Dark Deeds: How Mennonite Communities Became Entangled with Mexico Cartels
Part 2: No way out
Hola Amigos! I think this quote from Steve Fisher, LA Times, says it all, “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.” Please read on for background on how the unthinkable happened. Also, if you received two emails from me last week regarding Part 1, my apologies. The Substack server wasn’t sending out my post after five or six attempts and in deciding what to do, the Substack Bot told me to duplicate it, swearing on its little tin heart it would not be sent out as an email. Well, I duplicated it, the Bot was wrong, and you may have received the post twice. Now it too is forever enshrined on my home page. The joys of technology. Lo siento! And happy summer!
Mennonites are known for their farming and agrarian abilities. They became famous in Mexico for their apple orchards, providing the country with high quality apples, and introduced dairy products to Mexican cuisine, inventing what’s called Queso Menonita, a cheese synonymous with Chihuahua. They’re also some of the most successful industrial farmers in the country. 1
Mexican crema (cream) came about because they brought dairy farming to the country. Anyone traveling early on to Mexico knows it was nearly impossible to find cheeses or cream for morning coffee. But the Mennonites’ hold on the land changed that, with dairy farming and its products.
An island unto themselves
Their entry to Mexico happened as they searched for a place to live in peace without input from the outside world. Mennonites arrived in Mexico from Canada, having settled there in search of religious freedom in the 1700s from Europe. After Canada entered World War I, their blended language of Dutch and German called Plautdietsch created problems for them along with their objection to joining the military. They searched for a new location.
After the Mexico Revolution, President Álvaro Obregón wanted help rebuilding the country and promised the Mennonites cheap land, religious freedom, and exemption from military service. Mexico beckoned. Three thousand Mennonites landed in Chihuahua in northern Mexico in 1921 where they turned desert into bountiful fields of corn and soybeans. Their numbers grew steadily and they kept to themselves.
Isolation factor
In the meantime, drug cartels too had discovered the attraction of Mexico’s solitary northern desert, but the appeal was for different reasons. Along with isolation, it offered close proximity to their main customer, the US, and well-established trade routes. To the Mennonites, their presence was unexpected and unsought. Some wanted to distance themselves from the cartels and search for a fresh start.
In 2000 a group of Mennonites relocated to Las Flores, Campeche, on the Yucatán Peninsula, where forest jungles could be razed and tamed to grow crops.
A sad tale in Mexico, however, is that no place can be immune from the long reach of the cartels. And upon entering into a cartel contract of any sort, dismissal is unlikely. The quip, "Plata o plomo,” the silver or the lead, means take the money or a bullet. And with the cartels, not unlike the line in “Hotel California,” you can never leave.
Colombia connection
In the 1980s, Mexico cartels made a bold move against Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar who a few years earlier had gone looking for a better shipping method for cocaine shipments to the US. 2His planes and boats traveling through the Caribbean to the US had become targets of drug enforcement authorities. He wanted a new option.
Mexico checked all the boxes. Plenty of off-the-grid terrain, established trade routes, willing partners, and the kind of corruption Escobar could feel comfortable with: Payoffs, bribes and corrupt military and police. Pablo set up a deal with a major Mexico cartel to send coke north through the states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Campeche.
But shortly into the beginning of a beautiful friendship, the Mexican cartel demanded more than a commission. After all, land routes in use had been a part of Mexican history as long as anyone could remember. And cocaine, as anyone with eyes could see, was just getting started.
With this move, the international narcotics trade was being re-positioned with Mexico at the top. They started buying cocaine in massive quantities to send to the US themselves.
Neighbors
Stepping into what would become an intolerable situation was Franz Kauenhofen, a Mennonite farmer in Las Flores whose initial error was the bad luck of befriending a neighbor who was a drug trafficker. 3
Kauenhofen was a successful family man and member of the community until his wife became ill in 2012. Ballooning medical bills, even after church assistance, hovered in the $200,000 USD range.
No one can verify how he became involved with the cartels, but after establishing a friendship with his neighbor he began brandishing an AR-15 assault rifle, and eventually bought a smart phone, strictly prohibited for Mennonites.
His refusal to stop using it got him ex-communicated publicly in church one Sunday, in front of all parishioners. Unwilling to repent, he lashed out and sent gunmen to the homes of two ministers, who fled the pueblo and moved back to Chihuahua. No other townspeople bothered him after that and he could pursue whatever course he desired.
From soy fields to airstrips
He was approached by a cartel member who asked him to clear a landing strip out of a soy field so planes filled with cocaine could refuel. Initially he earned $20,000 USD for each landing. He agreed because he still owed $150,000 on his wife’s medical bills.
A month later he was offered a job to help with another landing. Twenty people arrived with high-power weapons to receive half a ton of cocaine. They were working for the Sinaloa Cartel. Meanwhile Kauenhofen worked the fields and shipped soybeans to silos of Mennonites that didn’t take part in his ex-communication. He maintained the cover of a farmer, said Hipolito Alonzo Quijano, Director of Campeche State Criminal Investigations, who had pieced together from court documents a 19-page deposition from authorities and members of his community.
The depth of Kauenhofen’s involvement shocked even some of the country’s most seasoned drug fighters, Quijano said. He had become an integral chess piece in the grand scheme of how cartels grew their business after grabbing control of cocaine after Escobar.
For the cartel, out of the way airstrips carved into slices of former jungle were the perfect ‘jumping off’ spot. Others in the community had no idea the cleared fields were so desirable to the cartels.
By the end of 2019, he said in his deposition, he commanded a team of six sicarios who defended his territory. He testified he oversaw 20 cartel members who provided logistics and security for planeloads of cocaine.
Kauenhofen dressed like a Mennonite, but amassed a fleet of trucks, four-wheelers, motorcycles and an arsenal of weapons including high-powered machine guns to safely escort shipments to Sinaloa, according to the deposition. He further went on to state he assisted with 15 planeloads of cocaine in the four years he worked for the Sinaloa cartel, though there were more. Now each landing earned him $325,000, as each plane carried 500 kilos of coke.
Business becomes deadly
As of 2021 he controlled clandestine airstrips in four municipalities in Campeche, according to Mexican military documents. By this time he had no qualms about using violence if necessary to protect his business.
Murder came into the picture after cash he’d buried in a field had gone missing. He killed the man who helped him bury it, accusing him of theft. Then he killed an informant. In 2021 he killed a local farmer that burned him years earlier on a loan deal and buried him in a hidden grave. Anyone who crossed Kauenhofen ended up dead. But according to locals, the killings and disappearances were no mystery to the Mennonites.
By 2022 Mexican military noted an increase in unregistered planes landing in Mennonite communities and added extra patrols. They were on to Kauenhofen, and by that September he was considered one of the most dangerous traffickers in Campeche.
When Mexican troops stormed his property, they found 1500 pounds of cocaine stashed in two houses in Las Flores, and arrested two other Mennonites, according to local news reports.
By early 2023, according to Quijano, authorities were closing in on him after military authorities had seized 12 cartel planes. Soon afterwards, a state police stop checking on a van believed to be linked to a clandestine gravesite found near the Yucatán border ended in a fire fight. Three Mennonites died, and a few days later, three gunmen were arrested for the crime. They worked for Kauenhofen and provided information about the vehicles he drove. Police set up checkpoints outside Las Flores.
According to an LA Times article, on January 20, 2023, Kauenhofen attempted to walk past the checkpoint. Officers arrested him immediately. According to deputies he offered the police $60,000 USD to let him go. When they declined, he offered one million.
The three men arrested from the firefight led authorities to the remains of the man who lent money to Kauenhofen. He stands accused of ordering the deaths of eight people.
Immediately after Kauenhofen’s arrest, his wife and children left Campeche and moved back to Chihuahua. The LA Times writes, “More than two decades after Kauenhofen’s family helped found the town of Las Flores, Mennonites 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 has left the next generation of farmers little opportunity to buy more land for crops. Twenty families are moving to Angola in south Africa where the government has promised religious freedom and lush forest land.”
Kauenhofen is in a maximum security prison in the state of Chiapas awaiting a trial date. With no juries in Mexico, a judge will decide his fate.
And the beat goes on.
Part 3 research on Mennonites and the cartels is in the works. On my next post, we’ll take a break from cartel matters for a little fun and games. Hasta luego!
Cindy Ritmeester.”The Mennonite Legacy in Mexico.” MexConnect. March 2017.
Steve Fisher. “How a Mennonite farmer became a drug suspect.” LA Times. February 1, 2024.
Editorial staff/AP-Denver. “Mexican Mennonite sentenced to 15 months for marijuana smuggling.” The Guardian. December 1, 2014
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MY BACKSTORY—Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. Living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland made it easy to pyramid hop on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids and the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’m still enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here on Mexico Soul.
Thanks for restack @Daniel Catena
Amazing well-researched article, Jeanine. I am so impressed by the amount of work you did on this and your writing style. You captured my interest from the start and kept it to the very last line. I am looking forward to reading Part 3.