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Magdalena Rojo profile image

Magdalena Rojo

Freelance contributor

Thomson Reuters Foundation

Magdalena Rojo is a freelance contributor to the Thomson Reuters Foundation based in Mexico.

February 02, 2023

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.