Johann Peters, a middle-aged Mennonite man, was sitting in an Acapulco chair on his polished-concrete-floored verandah, grinning broadly. It was sparse out there - just a few chairs, an item of clothing hanging up to dry, a neatly-painted green door leading into the house where we could hear children quietly moving about, and a view onto an immaculately-mown lawn. Not much more. The sense of peace was palpable, broken only by a cockerel crowing or dog barking.
One of his sons, like Peters wearing a checked shirt and navy dungarees, had just arrived home and brought water from the family’s private well, some 80 to 100 metres deep.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked us, a welcome offer in 30+°C heat. “Do you want to see what the water is like here?”
Peters had just been telling us how, in the late 1960s, his parents had settled there, in what was once all forest, in the Santa Cruz region of eastern Bolivia. They had migrated from Mexico in search of more land, he said, and named the new colony, as the Mennonites called their settlements, after the one they had left behind in the Mexican state of Chihuahua: Swift Current. According to Canadian geographer Yann le Polain de Waroux and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, it was one of the first ten Mennonite colonies founded in Bolivia and one of the first twenty-five across South America.
“Do you remember, when you were a child, what it was like here?” my colleague, Alvaro Bozo Garcia, had asked, gesturing towards the fields beyond Peters’s house and garden.
By the time he was born, he told us, in the late 1970s, all that land was already being used to grow crops.
“Soy, corn, sorghum,” he said.
What that meant, among other things, was that he himself didn’t have to clear any of the forest.
“It was our fathers who did all that, after they arrived from Mexico,” Peters said, grinning again, as if he knew how much sweat and hard work it must have entailed, especially without the bulldozers and other machines available today.
He said some of those original migrants were still alive, although his father had died in the early 1990s and he didn’t know how or why the colony’s founders had chosen this particular location, now less than an hour’s drive from Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s biggest city. All in all, it extended for almost 20,000 hectares.
“It was because there wasn’t enough space [in Swift Current in Mexico],” said Peters, in his late 40s, speaking Spanish with a strong German lilt, since among themselves the Mennonites speak a “Low German” dialect. “Once a colony fills up and there’s no more land for all the families, they go looking for somewhere else to establish a colony. Some went to Paraguay, some went to Argentina, some went to Brazil, some came to Bolivia. Some are now going to Angola.”
The number of Mennonite colonies in Bolivia has boomed in recent decades and there are reportedly now over 130, more than any other Latin American country. As I highlighted in an article last month, the Mennonites grow a large percentage of Bolivia’s total soy crop, despite constituting a minority of the population, and have been playing an outsized role in the country’s under-reported deforestation crisis too. In 2024 and 2025 Bolivia lost more tropical forest than any other country in the world except Brazil, having placed third the previous four years, according to the US NGO World Resources Institute.
Swift Current’s role in this boom would be hard to overstate. Not only was it one of Bolivia’s earliest Mennonite settlements, but as of late 2020 it had established more “daughter” colonies elsewhere in the country than any other, according to Yann le Polain de Waroux et al. Those researchers put such “daughters” at six at the least - four of which had gone to found their own daughter colonies, effectively making them Swift Current’s “granddaughters” - and now those numbers would be even higher.
This raised all kinds of questions. Why the need to constantly acquire more land and how might that be connected to their religion - the Mennonites being members of a Christian denomination tracing its origins back to 16th century western Europe? Were they intending to establish another new colony somewhere? And were they concerned about the social and environmental impacts of knocking down so much forest, or their input-intensive, chemical-dependent farming practices? What several of us - making a film for the UK-based Gecko Project - were doing in Swift Current, in late 2024, was trying to obtain some answers.
A formal authority in the colony, Peters couldn’t have made for a better interviewee. In the course of our conversation, held there on his verandah, he revealed that Swift Current was indeed in the process of establishing a new colony, called Bella Italia, in a much remoter part of Santa Cruz near the border with Brazil, and he himself had been playing a fundamental role in doing so.
“Various families are going to move there,” he said. “Not all together.”
“Is it forest there?”
“Yes, forest.”
Peters said it was named Bella Italia - “Beautiful Italy” - because that was what the previous owner had called it and she had wanted them to continue doing so. He turned out to have been one of the people most involved with the purchase - not only spending considerable time and energy scouting for suitable land, but visiting recently and even helping to start clear-cutting the forest.
“We’ve been getting on with things there,” he said. “We had begun clearing I-don’t-know-how-many hectares of forest and then the fires arrived.”
In 2024 fires burnt across more than 12.5 million hectares of Bolivia, leading the NGO TIERRA to call it the “worst environmental disaster” in the country’s history and point the finger at government policy and agribusiness, referring to an “unsustainable agricultural development model that is prioritising the expansion of monoculture crops over fundamental ecosystems.” Peters said the fires had hit the new colony, which I reported on last month, about two weeks previously and caused chaos.
“You can’t really use the tracks right now because the fires came through and the trees have blocked them,” he said. “They burnt through everything.”
Peters said the Bella Italia land had been designated primarily for selective logging, but they had followed the required legal and administrative steps to change that so they could clear-cut most of the forest and start farming. What did they use to do the clearing?
“A Caterpillar [bulldozer],” he said. “Always a Caterpillar.”
Peters made it clear that an increasing population partly explained the need for more land, which was unsurprising given that the Mennonites tended to have very large families and raised their children to be farmers. But also important was their wish to live removed from others, in an attempt to evade certain aspects of modern life they didn’t agree with. For example, although they used bulldozers, tractors and other kinds of machinery to farm, the wheels on their tractors weren’t fitted with rubber tires, and they weren’t permitted to drive cars or ride motor-bikes at all.
Indeed, such traditional, conservative attitudes were everywhere you looked in Swift Current. The only cars belonged to visitors, like ours, and the main form of transport was horse-and-trap, called “buggies”, while everyone wore the same clothes - the men and boys in checked shirts and dungarees, like Peters and his son, and the women all in ankle-length dresses.
There wasn’t any TV, internet, music or so-called “smartphones” either. Or rather, there weren’t supposed to be smartphones. One elder told us, on condition of anonymity, how some people had been caught recently “smuggling” them into the colony, before being caught and forced to apologise.
Trying to understand why certain things but not others were allowed was challenging. When we asked Peters why he could drive a tractor but not a 4x4, he replied: “It’s because our religion doesn’t permit us.”
“Your religion says tractors are ok?” Alvaro queried.
“Yes.”
Peters emphasised their “religion”, as he called it, had been brought over by his parents’s generation from Mexico and that it hadn’t simply “appeared” there in Bolivia, although what he meant by that wasn’t clear.
“Does your religion say you have to work the land?”
“Yes.”
“How does it say that?”
“The Bible always says each one of us has to work and sweat to earn his daily bread,” Peters said. “That’s what we’re doing. We’ve always got to look for more land to establish new colonies so there’s space for our children, so they can carry on working like us.”
For now, though, Peters had no immediate plans to return to Bella Italia and enough to think about in his own colony. Over the years they had continued to farm soy, corn, and sorghum, as well as raising cattle, he said, and although the soil was still generally good Santa Cruz’s droughts had been making things harder for them. This was a familiar lament we heard over and over again in that part of Bolivia, with some experts believing the long-term viability of the entire soy sector is threatened. So how was the soy there in Swift Current?
“Just ok,” Peters replied. “It’s just that last year it was quite dry. The weather hasn’t been favourable for crops, so we only just made back our outgoings.”
The Gecko Project’s film Bolivia Burning was released in September 2025.