English version Martha Psowski

In Mexico, the roads leading to where oil palm is grown and gathered for wholesale are rarely paved. Many are paved with gravel, while others are just dirt. When it rains, the roads turn to mud. When entering the palm-producing zones, hours can go by between leaving the last paved road behind and seeing the first oil palm tree. Before that, one often sees old, fading signs advertising that the road was a project of some local government, with the help of the agricultural secretary. In contrast, the offices of the big palm companies are in luxurious office buildings in some of the most exclusive neighborhoods of important cities.

The narrative of these companies, and of entrepreneurship, is that they were built by “self-made men.” The story is of men, always men, who came from nothing and with their “exceptional” work ethic and determination overcame all obstacles to succeed in business. They are cases of individual success floating in the sea of collective failure, of the people who “don’t try hard enough” or who, in the words of a famous 2023 article in The Economist, “useless workers.”

According to the numbers, “the richest 0.001 percent, made up of fewer than 60,000 multi-millionaires, today controls three times more wealth than half of humanity combined.”¹

Cornelio’s home is humble despite his great efforts. He manages a collection center for oil palm and knows every parcel in his community. By only looking at a fruit cluster on a plant he can know the plant’s age. He knows the owners of all the parcels and has memorized when each was planted. He has to take note of this every time he buys from the producers. This has been his daily work for years. Even though officially he only accepts oil palm fruit on Mondays and Tuesdays, he works tirelessly all week. Cornelio has little time to rest. But despite his efforts and commitment to the work, his economic situation is so precarious he would have no way to deal with a medical emergency.

A closer look at the “success stories” of business reveals dynasties, clans and power relations. First and last names that are repeated and coexist in an ecosystem of businesses, public events, weddings and links to the state and powerful families. The case of oil palm is no exception. But being a relatively new crop, the palm producing elite is just beginning to consolidate. Many of them came from other businesses or from countries that have more entrenched palm oil industries.

For Cornelio, oil palm has always been around. When he was 12 years old, he helped his father while his little cousins gathered the loose seeds to fill burlap sacks. This was 23 years ago and his pride for his work is palpable.

“I want the company to know that we work hard,” said Cornelio, whose hope is that one day “the company” will formally hire him.

Unfortunately for how hard he works, his accomplishments are limited compared to those elites who “work hard and triumph.” It’s not for lack of trying. On average, in Latin America, it takes between five and 11 generations to achieve the social mobility to leave poverty and enter the middle class. Technically, this is considered getting out of poverty. But to get rich? That is even harder.

Cornelio and his cousins grew up surrounded by oil palm. This is his grandparents’ and parents’ legacy and one that he plans to leave to his son. But to take advantage of this inheritance, he is dependent on the industry to buy the harvest. On people with unfamiliar first names and surnames, anonymous to him as the producer and for the people who consume palm oil. Names that, generation after generation, remain at the front of a company. That is the aim of this story; to connect each company to these individuals by name. 

Competitive Advantage

The palm oil mill plant is essential in the African palm production chain. Without it, the industry doesn’t exist. Once the palm seeds are processed, logistics companies transport the oil to refineries where it is made edible. This is the truly lucrative part of the business. Then the refineries rely on contacts within the ultra-processed food industry, which buys the oil in large volumes. 

Like most big industries worldwide, public policies, and the politicians who promote them, have benefitted oil palm. There is an obvious revolving door from industry to public service and back again, as was the case of the palm magnate Armando Toledo Jamit. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Campeche’s agriculture secretary under Governor Alejandro Moreno of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Once he finished his term, he returned to the palm industry. Then in 2021 the Morena party (National Regeneration Movement) first named him the chief of staff for Governor Layda Sansores (2021-2024) and then Secretary of the Interior  (2024-25).

For that reason it is surprising that Toledo Jamit, considering all the influence and power he held in the state with the second-highest palm production in Mexico, has never had — as far as we know — his own palm oil mill. He was, however, an associate of the family that has four palm processing plants and one refinery.

Revolving Doors

The first palm oil mill in Mexico appears to have opened in 1958 thanks to Juan Bernstorff, a German who in the 1920s decided to escape the crisis in the aftermath of the First World War to join his brother Cristian who was already living in Chiapas. As time went on the brothers would become the principal coffee producers of the area.

The coffee trade, as Alfonso Castellanos Navarrete writes in his book Fronteras de aceite: Hegemonía de la palma africana en Chiapas (Borders of Oil: the Hegemony of African Palm in Chiapas), provided Juan the resources he needed to pioneer the cultivation of oil palm in Chiapas. Nonetheless, according to his grandchildren, oil palm never became a full-fledged business for Juan. Thanks to his connections with the government of president Miguel Alemán Valdés, he was able to sell his product to the steel mill Altos Hornos de México as an industrial lubricant.

Even though the Bernstorffs had a monopoly on oil palm production in Mexico until 1995 they were not able to dominate the market. Neither did the La Aceitera Chiapaneca La Palma, an organization of small-scale farmers that owned the second mill in Mexico, dominate the market. This is due, in part, to the scale of palm plantations, which in 1999 only had a surface area of 5,641 hectares. Meanwhile Central America, that same year, had 103,000 hectares of palm plantations.

According to Castellanos Navarrete, in the 1980s palm became profitable when the Bernstorff family — by this time Juan had died — began selling the crude oil to the company Oleofinos to process it into edible vegetable oil. Oleofinos was some 1,600 kilometers away from the palm zone.

The engineer José Luis Pérez and his wife María del Rosario Morett Sedano founded Oleofinos S.A. de C.V. in 1978. These names frequently appear in the social pages of the state of Jalisco. The company specialized in producing oils for the soap industry, and according to its articles of incorporation in 1984, two of the couple’s children were listed as associates of the company: José Luis and Fernando Pérez Morett. According to the company’s mythology, the Pérez Morett brothers inherited a struggling company in the 1990s and turned it into a booming business.

Originally Oleofinos worked with coconut oil and other vegetable fats. The company grew alongside the palm industry. In 1996, the government of PRI president Ernesto Zedillo started the Oil Palm Program, which among its political objectives sought to contain the discontent of peasant farmers and slow the advance of the Zapatista guerrilla movement. In 1998, the Alliance for the Countryside oil palm production programs made progress. The next year, Oleofinos, which is now part of the Olemex Group, began construction on the first of four processing plants that operate under the Oleopalma brand.mex— inició la construcción de la primera de las cuatro plantas extractoras que operan bajo la marca Oleopalma.

Palm Democracy

The palm boom coincided with the so-called democratic transition in Mexico. In 2000, after 71 years of PRI rule, the National Action Party, or PAN, with roots in Christian democracy, won the presidency. The PAN had become the platform for many businesspeople to participate in politics and access power. The party’s discourses criticized the political class as bad administrators and celebrated the business class as wealth creators and, above all, an example to follow.

The neo-PAN members, as academics called them, embraced and continued the neoliberal project that had begun in the PRI ranks 18 years earlier. By that time, previously state-controlled oligopolies, such as the sugar industry, banking and telecoms, had been privatized.

Vicente Fox Quesada took office as president in December 2000. Several decades earlier, Fox had led the Latin America division of  Coca-Cola. A group of businessmen outside the party created an organization called “Friends of Fox” and financed his presidential campaign. One of the numerous millionaires who participated was Alfonso Romo Garza, who at that time owned Seminis, a company that controlled 25 percent of the global seed business.

Within the PAN, a group of farming and agro-industry business leaders had consolidated to create a perception of proximity to the Mexican people, exploiting the image of the rancher with a cowboy hat, jeans, cowboy boots, and riding a horse. The first among them was Alberto Cárdenas Jiménez, the former governor of Jalisco (1995-2000), who Fox named secretary of the environment and natural resources.

During this first PAN administration the Ministry of Agriculture, Ranching, Rural Development, Fishing and Food (Sagarpa) focused on transforming the Mexican countryside from “an economy based on self-sufficiency and protectionism toward a modern, competitive model”² that sought to turn farmers in “subjects of credit, instead of simply recipients of subsidies.”³ This fed into the narrative that the poor are a parasitic class, while billions of pesos are spent to develop not so much businesses as businessmen.

Javier Usabiaga (1939-2018) was named to lead Sagarpa. He was known as the “King of Garlic” and had already served as agriculture secretary for the state of Guanajuato while Fox was governor.

At the start of the millenium, Usabiaga, a second generation agro-businessman who partnered with Fox in the sesame seed industry, had an agricultural empire of between 7,000 and 10,000 hectares of vegetable production for export. His land produced an estimated 35 percent of the garlic grown in Mexico, hence his nickname. His company Mr. Lucky also sold vegetables to the Mexican affiliates of McDonald’s and KFC.

In 2001, the first year of Usabiaga’s term, the program to promote oil palm production in Mexico was evaluated and extended. The agricultural budget that year dedicated $121.7 million pesos (USD $13 million)⁴ to the program. Oleomex, the Pérez Morett family business, also began operations at its first oil palm processing plant, making it the third plant in the country that we are aware of. With the processing plant, Oleomex was able to take advantage of the support the state was providing for oil palm cultivation, which grew from 5,000 hectares in 1999 to 18,767 hectares by the end of 2001.

Agroindustrial Commercialization Support and Services (Aserca), a decentralized office of Sagarpa, provided financing and logistical support to promote economic infrastructure within the oil palm production chain.

Aserca implemented schemes to transform traditional agriculture into commercial production and gave direct support to peasant farmer families, and small and mid-sized producers for “productive reconversion.” These payments incentivized the shift from “less profitable” crops to oil palm. This threatened food sovereignty in communities across the country. Francisco Mayorga Castañeda, an agro-businessman, founding president of the Agroindustrial Council of Jalisco (1994-95) and former agriculture secretary of Jalisco under governor Alberto Cárdenas Jiménez, lead the office.

Friends of the Palm

In 1958, Jalisco politician Efraín González Luna wrote a letter to Manuel Gómez Morín, another founder of the PAN, to inform him that “The chemical engineer Francisco Morett Sedano, son of Don Pancho Morett, both members of the Party,”⁵ had resigned from his job and sought him out to find new employment. Wanting to help the young Francisco, González Luna sought the advice of Gómez Morín, who had been the chief administrative officer of the federal Ministry of Finance, founder of the Bank of Mexico and an investor in the Modelo brewery.

While there is no evidence that Francisco Morett Sedano was a partner of Oleomex  or one of the companies associated with it, his sister María was one of the company’s founders. Since 1998, his brother Carlos Morett Sedano was part of the group as an investor in Oleoquímica Mexicana, the parent company of Mexicana de Aceites de Palma in partnership with Industrial de Oleaginosas, owned by Fernando, José Luis, Ignacio, Álvaro and Diego Pérez Morett. He went on to be the PAN secretary for Jalisco.

In 1999, Carlos Morett Sedano, representing Oleoquímica Mexicana, founded Aceites Tropicales S.A. with the Campeche businessman Armando Toledo Jamit with the goal of “achieving the grinding of the African palm fruit,” as the founding documents of the company indicate.

Jalisco is a conservative state, with Catholic families that pride themselves in their Hispanic lineage, and has been the birthplace of several right and far-right movements. Families are tightly bound together by business interests, marriages and friendship. This forms a closed circle similar to the roots of an oil palm tree that are interwoven and capture so many resources that other plants are not able to grow and compete.

To enter this social fabric takes several generations, not to mention money. These families knew how to transition their businesses from the agricultural economy to the industrial, or agro-industrial. They are convinced that to maintain economic power it is indispensable to have one foot in politics.

“These are huge families, with many branches, which complicated studying them. And one has to differentiate between political dynasty families and families that dabble in politics. The example of Alberto Cárdenas is the latter,” the academic Javier Hurtado said in an interview.

When Alberto Cárdenas Jiménez was recommended to run for governor of Jalisco in 1994, he in turn proposed Efraín González Morfín, the son of Efraín González Luna, José Levy García or Francisco Mayorga Castañeda⁶. for the candidacy in his place. None of them accepted — political campaigns are costly and tiring — but they all supported him and followed him into the cabinet. Javier Hurtado documented that it wasn’t just them. In nine years, three as mayor and six as governor, Cárdenas Jiménez brought 33 people into public office that he was related to either by blood or marriage.⁷ This was a clear demonstration of the strength of the social pact.

One of the most recognizable names was that of his brother Gonzalo Cárdenas Jiménez who in 1996 assumed the presidency of the Eastern Oil and Proteins Chamber of Industry (Capro), without any prior public activity or participation in the sector that backed up his appointment. 

On November 17, 1998, Capro published a spread in the newspaper El Informador. The organization denounced that it was a victim of “defamation” in the press, after a local oil businessman accused the organization, its powerbrokers, and Gonzalo Cárdenas himself of benefitting the Pérez Morett family in several ongoing law suits.

The Invention of the Industry

Once Vicente Fox reached the presidency, he declared oil palm a priority program and included it in the 14 systems of agricultural production. These involved integrating chains of production associated with a particular crop and included the supply of technical equipment, productive inputs and financial resources. Aspects from primary production, to collection, processing, distribution and commercialization were included. In these systems, unsurprisingly, the small scale farmers were the most precarious link in the chain that supported the agroindustrial sector. This deepened social divisions and added a new element: the loss of food sovereignty in rural communities and a new dependence on ultraprocessed foods, including industrial breads and oils, corn flour for tortillas, sodas and more. This was a win-win for agroindustry.

The Fund for Shared Risk in Agro-Business Development (Fomagro), the Shared Risk Trust (Firco), and the Trusts Established in Relation to Agriculture (FIRA) were created to inject resources into the palm industry. The “Oil Palm Central Plan 2004” was also created, in the same year that Pérez Morett opened his second processing plant.

As President Vicente Fox’s six-year mandate ended, Mayorga Castañeda was the federal agriculture secretary and the area planted with oil palm had surpassed 29,704 hectares.  According to reports from Sagarpa, by then five processing plants were operating, two of them financed with public funds, although the specific amounts of funding, the mechanism (financing, coinvestment, etc) and the specific recipients was not specified. 

According to our mapping, the companies that built processing plants during the Fox administration were Oleomex (2004), Oleosur (2002), Consorcio Forestal (2003), and Grupo Numar/Palma Tica (2004).

Oleosur is a consortium owned by the Terrones López family, which operates at the port of Altamira, Tamaulipas, in partnership with several Guatemalan palm industry representatives, including the Arriola Torrebiarte group that has a foothold in the Fondo Chiapas palm company through José Miguel Enrique Arriola Fuxet. He invests in two of the Fondo’s affiliates: Aceites Sustentables de Palma and Palmas de Comillas. Fondo Chiapas, as the second installment of this series explained, is a company formed by agro-industrialists, with investment from the government of Chiapas, to provide a counterweight to the Zapatista movement. Several Mexican businessmen are partners, including Alfonso Romo and the “Sugar Czar” Enrique Molina Sobrino.

The owners of Grupo Numar, also known as Palma Tica, are the Costa Ricans Alejandro González May and Carlos Alfredo González May. This company owns a large proportion of the area in cultivation in Costa Rica. Their processing plant in Mexico is next to the FA Line of the Interoceanic Train, a few kilometers from the municipality of Palenque where it connects with the Mayan Train. Once the cargo line is completed, Palm Tica will have direct access to Puerto Progreso and the Port of Coatzacoalcos in Veracruz.

It is worth mentioning that, while Veracruz is a palm state, its production is limited and at a stable level compared with some of its competitors. While cultivation nationally has grown on average 6,174 hectares a year since 2010, in Veracruz palm has never been planted on more than 8,000 hectares statewide. But Veracruz is a strategic state for the palm industry’s inner workings. It is home to three of the most important ports on the Gulf of Mexico, and among them Coatzacoalcos, previously mentioned, offers interconnections with a vast rail network that cuts through the heart of the palm belt where cultivation is increasing, roughly from Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz to Escárcega, Campeche and to the border with Guatemala.

Perhaps because of the limited area in cultivation, Veracruz only has one palm processing plant, owned by the Lemarroy Gonzalez family. Jacinto Rafael and Jesus Rogelio are the family’s most well-known representatives. The former inherited the leadership of the family’s gasoline company, while the latter inherited a political career, achieving what his father never could: becoming the mayor of the city that he helped found.

The Lemarroy are considered allies of the PRI’s Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares, who left the part to join the PAN and run alongside Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón. This lead him to become governor of Veracruz in 2016 and a senator in 2025, the year he renounced the PAN to join the left-wing Morena party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The Lemarroys became closer to López Obrador once he won the presidency.

Green Deserts

In 2006, the “dogmatic wing” of the PAN won the presidency of Mexico with its candidate Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. This gave the National Action Party six more years to govern, a period during which little changed, at least for agro-industry and agriculture. Two well-known names in the Fox government, Alberto Cárdenas Jiménez and Francisco Mayorga Castañeda, were named to the Ministry of Agriculture. The former from 2006 to 2009 and the latter from 2009 to 2011.

Under the direction of these two well-known food industry figures, the “Strategic Project for the Humid Tropics” was created with the goal to “reforest degraded areas” and reestablish the productive structure of southeastern Mexico with industrial crops like palm oil and rubber.

Going back decades, industries and government officials began to refer to crops like palm oil that require extensive areas of cultivation as “reforestation” to mitigate the statistics of deforestation, which was largely a result of agroindustry and cattle ranching.

The use of the word “reforestation” has become so normalized that carbon credits have been sold in areas supposedly “reforested” with palm plantations, despite the evidence that an industrial monoculture under no circumstances is equivalent to reforestation. On the contrary, plantations create green deserts that degrade ecosystems, increase carbon emissions, affect biodiversity and, in the case of palm oil, dry out the soil, in addition to the contamination caused by agrochemicals.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the Convention on Biological Diversity in fact distinguishes between natural forests and plantations (monocultures), excluding from the first category any industrial cultivation, because they substitute complex forest ecosystems with homogenous agricultural systems with little biodiversity, less carbon storage in the soil and greater ecological vulnerability. This was evident in the 2010s when the ácaro rojo palm blight (Raoiella indica) affected palms of plantains (Musa sp.), coconuts (Cocos nucifera) and oil palm (Elaeis guineensis).

The first six years of the 21st century were challenging for petroleum supply. In the 2003 Iraq War, the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA’s strike on U.S. exports and the guerrilla attacks on pipelines in Nigeria raised oil prices above $40 USD a barrel, while the damages caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Gulf of Mexico exceeded $57 USD. In addition, demand from China and other emerging economies grew while production plateaued. That led to July 3, 2008, when oil reached its highest price in history at $145 a barrel on the WTI and $147 a barrel in the Brent.

Considering these conditions, the world began to look favorably at biofuels and Mexico declared oil palm a priority crop. Meanwhile scientific and national industries experimented with different types of bioenergy, including jatropha (Jatropha curcas). The Strategic Project for the Humid Tropics was the ideal forum to make the connection between the rural sector and these new goals.

According to reports from the Ministry of Agriculture at the time, the primary objective of planting oil palm was to reduce the deficit of oilseeds to grow edible oils. But as time went on it was explicitly established that oil palm production was being considered for biodiesel in the short term. This policy continued with the following administration.

At the end of the second PAN administration, two more palm processing plants began operating: Oleomex’s third and a rural plant owned by the Zitihuatl Farmers Association. In 2010, the government of Chiapas inaugurated a biodiesel plant to supply the state capital’s transportation system. Years later the system was dismantled and abandoned after a scandal that uncovered how the supposedly ecological buses were fueling up with diesel in the early morning hours at regular gas stations.

While industrial biofuel development did not prosper as hoped, by the end of 2012, following the Humid Tropics Project, more than 61,548 hectares were planted with palm. Thanks to a FAO study we know that within the project oil palm cultivation increased while “other crops decreased in area cultivated, including vanilla, cacao, hennequen and pepper.”⁸.

Palm Expansion

The return of the PRI to the presidency with Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-18) brought with it a growing number of processing plants and an ambitious program to turn Campeche into the second biggest oil palm producing state in Mexico. According to Global Forest Watch, Campeche is the state that lost the most to rest cover between 2001 and 2023, even though 40 percent of its territory is protected as conservation areas.

The Farming and Fishing Information System (SIAP) documented that in 2012 Campeche’s oil palm plantations covered less than 4,000 hectares. By 2014, the area planted had increased to 13,805 hectares thanks to a strong injection of public resources, as evidenced by the 2015 work report of governor Fernando Ortega (2009-2015). In the final year of his government, at least $150.94 million pesos ($8 million USD) were designated to develop different segments of the palm industry, from greenhouses to industrial plants.

The public investment in both oil palm businesses and policies had gotten results. This accelerated progress occurred during the administration of governor Alejandro “Alito” Moreno Cárdenas (2015-19) and his secretary of rural development, Armando Constantino Toledo Jamit, an oil palm businessman and owner of the Central Market of Campeche.

Of the eight processing plants that began operating during the Peña Nieto government, only three were owned by large business interests: Aceites Sustentables de Palma, owned by Fondo Chiapas; Agroforestal Uumbal, an affiliate of Agroindustrias Unidas de México, and Oleomex’s fourth plant.

The rest belonged to local groups and small farmer organizations, among the first was the Agroindustria Oléica de la Región de los Ríos (2017), in Tabasco, owned by the ranching magnate Felipe Casanova Lastra in association with the hotel owner José de Jesús Ramos Marín and Alejandro Aguilar Reséndez. The latter was the regional head of agrochemicals for Monsanto and director of agriculture in Tabasco’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (2008-12) and, according to his CV, in that role “designed and implemented the state oil palm project.”⁹.

It is worth mentioning that the Lastras and the Maríns are related through a family line that has a long tradition in Tabasco politics, including Ignacio Lastra Marín, who was the general director of tropical zones in Sagarpa (2017) and sub-secretary of food and competitivity (2018), among other responsibilities in that ministry.

On June 26, 2024 the Federal Administrative Justice Tribunal in Mexico declared that Jesús Ignacio Lastra Marín had “incurred serious administrative responsibilities for the misuse of 9,000 subsidy packages” from Sagarpa’s Productive Development in the South, Southeast (previously the Humid Tropics Program), which dedicated significant economic and strategic resources to foment the palm boom.

In 2018, Chiapas started construction on the Industrial Oil Group Huehuetán, property of Manuel Ángel Villalobos, of the Green Party. He was elected municipal president of Huehuetán for three terms between 2015 and 2024¹⁰ Meanwhile in Campeche operations started at Oleofinos del Carmen, owned by José Ángel Cortés Rosas and Martha Silvia Rosas Muñoz, who in 2017 were penalized for polluting the Candelaria River.

The processing plant of the small-holder farmer organization Palmicultores del Milenio is the only one of the 21 analyzed in this investigation that went bankrupt. The plant was plagued by irregularities since it opened. For example, the Federal Superior Auditor (ASF, the highest authority of fiscal audits in Mexico) found during an inspection on June 24, 2015 that the project was not complete even though, according to a contract signed with the National Agricultural Development Financer (FND), it was supposed to have been completed by February 2015. The final payments for construction expenses had been delivered in October 2015.
ntas extractoras analizadas en esta investigación.

According to a press release, at the end of that same year, in December 2015, José Calzada Rovirosa, the director of Sagarpa, and governor Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas attended pilot testing at the “Jorge Mena Pérez” plant which had received an investment of $55 million Mexican pesos ($3.46 million USD). It is strange that it was ASF that realized that the FND had given a $26.9 million peso credit for the plant’s construction.

A few years later, in November 2019, Cecilio Aguirre, leader of the Palmicultores del Milenio, denounced that the support promised by Peña Nieto and Moreno Cárdenas had been suspended. When the plant went bankrupt, Aguirre later shared, it left the property titles of about one hundred small scale farmers pledged as collateral for the loan that was never paid off. According to a former member of the Campeche state cabinet, the state government mediated a settlement for the debt with a private buyer who purchased the extraction plant equipment. It was not possible to verify this claim.

From Right to Left

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s arrival to the presidency, in 2018, represented a shift to the left. He sought to counteract neoliberal policies imposed in Mexico since 1982. Funds to support oil palm were explicitly suspended and documented, specific activities to promote palm did not continue. But several high level public servants who came out of the PRI and PAN administrations continued public policies that benefit agro-industry. These individuals already had links to palm development in Mexico.

The first big controversy related to agriculture was the appointment of Víctor Manuel Villalobos Arámbula as director of the Ministry of Agriculture and Social Development (Sader). Villalobos, an agronomy engineer, with a masters and doctorate in plant biosciences, was the sub-secretary of natural resources in the Ministry of Environment Natural Resources and Fisheries (Semarnap) during the Ernesto Zedillo administration and subsecretary of agriculture in the Fox government.

After financing the Fox campaign, Alfonso Romo Garza, a descendant of the instigator of the Mexican Revolution and former president Francisco I. Madero, kept a low profile for several years. He returned through the front door as chief of staff for the presidency under López Obrador, a role he held until 2020. He left through the back door after he was called out by the secretary of environment, Víctor Toledo, for lobbying for industry supporters of glyphosate, a dangerous herbicide that is widely used in industrial agriculture, including in the cultivation of oil palm. It is banned in many countries.

Víctor Manuel Villalobos and Julio Scherer Ibarra (father-in-law of his daughter) also played an important part in this lobby. Scherer Ibarra was the legal advisor to the presidency and at one time the executive of the Scorpion Sugar Group, owned by the Fondo Chiapas leader Enrique Molina Sobrino. Both Villalobos and Scherer blocked the presidential decree that would have banned glyphosate with a legal proposal known as the “Scherer-Villalobos law.” This led Toledo, who publicly revealed the move, to resign. But it did not prevent the glyphosate ban from going into effect. that would have banned glyphosate with a legal proposal known as the “Scherer-Villalobos law.” This led Toledo, who publicly revealed the move, to resign. But it did not prevent the glyphosate ban from going into effect.

Good Intentions…

“A lot of people started growing palm, out of necessity. But you know what, I am not going to speak ill of this crop because it arrived at the moment when people needed it. But this crop really impacts the soil. If you get rid of the palm it takes away the organic matter, the soil, and you’re left with just dirt. And when does the soil regenerate? It will take a long time. So it’s better if we plant fruit trees, timber, and continue with the cattle ranching that we already know how to handle in this region,” López Obrador said in 2019 in his home state of Tabasco.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions. What appears to be public policy to discourage a crop that is damaging to the environment and rural communities ends up repeating the same history that occurred in Asia, Africa and other Latin American countries. 

On this well-trod path, once the oil palm production chain is working and the business is profitable, agro-industry begins cornering small producers. Industry both controls prices and the purchase of fruit at the processing plants and can orchestrate affiliates to grab land and water for their own plantations.

Without state support, the so-called “community” producers are destined to fail or are at the mercy of the terms set by the processing plants.

In Mexico, the legal framework of the ejido, the system of communal landownership, has slowed this process but not stopped it. In 2024, 63 percent of palm production was on private property, another 36 percent was on ejido land and 1 percent was on communal land. A state-level analysis brings further nuance. In Campeche and Tabasco the vast majority of palm production, 88 percent and 83 percent respectively, is on private property. These are cattle ranching states where large landholders kept their property intact during agrarian reform. Meanwhile, in Veracruz, 47 percent of production is on ejido land and Chiapas follows close behind at 45 percent. y 83% respectivamente) son estados ganaderos con terratenientes que mantuvieron sus tierras intactas tras la reforma agraria, mientras que en Veracruz (47%) y en Chiapas (45%), abunda la propiedad ejidal.

This information comes from the article “Does community-based tenure prevent land grabbing? The oil palm case in Mexico”¹¹ which details how the largest industrial plantations occupy the most territory, 27 percent in total. Meanwhile the largest individual plantation identified in the study is one in Campeche that covers 3,226 hectares. Its owner is not specified.

The King Is Dead, Long Live the King?

According to Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) audits, in 2024 Oleoquímica Mexicana, which included Grupo Oleomex and Industrias Oleopalma, controlled or managed 6,319.57 hectares, which includes plantations, reserve parcels and various infrastructure. We could add the 3,411.05 hectares that RPSO reported to be controlled by the extractive company Prolade SAPI. José Luis Pérez Morett is an investor in the company along with Gastón Mauvezin, the general director of Proteak, the biggest agroforestry company in Central America.

All together, the family from Jalisco lays claim to almost 10,000 hectares, a refinery, and five processing plants. This makes them the biggest player in the oil palm industry in Mexico by leaps and bounds. However, this still doesn’t compare to what businessmen from Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala have in their home countries. Nonetheless, in 2025, the environmental attorney general closed the mill in Mapastepec for several months. During a visit to the Palenque mill, the director informed us that, since the previous year, it was only operating as a collection center.

With the available data, we know that as of 2023, Agroforestal Uumbal managed 8,626 hectares in cultivation, in addition to infrastructure. If we add the land that is not cultivated and has high conservation value, the company controls 12,309 hectares in Mexico. This would make it the biggest company in terms of land holdings.

Furthermore, according to the investigation “Water Millionaires”,¹² Uumbal has water permits for 54,000 liters a year, under the agricultural use mechanism. In this program, the company does not have to pay for service and has a preferential rate for the energy¹³ that is used to power the water pumpss.

As the first installment of this series explained, Uumbal is led by Jorge Esteve Recolons, one of the most notorious businessmen in Mexico in recent years. He owns ECOM International, a family business headquartered in Switzerland that commercializes commodities in 30 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. He also owns Agroindustrias Unidas de México (AMSA), the intermediary that purchases coffee that Nestlé uses in its Mexico Plan Nescafé.

In 2000, Isaac Saba Raffoul, Jorge Esteve Campdera and Luis Berrondo Martínez managed to organize  meetings between and business leaders and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexico City mayor at that time who was distrustful of the economic elite, according to the business columnist Dario Celis.  The emblematic megaproject of López Obrador’s time leading the capital city,  the second story of the Periférico beltway highway, was born out of these meetings, according to Celis.

While Mexican by his own right, Jorge Esteve Campdera is part of one of the richest families in Cataluña. He is a business partner of Luis Berrondo Martínez, the legendary owner of Mabe, the most famous national brand of stoves. They served together on the board of Bancreser¹⁴ and later Banco Internacional, which was sold to the British group HSBC.

Their descendents have continued alliances with companies including Crédito Real and Copri, a real estate group that traded for properties owned by the government of Mexico City in exchange for financing the construction of a series of fast lanes that connect Santa Fe, the finance center of the city. This occurred during the mayoral administrations of López Obrador and the current economy secretary, Marcelo Ebrard.

This capacity for dialogue with the current administration helped Jorge Esteve be named president in February 2025 of the National Agricultural Council, the political action organization for agro-industry. Esteve, in addition, is the vice president of the Mexican Business Council, the highest-level business group in the country.

The power that the palm businessmen have achieved in Mexico and the huge demand for vegetable oils from domestic industries has made it nearly impossible to stop the expansion of palm oil. In an international landscape that appears to be swinging back to protectionism and domestic production, it seems even less likely to stop the industry’s expansion.

Even so, one would hope that the state, in its role of guaranteeing human rights, would fulfill the promises made to small-holder farmers to ensure fair prices for the crop and dignified working conditions, protect ecosystems and improve transparency of the supply chain. At the same time, industry could be required to disclose what type of vegetable oil its products contain through a more thorough labeling process.

Even so, one would hope that the state, in its role of guaranteeing human rights, would fulfill the promises made to small-holder farmers to ensure fair prices for the crop and dignified working conditions, protect ecosystems and improve transparency of the supply chain. At the same time, industry could be required to disclose what type of vegetable oil its products contain through a more thorough labeling process.

While many of the relationships and connections described here could be morally reproachable, it is also clear that most of them are legal. It would require a more detailed study to understand why. At one time Toledo Jamit himself complained that the state support for palm was “dedicated” for people who were closer to the powerful than he was.

It is also concerning that this conduct is not exclusive to one sector or industry. To the contrary, these practices extend across industries. This allows the concentration of capital and wealth in the hands of a few, while everyone else is left with the social and environmental problems and many struggle to find a stable lifestyle. Examples of this are common among those who plant palm, but that is another story, which is told in the documentary The Chains of Palm.

The idea that people don’t work hard and that’s why they stay poor (meritocracy) has been a very effective concept to convince the population that the state should stop helping the most impoverished population, while the development discourse continues to favor the business class. This keeps the revolving door well oiled.

This report was funded as part of the Bertha Challenge 2025. To learn more about this project, click here.

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   desigualdad mundial 2026, Laboratorio Mundial sobre la Desigualdad. wir2026.wid.world ↩︎
2. «Informe de Rendición de Cuentas de la Administración Pública Federal 2000-2006 primera etapa» Sagarpa. Pág. 3  ↩︎
3. «Informe de Rendición de Cuentas de la Administración Pública Federal 2000-2006 primera etapa» Sagarpa. Pág. 4 ↩︎
4. Primer Informe de Labores 2001, Informe Sectorial SAGARPA, Gobierno de México. ↩︎
5. Una amistad sin sombras. Correspondencia entre Manuel Gomez Morin y Efrain Gonzalez Luna 1934-1964, Fondo de Cultura Económica (2010). Tomo 5 pags. 3251-3253. México ↩︎
6. Navarrete U., Carlos Alberto. Grupos y alianzas en el Partido Acción Nacional: el caso de Jalisco : 1979-1999. México: El Colegio de San Luis, 2015. P.155 ↩︎
7. Relaciones de parentesco, estructuras de poder y grupos políticos en Jalisco 1995-2003, UDG 2004. ↩︎
8. Evaluación Nacional de Resultados 2013 Proyecto Trópico Húmedo, FAO- SAGARPA. 2015 ↩︎
9. ↩︎
10. In 2009, the Green Party was expelled from the the global organization of green parties, the Global Greens ↩︎
11. Antonio Castellanos-Navarrete *, Marcela A. Colocho-Rodríguez , Nicolás Vargas-Ramírez Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur (CIMSUR), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), México. Applied Geography, 172 (2024), P.103413. ↩︎
12. Gómez, Wilfrido y Andrea Moctezuma. 2020. «Los millonarios del agua. Una aproximación al acaparamiento del agua en México». En Revista Argumentos, (93):17-38, México, UAM-X, https://let.iiec.unam.mx/node/4361 ↩︎
13. In Mexico, electricity is provided by a state-owned company. ↩︎
14. Bancreser was nationalized in 1982 and privatized again in the 1990s under the name Bancrecer. ↩︎