappear. “When deforestation started,” he said, “they destroyed everything from millennia back.”

The numbers are stark. In Hopelchén, the Mennonites produce about 90 percent of the region’s soybeans. In 202,2 the municipality was the top producer of soy in all of Mexico, with nearly 50,000 hectares planted. Meanwhile, Maya beekeepers say the number of hives they need to produce a ton of honey has tripled in the last twenty years.

The tension is not just about bees. It is about power and money. A university study found that the Mennonites have more capital, more machinery, and more technical knowledge than their Maya neighbors. They are plugged into a network of big agribusiness companies that buy their soy. The Maya farmers, who have been on the land for centuries, often struggle to compete.

Yet the relationship is not always hostile. The two groups interact every day, buying and selling goods, sharing equipment, and sometimes helping each other out. Some Maya farmers admire the Mennonites’ work ethic. But underneath the daily cooperation, there is a deep worry that the land cannot sustain both ways of life.

While the environmental conflict has been building for decades in the south, a different kind of crisis has recently erupted in the north, where the Mennonites first settled. In early 2025, an eight-year-old boy from the Mennonite community near Cuauhtémoc traveled to Texas to visit relatives. When he came back, he brought measles with him. The disease spread quickly through the colony. Because many Mennonites are not vaccinated, it moved through schools and churches and then into the wider community, infecting Indigenous Raramuri people who work in the fields and cheese factories.

By May, Mexican officials had documented more than 900 cases and one death. Health workers say the real number is probably higher. A nurse estimated that 70 percent of the community is not vaccinated.

The reasons are complicated. While Mennonite communities are not a monolith, with different groups varying in their agricultural practices, they generally avoid interactions with outsiders and adhere to religious orthodoxy.

The Mennonites have historically distrusted outsiders and government authorities. That distrust extends to vaccines. Some families get their information from relatives in the United States and Canada, where anti-vaccine messages are common. One man told reporters that he refuses vaccines as a matter of personal freedom. “If we can’t make our own decisions,” he said, “we don’t live in a democracy.”

The outbreak has put a spotlight on the tension between the Mennonites’ desire to be left alone and the country’s public health needs. Some leaders are working with health authorities to encourage families to get the shot. But they acknowledge that many will never agree.

Meanwhile, the consequences are being felt by people like Gloria Elizabeth Vega, an Indigenous Raramuri woman who caught measles from a coworker. She was vaccinated, so her case was mild, but she had to take 10 days off work without full pay. Gloria Elizabeth struggles to buy food and school supplies for her daughter. She wishes the Mennonites would think about others. “They say, ‘Well, I have enough to be fine,'” she said. “But they don’t think about that other person next to them.”