There was something almost eery about it: a crossroads of dirt tracks cleared out of the forest running dead straight in all four directions for who-knew-how-far. But nothing else. No other sign of life - no houses, no vehicles, not even the cry of a bird.
A little deeper into the forest, away from the road, we found something: a clearing about the size of a few soccer fields. There was a grey box trailer in the middle, a yellow Japanese bulldozer next to it, and one or two other pieces of heavy equipment. All around was just bare brown earth, exposed roots and a number of sorry-looking tree trunks - the remains of recently-bulldozed forest. Fires had ripped through a couple of weeks previously, and a giant, felled “toborochi” - an emblematic, revered species in this part of the world - lay off to one side, still smoking.
This, then, was what a brand new Mennonite colony in remote Bolivia looked like. So new there were still no houses and apparently no inhabitants.
Although it has garnered very little attention internationally, Bolivia is right at the centre of the world’s deforestation crisis, having lost more tropical primary forest in 2024 and 2025 than any other country except Brazil, according to figures released last month by the US-based NGO World Resources Institute. Surprising as it might seem, Mennonites - members of a pacific Anabaptist Christian denomination tracing its origins back to the 16th century Protestant Reformation in western Europe - have been playing an outsized role in that crisis. According to a 2024 report by the NGO Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Laboral y Agrario (CEDLA), 15% and 16% of Bolivian deforestation between 2010-2015 and 2016-2022 happened in Mennonite colonies, despite the Mennonites only constituting a minority of the population.
In fact, those percentages are almost certainly an underestimate because some Mennonites also farm land beyond their colonies, as they call them, and because they’ve been establishing new colonies faster than anyone can keep track of. While CEDLA estimated the Mennonite population in Bolivia had doubled between 2013 and 2023 and stated that “currently there are more than 100” colonies in the country, just a couple of months later the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), based in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, sold us a December 2022 map marking 123 colonies but told us there were actually now “more than 130.”
That was why this colony, called Bella Italia, was so significant. It was so new that it wasn’t on any map yet - not CEDLA’s, not any other NGO’s, not even the MCC’s.
The heat in the clearing was fierce, in the mid-30s Celsius. Around the back of the trailer there were further signs of life: large plastic bottles of sugary drinks sweating in the sun, various tools, a carton of something-or-other, and a towel and various items of clothing hung up to dry. The door was open: it looked like someone had been there until just recently.
Suddenly a white estate car drew up, throwing up great clouds of orange dust, and two men climbed out. One, whose name turned out to be Peter Friesen, was a white man wearing blue dungarees, a checked shirt and a huge straw hat pulled low over his face - typical garb for what are known as “Old Colony” Mennonites. The other man, a Bolivian, was either a taxi driver or Friesen’s chauffeur, since an “Old Colony” Mennonite wouldn’t ever get behind the wheel of a car. Some aspects of modern technology they embraced, such as bulldozers and tractors, but others, like TV, the internet, so-called “smartphones” and rubber tires, they eschewed.
In recent years the Mennonites in Bolivia, as well as certain other Latin American countries like Peru and Paraguay, have received more and more media attention as their forest-felling exploits have become better understood, although in Bolivia in particular they’ve been clearing huge tracts of forest for decades. According to Canadian geographer Yann le Polain de Waroux and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, there are more Mennonite colonies in Bolivia than any other Latin American country - with an estimated 20+ founded in the 1990s, 25 between 2000 and 2009, 30 between 2010 and 2019, and another 25+ since 2020, coming to more than 130 in total. But what were these newly-founded colonies like, and what did the Mennonites themselves have to say about things?
Friesen didn’t appear at all surprised to find us - three foreigners and one Bolivian, making a film for the UK-based Gecko Project - there in Bella Italia, poking about his new home, remote and uncharted as it was. The colony had been founded within the last year, he told us, and there were just six families living there, all in box trailers like the one in front of us.
“While there’s no other option,” he said, speaking Spanish with a strong German accent, since among themselves the Mennonites speak a “Low German” dialect.
What had it been like when they arrived?
“Nice, green, humid. All forest. It wasn’t burned like it is now. We had to clear it and make the tracks, and that’s how we got in here. Tough work.”
They had been clearing about three hectares of forest a day, Friesen estimated, with the bulldozer.
“That’s when things are going well,” he said.
One of eight siblings - two brothers and six sisters - Friesen was head of the new colony and clear about what the future held. Many more families would arrive, he said, and much more forest would be bulldozed. Situated in the far east of the 370,000 km² Santa Cruz region, close to the Brazilian border, their aim was to till most of the land intensively and grow crops at large-scale for sale.
What sort of crops exactly?
“Soy, corn, sorghum, peanuts, all of that,” Friesen said.
No doubt soy would be the most important. The country’s most widely-grown, exported crop, Bolivia is a top 10 global soy producer, although a long way behind countries like the US, Brazil and Argentina. In recent years the most significant importers have been other Latin American countries: Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile, with companies like the US-based Cargill playing a key trading role.
Indeed, soy, along with beef, is one of the biggest drivers of Bolivian deforestation - with Santa Cruz, constituting a third of the entire country, the most impacted region. According to a 2022 report by the NGO TIERRA, 83% of deforestation since 2013 when the government began implementing its controversial “Patriotic Agenda 2025” happened in Santa Cruz. Like many other NGOs, TIERRA argues that legislation and government policies directly or indirectly promoting large-scale agriculture is fundamental to explaining why Bolivia has been losing so much forest.
That and the fact that demand for Bolivian soy remains ongoing, that companies like Cargill et al are prepared to exploit and/or encourage it, and because people like Friesen are willing to hack their homes out of the forest, despite the heat, threat of fires, lack of infrastructure and their distance from potential markets. That was to say nothing of Santa Cruz’s recent droughts, which some observers believe threatens the long-term viability of the soy sector.
But none of this seemed to worry Friesen.
“The lorries can come and pick the soy up and take it to Santa Cruz or the [Brazilian] border,” he said.
When it came to soy, the Mennonites certainly knew what they were talking about, having pioneered its commercial cultivation in Bolivia decades ago, and over the years consistently producing an outsized percentage of the country’s total output. According to the Cámara Agropecuaria del Oriente, a Santa Cruz-based agribusiness lobby, the Mennonites had been growing more than half of all Bolivian soy in the early 1990s, before declining to 22% a decade later. In 2011, according to another lobby group, the Asociación de Productores de Oleaginosas y Trigo, the Mennonites were producing a third of Bolivian soy, while in 2023 Cargill told the NGO Global Witness they “represent about 35% of today’s soy production in Bolivia.”
“[We can sell it] wherever is closest,” Friesen told us. “Wherever it pays better.”
Bella Italia had been founded, he explained, because of an urgent need for more land. He and the other families had previously lived in one of the oldest Mennonite colonies in Bolivia, Swift Current, which had been established in the 1960s by Mennonites from a colony also called Swift Current in Mexico, which in turn had been founded in the 1920s by Mennonites from a colony with the same name again in Canada. The very first Mennonites in Bolivia had arrived in the 1950s, from Paraguay.
The only reason we knew Bella Italia existed was because we had visited Swift Current and the new colony had come up in conversation after we asked one of the authorities there if he knew anyone who was trying to buy land elsewhere in the country. It wasn’t the first “daughter” colony Mennonites from Swift Current had spawned. There had been others over the years - at least six, according to Yann le Polain de Waroux et al - but none quite as far east or remote.
“Swift was filling up,” Friesen told us. “There was no room left where we were. That’s why it was decided to buy this land here.”
Bella Italia extended for 10,400 hectares, according to Friesen. Given what was known about deforestation rates in other Mennonite colonies - where in some areas an average of 89% of the forest has been cleared, according to TIERRA - that meant 1000s of hectares stood to be bulldozed.
Friesen acknowledged there would be negative impacts, particularly on animals losing their habitat. Bella Italia was at the far eastern reaches of the Chiquitano Forest, considered by scientists at the UK’s Kew Gardens to be “the world’s largest intact tropical dry forest” and a “transition zone between the tropical Amazon and dry Chaco forests.” Although comparatively little-studied, the NGO Fundación para la Conservación del Bosque Chiquitano (FCBC), headquartered in Santa Cruz, believes the Chiquitano to be home to “extraordinary natural riches” and many mammal, bird, amphibian and reptile species - some of them endemic.
“Deer, collared peccary, paca. . . we’ve even come across jaguars,” Friesen said.
Of course, the fires had made things even harder - for the Mennonites too, not just the wildlife. Ultimately, in 2024, the year that we visited, more than 12.5 million hectares of Bolivia would be impacted by fires, according to TIERRA, which described it as “the worst environmental disaster” in the country’s history. As TIERRA highlighted in a report last year, those fires released an estimated 100 mega tonnes of CO², and the vast majority was the result of people clearing and burning the forest for agricultural purposes - mainly soy and cattle-ranching.
In Bella Italia’s case, according to Friesen, it was the latter that was to blame. The fires had blown in from a cattle-ranch just to the north, he claimed, and most of the new colony had been forced to evacuate temporarily to a nearby town, while Friesen and a few hardy others stayed behind. The thought of him sheltering in his box trailer while the forest burnt around him was a desperate one.
“I didn’t leave, but others did,” he said.
Wasn’t he scared?
“Obviously.”
Friesen confirmed there were other, new colonies in the surrounding area, giving the impression that effectively a new Mennonite front was opening up in that corner of Santa Cruz. Like Bella Italia, those colonies hadn’t sold any soy yet because they hadn’t had time to grow any.
“Everyone around here right now is new,” Friesen told us.
So when was he hoping for his first harvest?
“I’d hope to have it after a year,” he said, “but we’ll have to wait and see.”
The Gecko Project’s film Bolivia Burning was released in September 2025.