Magdalena Rojo

Early one Sunday morning in December, in a town in southwestern Mexico, dozens of people equipped with machetes hopped onto open trucks and bundled into cars and headed into the nearby forest.

A few kilometres south of Capulálpam de Méndez in Oaxaca state - on a plot of land owned by the indigenous Zapotec people - the group disembarked and started clearing unwanted vegetation threatening to hinder the growth of recently-planted pine trees.