The Amish, the Mennonites and the Hutterites
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Petr
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On the darker side of the Mennonite dream:
www.latimes.com
How a Mennonite farmer became a drug suspect
Mennonites are pious Christians who eschew much of the modern world. But in Mexico even they have not escaped the pull of the drug cartels.
LAS FLORES, Mexico — Franz Kauenhofen was once a pious member of his Mennonite community in this tropical stretch of southern Mexico. He read the Bible, tended to his fields and reared his three children to obey the teachings of the church.
“He never bothered anyone,” a childhood friend recalled. “He was a very kind, very noble person.”
Mennonites are Christians who, like the Amish, believe that admission to heaven depends on dressing modestly, doing good works, embracing pacifism and eschewing many modern conveniences. Kauenhofen’s community — a hamlet known as Las Flores — allowed cars and electricity but banned televisions, computers, the internet and smartphones.
Despite such restrictions, Mennonites are among the most successful industrial farmers in Mexico. Kauenhofen owned at least 100 acres, where he and his farmhands grew soybeans.
But today at age 40, he sits in prison accused of running clandestine airstrips for drug planes and commanding groups of assassins. Prosecutors say he was on the payroll of the Sinaloa cartel, once headed by the infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
“He was a rising criminal,” said Hipólito Alonzo Quijano, director of the Campeche state criminal investigations agency. “And he was extremely dangerous.”
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The Mennonite population in Mexico eventually grew to 100,000, concentrated in the north — and largely isolated from the rest of society. Men often learn Spanish to conduct business, but many women speak only Plattdeutsch. Kauenhofen, the seventh of eight siblings, grew up in the state of Tamaulipas.
In 2000, the year he turned 17, his family joined an exodus of Mennonites relocating to the southern state of Campeche on the Yucatán Peninsula and buying up large tracts of jungle. The Mennonites set out to tame it.
In Las Flores, nine founding families, including Kauenhofen’s, cut down thousands of acres of jungle to grow crops.
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The fields created by the Mennonites proved ideal nocturnal landing strips.
The planes either refueled on their way to northern Mexico or unloaded their cocaine to be delivered to the United States by road. The scheme helped turn the Federation cartel — which eventually became known as the Sinaloa cartel — into the most powerful drug trafficking organization in Mexico and arguably the world.
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Quijano, the police investigator, said that in 2009 Kauenhofen befriended a neighboring farmer who turned out to be a drug trafficker — an account that lines up with rumors that began circulating in Las Flores around the same time.
“From that time onward he had friendships with dangerous people,” said one community member who grew up with Kauenhofen and went to church with him. Like others living in or near Las Flores, he asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from drug cartels.
He said that Kauenhofen started showing off a brand-new AR-15 assault rifle to friends.
Church members said the ministers were concerned enough about Kauenhofen that they talked with his father, a preacher in the church, about how to steer him back to a more righteous course.
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If there were any doubts in Las Flores about Kauenhofen’s involvement with cartels, they were quickly put to rest.
The evening of his excommunication, he sent gunmen to the homes of two ministers, according to multiple Las Flores community members. But the ministers had gotten word and fled. One ran out his back door, through his field and into the hills. The other fled north to Chihuahua.
The next morning, Mexican soldiers descended on Las Flores and began searching for Kauenhofen but didn’t find him and left.
Community members said he and the two ministers eventually came to an agreement: Kauenhofen would be free to conduct his drug business as long as he stayed away from the church. The ministers relinquished his soul to the devil.
“They never bothered him again, because they were afraid,” said a close relative of Kauenhofen. “It was up to God now.”
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By the end of 2019, Kauenhofen said in his deposition, he commanded a team of six sicarios — professional assassins — who defended his territory. Five of them were ex-members of the Kaibiles, an elite special forces unit in the Guatemalan military known for brutality during that nation’s long civil war, according to Campeche’s attorney general, Renato Sales Heredia.
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By late 2021, Kauenhofen controlled clandestine airstrips in four municipalities in central Campeche, according to Mexican military intelligence documents.
That same year, prosecutors said, Kauenhofen commissioned two narcocorridos, ballads that pay tribute to drug lords.
“Planes loaded down are coming to the jungle,” croons the singer in a band named Grupo Delta. “We’re opening paths, making secret airstrips.”
The song continues: “Family is first and blood is the most sacred thing. We will continue to work as long as God gives me life. He compensates you when you endure the punches.”
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Las Flores had always been skeptical of outsiders, including government authorities, and problems tended to be handled internally by the church.
There was another reason that nobody wanted to cross Kauenhofen: Despite the bodies that kept turning up, other kinds of crime — long attributed to non-Mennonites in the area — had dropped. One farmer said he could leave a tractor in the field and not worry about it.
Kauenhofen may have been brutal when it came to his enemies, but as his power grew, he seemed to take pride in maintaining order in the community.
At one point during his deposition, he explained that he was furious when some of his henchmen stole cash from the gas station when they killed the two workers there.
He recounted telling them: “What example are we setting if we too are stealing?”
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More than two decades after Kauenhofen’s family helped found Las Flores, Mennonites there are once again looking for a new place to call home.
The Campeche government has cracked down on the razing of more Maya forest, and that has left the next generation of farmers with little opportunity to buy more land for crops.
Twenty families are in the process of moving to Angola, the Portuguese-speaking nation in southern Africa. The government there has promised them religious freedom and lush, forested land for as far as the eye can see.
“The Angola government is looking for farmers,” said Abram Loewen.