In February 2023 I marched with about two hundred people on the Pan-American Highway in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where continental Mexico is at its narrowest. The Pacific side of the isthmus, dotted with beach resorts that draw American tourists and celebrities, felt a world away. Migrants bound for the US trudged past us, down an unremarkable stretch of highway flanked by dry bushes and shrubs, dragging suitcases and carrying children on their shoulders as the heat reflected off the asphalt.

Residents of the Oaxacan town of San Blas Atempa and other nearby communities were protesting a 360-hectare factory complex for agribusiness, metallurgy, and leather and textile production that the Mexican government had announced would be built atop San Blas Atempa’s communally owned forest, a thorny lowland expanse called El Pitayal, named for the pitaya cactus fruit that locals forage from its woods. (In the indigenous Zapotec language, this forest is called Gui’xhi’ Bidxi, meaning “Land of the Pitaya.”) People from neighboring towns had blockaded the highway and were accusing local officials of illegally seizing their land.

“How do you think the government will retaliate?” I asked the woman beside me. Her reply was almost drowned out by the protesters’ chants. “We think they’ll kill someone,” she said, and pointed at the protest’s leader, an indigenous Binnizá man in a yellow T-shirt named David Hernández Salazar. “Him.”

Salazar thrust his fist into the air and shouted into a dirty white megaphone that their forest was not for sale and that a deed supposedly selling the land to the project, validated by the government, in fact bore the forged signatures of local residents who were long dead. The marching protesters told me that they revered El Pitayal as a part of their family, like an ancestor who had helped to sustain their community over centuries, and that they were willing to take on the risks that accompanied defending it. Salazar had been arrested in 2017 after a similar protest and severely beaten while in detention. Billions of dollars were at stake, and this small community was proving an obstacle to national and international industrial interests.

Only about 20,000 people live in San Blas Atempa, and the fight was obscure even to most Mexicans. The land defenders maintained a blog with updates on legal charges targeting their communities and the arrests of their leaders by the government’s law enforcement agencies, but these events would receive, at most, a brief mention in the national press, which often focused only on destruction of government property or on this small community’s confrontations with armed Mexican marines.

Thousands of small indigenous communities like this one are fighting a hidden war across the planet. Though indigenous people make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, they manage or hold tenure rights over at least 36 percent of all “intact forest landscapes,” according to a recent study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Many reside in areas that are dangerous and difficult to access, and their interests have often been ignored by politicians and the media. It is a war in a quite literal sense: in 2024 the research organization Global Witness estimated that more than 2,100 environmental defenders, many indigenous, had been killed over the previous eleven years. Over 70 percent of these murders have been perpetrated in Latin America. (Other global hotspots include the Philippines, India, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) In 2021 more than fifty environmental defenders were assassinated in Mexico—more than in any other country.

Extractive megaprojects—such as hydropower dams, mines, and industrial factory complexes—are often the cause of this violence. Across Latin America, both left- and right-wing governments rely on industrial agriculture and resource extraction to create jobs and generate tax revenue, which is sometimes used to finance social programs. Powerful cartels also profit from major development projects by extorting protection payments, known colloquially as derecho de piso, from companies and government agencies, threatening violence if they are not paid.

Conflicts over land are especially common in Mexico because much of it is communally owned. During the 1910 revolution against the autocratic president Porfirio Díaz, militia leaders like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa led workers in breaking up haciendasowned by major landholders, most of them descendants of Spanish colonizers. When the landowner Venustiano Carranza became president in 1917, he was threatened by Zapata and Villa’s popularity among the peasantry and reluctantly included token land reforms in the country’s new constitution, legally enshrining communally owned farms known as ejidos. (In the end Carranza protected his fellow landowners; only 132,000 hectares were actually collectivized.) The land reform movement was boosted in the 1930s by President Lázaro Cárdenas, who allotted some 18 million hectares of public and agrarian land for communal governance.

From 1996 to 2001, indigenous Zapatista rebels (named after Zapata) in the southern state of Chiapas successfully fought for the enforcement of provisions of the San Andrés Accords, which allowed dozens of indigenous communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca to declare themselves self-governing. These groups demanded that the Mexican government stop infiltrating and harassing them and exploiting their natural resources.

As a result of such movements, today over 50 percent of Mexico’s land is collectively governed, and community assent is often legally required for development projects to proceed. Land sales that are approved are often accompanied by allegations of bribery and coercion through threats of violence, as well as by complaints, after the projects are built, that the companies and the government did not keep their promises to improve local living conditions. Aware of these broken promises, other communities resist.

In February 2022, amid protests in San Blas Atempa, government property in the village of Puente Madera was burned, including a banner that declared El Pitayal the megaproject’s property and at least two trucks belonging to a contractor and their police escort. The fire didn’t harm anyone, but the government blamed David Salazar for the sabotage and stepped up its legal proceedings against him.

A month before the march on the highway in 2023, municipal police had detained Salazar for the second time and, according to community members, refused to reveal his location. He was released only after his comrades, fearing the worst and adhering to the common belief that after the first seventy-two hours of a disappearance the probability of the person returning alive rapidly diminishes, blockaded the Trans-Isthmic Highway and happened to stop a bus transporting French tourists. After the French ambassador called then president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, the tourists were allowed to continue their journey. In the account of members of San Blas Atempa, Salazar was freed. It came as a relief; more than 125,000 people remain disappeared in Mexico, according to government figures. But nine months later, the government again legally targeted Salazar, this time charging him, along with seventeen other members of the community, with blocking and causing damage to public highways and vehicles.

Blocking roads, hijacking public vehicles, and sabotaging government property have become common protest tactics employed by communities across Mexico to draw the government’s attention—and they often work. In February 2022 communities in the central state of Puebla prevented their lands from being mined for silver through protests and legal action against the megaproject. Protesters in northern states such as Sonora have sparked public investigations into the disappearances of family members; others in the violence-ridden state of Michoacán have successfully drawn national attention to government corruption or cartel activity in their towns.

The industrial complex Salazar and his comrades were protesting is one of a number of Poles of Development for Well Being, orPODEBIS—“free zone” industrial parks that offer reduced tax rates to lure investors to Mexico’s underdeveloped south. Critics of these projects see a warning in the fates of earlier free zones like Ciudad Juárez, in the northern state of Chihuahua. Since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, that border city has become notorious for crime, particularly the murders of women who work in factories that sprang up to supply US markets.

The PODEBIS are just part of one of Mexico’s largest development plans: the Interoceanic Corridor, a trade and transit route that traverses the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The corridor is the revival of an old dream: a railroad was first planned in 1859 as part of the McLane–Ocampo Treaty signed by Mexico and the US, which granted the right of transit across the isthmus in perpetuity to US citizens and property (and laid the legal foundations for US military actions that concluded with the annexation of over 50 percent of Mexico’s territory). Nothing came of this plan for several decades owing to its enormous scale and cost, until Porfirio Díaz successfully constructed a railroad that began operating in 1907. The Isthmus Railway, however, eventually fell out of use because of the social and economic upheavals of the Mexican Revolution and competition from a more popular international trade route—the Panama Canal, inaugurated in 1914. The remnants of Díaz’s old railroad are still visible, its metal rails intermittently shining through clumps of green Oaxacan grass.

Throughout the twentieth century, multiple Mexican presidents proposed reopening and expanding the railroad, but plans were enacted only in 2018 by AMLO, who intended to create a global trade route that would rival the Panama Canal. He aimed to modernize highways and railroads for freight and passengers, enlarge ports in Oaxaca and Veracruz, rehabilitate existing refineries, and construct a dozen PODEBIS.

AMLO’s government promised that the Interoceanic Corridor would create 550,000 jobs through 2050 and attract $200 billion in private investment. Throughout his presidency he championed the development of the country’s historically poor south, including Oaxaca and his home state of Tabasco. Supporters of his that I spoke to in Mexico City and Oaxaca argued that he was trying to equalize development across the country, while his critics viewed these projects as a political strategy to shore up his base by channeling financing for state programs that traditionally benefited the middle and upper classes to the poor. Other megaprojects include a new oil refinery in Tabasco and the Tren Maya, a vast rail network intended to stitch together a series of spectacular Mayan ruins deep in the jungles and along the coastline of Mexico’s southeast, for easy access by tourists. The Interoceanic Corridor and the Tren Maya were designed to connect in the town of Palenque, Chiapas, where the government plans to build a large terminal for industrial cargo. Much of this development has been led by companies with grandiose names such as Olmeca-Maya-Mexica, harking back to Mexico’s indigenous empires that constructed giant pyramids—ancient megaprojects.

Many of these companies are run by the military, whose officers now operate as CEOs and project managers. Private security contractors, soldiers, and marines are deployed to construction sites for protection. A militarized Interoceanic Corridor has interested the US government as one way to prevent migrants from reaching the US–Mexico border; the corridor would serve as an industrial belt where migrants would be either arrested at checkpoints or employed. In 2018 AMLO wrote a letter to Trump touting the megaproject’s benefits: “The factories to be installed would generate a significant number of jobs and will prevent the region’s young people from continuing to migrate north in search of jobs.” The Biden administration continued offering US support, valuing the project as a more palatable alternative to Trump’s border wall. When the corridor was inaugurated in December 2023 at the Oaxacan port of Salina Cruz, then US ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar stood alongside AMLO.

In February 2023 one of Salazar’s associates, a man named Lupe, took me on a walk through El Pitayal. Lupe named each tree and explained to me how his community used the wood, fruit, roots, and flowers—an intimacy with the forest that has, he said, been transmitted through generations. He told me his greatest fear was “that the companies will turn us into slaves,” not literally but by “destroy[ing] the forest that provides us with clean water.”

The national oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or PEMEX, runs a refinery in nearby Salina Cruz that was planned to supply the Interoceanic Corridor’s new industrial parks under AMLO’s expansive fossil fuel programs. Lupe said this refinery and others have already contaminated underground aquifers in the region:

Other communities have lost their supply of clean water, so they now have to buy water to drink. To buy water, they need money. For money, they need jobs. That’s how they are forced into an industrial lifestyle. They take up jobs in the factories responsible for contaminating their water supply.

It was difficult for these communities to challenge the PEMEX behemoth. AMLO saw the exploitation of Mexico’s vast fossil fuel reserves as crucial to the country’s energy strategy and independence, and he financially and politically supported the debt-laden national oil company despite criticism from environmentalists, who objected to the expansion of PEMEX’s refining capacity and oil production in the Caribbean.

In 2024 Mexico elected North America’s first female head of state, Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist who promised to back new renewable energy projects but who is also seeking to complete many of AMLO’s industrial development programs and megaprojects. She has praised the Interoceanic Corridor as “one of the most ambitious projects” of AMLO’s presidency and insisted on the importance of railway connectivity across the isthmus (though she shifted funding away from Tren Maya, which began losing money soon after being completed in late 2024) and major new gas pipelines. Many of Mexico’s megaprojects rely on boosting the country’s fossil fuel production and refining capabilities; the country’s oil production is currently far below its 2004 peak because of the exhaustion of old oil fields and a failure to exploit major new ones.

Sheinbaum also seems unlikely to veer from AMLO’s approach to indigenous rights. She allowed his controversial head of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples, Adelfo Regino Montes, to remain in his position. From 2019 to 2021 he oversaw a series of public consultations with indigenous communities across the isthmus about the possible environmental and social effects of the Interoceanic Corridor. Though the recommendations that resulted were not legally binding, AMLO publicized them to show that unlike his predecessors, he respected indigenous rights, limited environmental harm to their lands, and sought to equitably distribute the economic benefits of development. During these consultations, indigenous communities submitted 1,005 requests to the government to protect their ecosystems and develop their communities—requests that included building new hospitals, universities, wastewater treatment plants, roads, and bridges. According to the government’s own federal auditor, only 175, or roughly 12 percent, were acted on by 2022, a year before the Interoceanic Corridor was inaugurated. The auditor also revealed that the government collected little environmental data on the megaproject and made few plans to limit its environmental impact.

While neglecting their demands, the government has repeatedly responded to indigenous protests against the violation of their land rights with heavy crackdowns. Its repression of communities that resisted the Interoceanic Corridor has ranged from setting fishermen’s houses on fire in Oaxaca to evicting and arresting Ayuujk indigenous protesters there. A group of twenty-three national and international civil society organizations monitoring the megaproject announced in June 2024 that it had counted seventy-two attacks against defenders, including harassment, threats, detentions, and physical violence, as well as three murders of Oaxacan activists: Jesús Manuel García Martínez, killed in 2022, and Félix Vicente Cruz and Noel López Gallegos, killed in 2023. These men had blocked highways to prevent the Interoceanic Corridor’s construction or protested alleged government corruption in the form of missing or misallocated payments to their communities for expropriated land.

In January 2024 I learned of new acts of sabotage against the Interoceanic Corridor. Nine mestizo activists—people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry—in the town of Santa María Mixtequilla, near San Blas Atempa, were arrested for allegedly attacking the construction site of their local PODEBI, which is intended to house factories for electronics, automobiles, agroindustry, pharmaceuticals, information technology, and petrochemicals.

Compared with the residents of San Blas Atempa, those in Mixtequilla had been more amenable to transferring their communal land to the Interoceanic Corridor, as long as they were properly paid for it. The municipal president, along with the community’s governing body and its assembly, had agreed to accept payment for the expropriation in 2023, but the profits would go only to a relatively small group of comuneros, or residents, who were descended from the original inhabitants of this Zapotec indigenous community and who together officially owned the land. The arrested activists, two of their campesino representatives told me, were acting on behalf of the remaining residents, who didn’t havelegal rights over the communal land and felt unfairly excluded from decision-making—and any forthcoming payments. They also protested the relatively low price for which the land was being sold: just 26 pesos (about $1.50) per square meter.

Another concern was cartel involvement. The isthmus is well known for cartels, which are often drawn to industrial developments like the PODEBIS by the huge inflows of capital. In an unsuccessful attempt to fend them off, AMLO entrusted the management and security of the Interoceanic Corridor to the navy, which declared that one of its objectives was to protect the corridor “from organized crime.” In Mixtequilla, cartel threats first took the form of messages scrawled on banners near the PODEBIS declaring that the writers were “not playing” and that this was “a first warning”—a signal that they would need to be paid off.

At the site of Mixtequilla’s PODEBI, the campesino activists had shattered the glass around the security guards’ booths and set fencing and other security installations on fire. As I arrived, I stumbled on an official delegation of investors and government officials visiting the site, escorted by armed marines and surveying the damage to their joint project. A man in a bright white Oaxacan embroidered shirt waved me over. He said he was the Oaxacan government delegate responsible for negotiating with the communities in the isthmus to obtain their assent for the Interoceanic Corridor.

“I already know you,” he said, surprising me as he shook my hand. I had no idea that the government had been tracking my reporting in Mexico. “I read your article in the Los Angeles Times about the Interoceanic Corridor. Please greet your good friend David Salazar. He’s my friend, too.” But his tone was sarcastic. “What are you doing here?” he asked me. “You should leave this place and not return.” He delivered these threats with an exaggerated smile.

Later that evening, I set aside my worries about the threats and drove back to Mixtequilla to attend an assembly about the Interoceanic Corridor and the damage to the local PODEBI. About forty comuneros,men and women, sat in a circle on plastic stools in someone’s yard. As soon as I stepped into the yard, one of the men shouted out to me, “You’re the Indian guy!” He said the Oaxacan government official had called and told him about my reporting on the Interoceanic Corridor, and that the official said he “likes you a lot.” I decided I wouldn’t return to this region for a while once I had reported on Mixtequilla’s meeting that evening.

Night fell fast. The divided assembly debated whether to proceed with the corridor or reverse their decision to sell, given the conflict and threats the sale had instigated—a decision that, by the community’s rules, had to be unanimous. They deliberated about how to deal with the activists who had burned the PODEBI installations and how to assuage government officials and investors. The assembly was also concerned about the menacing cartel banners that had appeared. All of this threatened to hold up the Interoceanic Corridor’s development and the incoming payments from the sale. Several men in the circle, the assembly’s leaders, spoke against making a peace offering to the activists by sharing the sale proceeds with them.

One comunero, a history teacher, leaned on his bicycle behind the circle of stools and said,

We don’t have to look too far to understand what this development will do to us. On Oaxaca’s beach, in Huatulco, the locals have retreated up into the mountains and descend each day to clean the foreigners’ homes and toilets for a pittance.

Another comunero taunted him—“What do you actually know about history?”—then addressed the assembly:

If they offer me a million pesos for my house, I’ll immediately move my family out. I want this megaproject. If my son doesn’t have to migrate to the US to find a good job, that’s a success. Our family will remain united on our ancestral land.

The teacher retorted, “Where the companies arrive, the cartels also come, the addiction also comes, the drugs, the prostitution, human trafficking. Our sons and daughters will have office jobs, but they won’t be safe.” Someone shouted, “Such problems exist in every big city!”

Was the trade-off for this industrial future worth it? Mixtequilla, San Blas Atempa, and thousands of other small communities around the world are trying to decide—and often being attacked, bribed, and coerced into acceptance. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, despite promises to protect indigenous rights and the environment, is promoting a railroad through indigenous Kayapó territory that would deforest vast swaths of the Amazon. He is also supporting an oil drilling project near the mouth of the Amazon River, a highway through pristine rainforest, and a giant dam that has decimated river ecosystems. In India, indigenous Adivasi communities have faced brutal crackdowns for opposing mining megaprojects backed by the government.

A month after I left Mixtequilla, nine of its activists were detained, and a Mexican court sentenced Salazar to forty-six and a half years in prison for damaging property. It was a disproportionate penalty in Mexico for common protest tactics, and it shocked his supporters; there wasn’t even evidence directly implicating him in the burning of the municipal police trucks. I called him, fearing he had already been arrested. But he was still free on appeal and promised to fight on. After his sentencing, he told me, “All the world’s prisons won’t be enough to fit the land defenders willing to risk everything to protect the earth.”

Over the following months, however, I noticed that his Binnizá community had stopped publishing overt criticism of the Interoceanic Corridor on their blog and no longer targeted specific allegedly corrupt officials. I called Salazar again; he told me that he and his family had received new threats. In June 2024 the community published a blog post describing itself as “in between solitude and silence,” explaining, in part to the other communities resisting the Interoceanic Corridor, that it would stop publicly challenging the megaproject after receiving threats from the government and “the paramilitary entities of the regional and transnational criminal economy,” which is code for Mexico’s violent drug cartels.

At the same time, David told me that the government had offered him a new incentive: it had verbally assured him, he said, that it wouldn’t enforce his sentence if he was silent about the megaproject. From my past reporting in India, Central Africa, and Cambodia, I knew that such carrot-and-stick intimidation had coerced many environmental defenders into giving up what should be their basic rights. Before I left the isthmus, David had said to me, “We’re just asking to be left in peace from all this development, so we can sit in our yards, eat our guavas, and watch our kids play.”

—February 12, 2026