The Mexican landscape fades away into ashes and dust, fragmented, defaced and scorched. Behind barbed wire fences, forests, rivers and mountains fall to the hands of private companies. Once transformed, the landscape becomes a separate universe, an incongruous and dangerous area where the new masters and their mercenaries terrorize people into silence.

Like other farmers from across the country, Roberto de la Rosa now walks on pathways riddled with booby traps. In recent years, it’s in Mexico that the number of defenders of the land assassinated has been highest.