¿Qué les pasó a las abejas?

Directed by Adriana Otero and Robin Canul, ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas? (What happened to the bees?) (2019) analyzes the causes behind the abrupt decline of beehives in the Mexican state of Campeche, set against a multiyear resistance by Maya communities against transgenic soy farming, whose associated agrochemicals impact bee populations.

The economy of peasants in the Yucatán Peninsula—who are predominantly indigenous—is primarily based on agriculture and beekeeping, as the peninsula is one of the world’s leading honey-producing regions. The first half of the year is dedicated to honey production; in the second half, these campesinos focus on producing maize, ensuring sustainable land treatment through nonintensive farming. Crop rotation, a practice carried out by peasants globally for millennia, has been affected over the past thirty years, primarily due to the introduction of genetically modified crops, most notably by the multinational Monsanto. In Yucatán, the aggressive extractivist practices of agribusiness began to consolidate at the start of the 2000s.

The protagonists of this documentary are Gustavo Huchín Cauich and Leydy Aracely Pech, leaders of the protests against transgenic crops in the Yucatán Peninsula. Leydy emerges as a central figure in the documentary narrative, transcending the mere representation of an activist to embody the intersection between territorial defense, Maya cultural revitalization, and indigenous female empowerment. Her participation in the Koolel Kaab collective, dedicated to the rescue and conservation of the Melipona bee, highlights the importance of Maya women in the preservation of biodiversity and traditional knowledge. The parallel drawn between women’s labor and the characteristics of these bees—vulnerability, delicacy, and industriousness—creates a powerful metaphor that highlights both the value of female labor and the ecological importance of these pollinators for the ecosystem and Maya culture.

Leydy’s international recognition as the “Maya guardian of the bees” renders visible the capacity of indigenous women to articulate resistance and construct alliances that transcend national borders. Her discourse, which advocates for “another model, another thought, another development,” connects environmental justice with the defense of women’s rights and the revitalization of ancestral cultures.

This documentary also highlights another prominent woman: its codirector, Adriana Otero, who was only twenty-five when she began the project, which took four years to complete, including preproduction, fieldwork, and filming (her codirector Robin Canul was twenty-nine). Otero noted: “Leydy’s presence in the film was fundamental; to present the role of women, both as beekeepers and as Maya women, and as women who fight and participate in community decision-making. This is something we rarely see.” Otero described ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas? as “a recognition of the peaceful, eloquent, and powerful way in which this protagonist has undertaken a struggle that sometimes seems impossible to us.”Footnote ⁷ All of Otero’s documentaries—including short and feature-length films—are characterized by recurring themes: the land, the environment, agriculture, rural labor, and Maya culture.

In ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas?, one observes a deliberate subversion of the stereotypes that have traditionally linked indigenous peoples with poverty, ignorance, or passivity. In contrast, the documentary presents dignified subjects—rather than passive “objects” of anthropological study—who actively defend their ways of production, mobilize for their rights, and engage in political dialogue grounded in lived experience, knowledge, and sentir (situated sensing). This becomes evident after the documentary’s opening section, which introduces the theme and its protagonists: A panoramic shot reveals vast deforested hillsides interspersed with images of dead bees. Gustavo lays it out plainly, synthesizing the heart of the film: “It is jungle, forest that we have conserved for hundreds and thousands of years. They come, buy those forests, and bring in machinery: the bulldozer clears the entire jungle, and the animals that live there, it kills them or they flee. We realized that, due to the soy planting, this is what happens to the bees: the population drops significantly or they die, depending on the pesticide or herbicide applied in those hills.”

By this point, the protagonists have already been introduced. The documentary depicts both the environmental devastation and the daily routines of Gustavo and Leydy as beekeepers, in addition to the family care activities they perform in their everyday lives. For instance, Leydy is shown teaching her son honey-harvesting techniques, while Gustavo speaks in Maya with his elderly father—whom he cares for, dresses, and feeds. The elder reflects on the community’s connection to honey and dietary shifts, noting, for example, that his people now consume more honey and less sugar. Figure 1 shows one of these moments.

Figure 1.

Leydy Pech in the midst of her labor. The care for these vulnerable pollinators is transformed into a metaphor for indigenous female empowerment against neoliberal dispossession.

Gustavo and Leydy are legitimized by their experience, their struggle, and their awareness-raising work. In the interviews, presented in the standard “talking heads” format, it is clear that they are not mere key informants but experts on the situation of the bees, Maya agriculture, and the exploitation of the agro-industrial complex. At one point, Leydy reflects on the situation and the participation of women: “If the men are working in beekeeping, if they are organizing themselves, why shouldn’t we women also work on something different—something that isn’t just in the backyard, at home, doing housework? So we said, well, let’s work with bees, the Xunan Kaab, as they are known. We began to build the dream; that is how the idea was born in me—the desire, the interest, the spirit to work as a group because, in reality, I had never been part of a group.”Footnote ⁸

¿Qué les pasó a las abejas? decisively denounces the consequences of glyphosate and other agrochemicals for the ecosystem and the health of populations. This denunciation is reinforced by the testimony of Fabián Amaranto Tomasi, an Argentine expert and activist whose health was seriously affected by the products associated with transgenic crops. It is worth emphasizing that Argentina was one of the first countries in the world to adopt GM seeds and their corresponding agrochemicals, resulting in extensive negative consequences for its population over the past thirty years.Footnote ⁹ Tomasi’s testimony includes reflections such as the following:

In a subsequent scene, Gustavo delves deeper into the Yucatecan reality—a situation mirroring that of other Latin American regions: “Before, we dominated all of our territory; it was ours. But since Article 27 was modified, we were confined to certain places we called ejidos. So now our ejido is delimited, and the government has already sold the remainder of our state—which was our territory as Maya people—to large corporations or to the Mennonites. And since we have very fertile land in the southeast, they buy those lands now that they are able to buy them.”

The testimonies of the Argentine and Mexican activists can be read together as an expression of a transnational, pan-rural connection that situates the local struggle in a broader context of continental resistance against extractivist violence. In this manner, Otero and Canul’s work both visibilizes a specific socioenvironmental conflict and proposes an alternative civilizational horizon in contexts of climate crisis and global environmental and social collapse.

Apenas el sol

The documentary Apenas el sol (Nothing but the Sun; 2020), by the filmmaker Arami Ullón, is a film of significant ethnographic and political value that addresses the territorial dispossession and structural violence suffered by the Ayoreo people in the Paraguayan Chaco.

Historically characterized by their nomadism and autonomy in the so-called Gran Chaco, the Ayoreo people underwent processes of late dispossession and forced sedentarization, a dynamic that intensified toward the end of the 1960s. This ancestral territory—the second-largest forest ecosystem in South America—is currently facing an ecological crisis, with deforestation rates reaching four hundred hectares per day.

The displacement of this community was not an isolated event, but a phase in the expansion of the extractive frontier, where religious missions—in collusion with the Paraguayan government—facilitated the advance of the agribusiness, territorial dispossession, and the commodification of vital resources such as water. In this context, the Ayoreo were confined to peripheral settlements, which generated the virtual extinction of their ancestral knowledge systems and a disarticulation of their social fabric.

Mateo Sobode Chiqueno belongs to the Ayoreo, one of the indigenous peoples of Paraguay. He produces sound recordings documenting the dispossession and violence suffered by his community at the hands of agribusiness, Christian missionaries, and his country’s government. Using an old cassette recorder, Mateo records interviews and testimonies, building a counterhegemonic archive that denounces the violence perpetrated against the Ayoreo.

In the Ayoreo worldview, women play a fundamental role as guardians of living memory and biocultural knowledge that sustain the social fabric against the constant threat of ethnocide and community disarticulation. While the sound recordings of Mateo Sobode Chiqueno represent a historical and political archive, the female presence in the documentary manifests defeats but also an everyday resistance through the intergenerational transmission of the mother tongue and the preservation of ritual practices in contexts of profound precariousness.

The narrative thread in Apenas el sol is based on an authorial displacement: Arami Ullón renounces the protagonist and the personal role she occupied in her debut film, El tiempo nublado, to delegate discursive agency to Mateo Sobode. In this cinematic device, the director materially disappears from the frame, allowing Sobode Chiqueno to act as the true interviewer and oral historian of the account. By traversing different settlements of the Paraguayan Chaco and capturing testimonies on rustic cassette tapes, Mateo’s work transcends biographical record to become a political and cultural synecdoche. His individual sound archive, filled with memories and songs of resistance, constitutes a representation of the collective soul of the Ayoreo people in its entirety, transforming an act of personal preservation into a tool of struggle against ethnocide and the systematic territorial dispossession that threatens to extinguish their universe.

Arami Ullón has been consolidating her career from a feminist and progressive perspective, both in her documentaries—in El tiempo nublado (Cloudy times; Paraguay, 2014), in contrast to Apenas el sol, she addresses in the first person her relationship with her mother and the socially imposed role of women as caregivers—and in her public stances, such as her critique of machismo and sexism both in society at large and in the film industry.Footnote ¹⁰ In general terms, Ullón’s cinema focuses on the stories of marginalized people and communities, and on the lack of rights and dynamics of power and abuse, addressing themes such as racism, gender discrimination, and colonial oppression.

“What was our sin?” Mateo inquires while walking amid the dust clouds and under a scorching sun, with no one to answer him. Ullón’s camera lingers on Mateo’s gaze, as well as on the skeletons of animals and dry trees found along the road.

The Salesian Catholic congregation and the Mennonites were fundamental in this process of dispossession. The Salesians, along with other white men, confined the Ayoreo to camps and remote settlements, where they lived in fragile huts, wooden houses, or precarious structures on barren lands, with scarce access to water and no means of subsistence—they are not permitted to gather or hunt—and they “converted” to the Christian god, as analyzed by the Paraguayan intellectual Ticio Escobar.Footnote ¹¹ One of the interviewees remarks, “They forced us to renounce our traditions, to feel ashamed of them, and instilled in us the belief that everything Ayoreo was from the devil.”

The title of the documentary, Apenas el sol, encapsulates a reflection on the Ayoreo people’s relationship with their territory: it is articulated by Mateo in his commentary on how the white man insists on establishing a relationship of property with everything he finds in his path, regardless of anything else: with the land, the water, the trees, and the people—leaving only the sun without an owner. Mateo wages a tireless struggle to ensure that the forests and the Ayoreo culture do not die.

The forced displacement of the Ayoreo people not only had a religious objective but also was an operational phase in the expansion of the extractive frontier, where Catholic and Protestant missions acted as the state’s executing arm to clear lands of high economic value for foreign capital. In this manner, the ancestral territory was fragmented and commodified to make way for agribusiness and monocultures, transforming what for millennia was a biocultural subsistence ecosystem into a sacrifice zone for the sake of capital accumulation.

The testimonies, stories, and songs obtained by Mateo began to be recorded in 1979. Throughout the documentary, we see Mateo interviewing other members of this indigenous people who recount stories of dispossession and violence.

Mateo Sobode Chiqueno’s interviewees expose both intimate feelings and opinions, as well as incongruities and contradictions. For instance, in a scene centered on one of the semiabandoned settlements where the Ayoreo were relocated, there is an Ayoreo Christian pastor. He tends to his small church and summons his parishioners through old, dilapidated loudspeakers. When Mateo interviews this Ayoreo pastor, he acknowledges that his people lived better in the past: “We didn’t starve to death, we didn’t have as many diseases as we do now,” he states. When asked for his opinion on returning to Ayoreo roots, the pastor quickly expresses disagreement: “One must stop being Ayoreo; it is bad.”

Ullón’s film shows how the defense of life and the “body-territory” (cuerpo-territorio) binomial falls upon female figures who seek to articulate strategies of resilience against the advance of agribusiness extractivism and the imposition of private property logics that commodified their vital ecosystem.Footnote ¹² The narrative of Apenas el sol captures the complexity of contemporary Ayoreo identities through characters such as the protagonist’s wife, who embodies the permanent tensions and negotiations between ancestral heritage and the structures of religious modernity imposed by evangelical and Salesian missions.

Mateo asks his wife, “How do you think I can take care of myself?” She responds that only Jesus can protect him. While the camera refrains from judging these or other testimonies, the film ultimately reveals the profound physical violence and dehumanization that the Ayoreo people have endured for decades.

Furthermore, another interviewee—a former shaman prior to the dispossession—notes that she abandoned her practice due to pressure from her own daughters, who represent a subsequent, already Christianized generation. Mateo subsequently reflects that it was the shamans who served as the keepers of ancestral knowledge, acting as protectors of the Ayoreo people. Figure 2 illustrates one of these testimonies. A third interviewee, an elderly Ayoreo woman, recounts how white men on horseback arrived shooting at everyone during her childhood; her father was killed while attempting to protect her during these violent incursions. This elder explains that the “white men” not only seized their ancestral lands but also introduced unknown diseases such as measles; various testimonies highlight the high mortality rates caused by this pathogen, which the community lacked the means to treat.

Figure 2.

Female testimony denounces structural violence: an Ayoreo woman details the trauma of displacement toward barren lands. The image underscores the fragility of cultural transmission in an ecosystem devastated by the expansion of the extractive frontier and monocultures.

This modern colonialism—whose ferocity and violence do not fall short of earlier colonialisms—can be clearly seen at various moments in the documentary, such as the scene where an interviewee narrates when white men came to expel the Ayoreo people from their land, with men on horseback appearing from everywhere. During the moments when the Ayoreo were fleeing, the interviewee explains that due to the prevailing chaos, his wife moved in a different direction: “I saw her go deep into the forest, and we never found each other again.” A similar testimony of grief is offered by one of the women interviewed by Mateo, who describes how her father was murdered in front of everyone during those violent incursions by white men. These “hunts” of the Ayoreo people reached their climax between 1979 and 1986, when the fundamentalist US group New Tribes Mission—currently known as Ethnos360—joined these expeditions.Footnote ¹³

Another important interlocutor in this documentary, José Iquebi, offers his testimony, recounting how the Salesians kidnapped him as a child, capturing him in the forest, providing him shelter, and constructing in him the image of a “good” indigenous person, adapted to modernity. The Salesians took the young José Iquebi—dressed in Western clothing—to display him in various towns throughout the region as an example of what an Ayoreo should be; in some cities with little indigenous presence, people even paid to see the boy José dressed as a “Westerner.” In turn, little José was deceived by white men into showing them the path to reach his Ayoreo relatives and his community: when this happened, all the Ayoreo were stripped of their lands and confined to distant, inhospitable places.

The director Arami Ullón states: “The Paraguayan Chaco is a territory that generates significant wealth, and religious groups arrive not only with a missionary objective but also with a goal of economic exploitation. The ethnic cleansing that has been carried out systematically aims to make those lands available for exploitation, as the government is not interested in indigenous people continuing to occupy the territory.”Footnote ¹⁴

Throughout the documentary, we see Mateo Sobode carrying his recorder, carefully handling his old cassettes, cleaning them, arranging them, and even sharing them with his grandchildren: His little granddaughter plays with the cassettes, while other grandchildren ask Mateo to play Ayoreo songs recorded over the years—“Grandpa, put on song four,” they tell him. Sobode remarks: “These children think our songs came numbered.” But those children know and want to hear the songs of their ancestors.

Mateo adds: “Our territory is a living being that shelters us and is illuminated by our presence. We express ourselves through our territory, and our history is drawn in every riverbed, in trees, in forest clearings, and in salt pans. Our territory also expresses itself through our history, because the Ayoreo people and our territory are one body.”

If in the first minutes of the documentary one sees dry land, dust, and a lack of water, at the end of the footage a massive, terrifying, and sweeping fire is observed. A colossal fire consumes a large part of the forest where the Ayoreo lived—and which they cannot access, except by jumping over fences here and there. One Ayoreo person declares, “That forest no longer exists and will take a century or more to recover.”

This transition from forest to private property had devastating ecological consequences captured by the film: the introduction of agro-industrial models altered water cycles. While in Ayoreo memory the territory was a fertile zone that provided life and health, current settlements are characterized by structural drought and barren lands; access to water is a mechanism of political control and external charity. The documentary visualizes this degradation in dusty landscapes where, as Mateo Sobode observes, “dust exists only when the trees are gone.”

This scene of the massive forest fire—the work’s visual climax—shows planned deforestation. These fires, often presented as “controlled”—occurring in large, private, and inaccessible territories—are carried out to expand the agricultural frontier of monocultures.Footnote ¹⁵

The film functions as a rite for the conservation of existence, transforming the act of recording into a tool of struggle for autonomy and identity, against a present marked by exclusion and the brutal loss of home and the means for a dignified life.

El Eco

This documentary analyzes the fragility of the rural world in Mexico regarding aspects such as violence, extractivism, and migration, which fall particularly hard upon women. It offers an intimate look at the difficulties families endure, especially during childhood, without idealizing rural life.

In El Eco (The Echo), emotions are more significant than exploitation and violence. The town’s women—grandmothers, mothers, teenagers, and girls—are undeniable protagonists. They live there year-round, while their partners—men fueled by widespread machismo—are usually absent, with jobs located hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, often in drug trafficking. When these men return home, they make their presence felt and seek to impose themselves. “I’m just getting back from work; do you work?” one of the fathers asks rudely upon arriving at his small home after working on a building under construction in the capital of the state of Puebla.

In this way, the Salvadoran-Mexican director Tatiana Huezo continues the trajectory of her previous documentaries—especially El lugar más pequeño (2010) and Tempestad (2016)—which portray the emotional toll of violence surrounding the disappearance of loved ones in a context of impunity, in narratives woven together through testimonial resources.Footnote ¹⁶ Within Huezo’s extensive filmography, we find only one work of fiction, Noche de fuego (2021): the story of three peasant girls who must hide their female identity to escape kidnapping and rape—this film received a special mention in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.Footnote ¹⁷

In El Eco—awarded best documentary at the Berlinale—the narrative centers on three other girls through everyday scenes of significant symbolic power. As in Noche de fuego, the film portrays girls navigating the transition from childhood while confronting experiences that exceed their age. Montse patiently cares for her grandmother, creating an intergenerational bridge; Sarahí teaches younger students at school, embodying the transmission of knowledge; and Luzma absorbs her father’s everyday machismo while developing an interest in becoming a veterinarian, illustrating the tension between patriarchal tradition and aspirations for female emancipation. All this unfolds through young gazes awakening to life, where everything appears as revelation and discovery, encompassing both the best and the worst.

In one scene, a girl prepares a lesson on the extinction of mammoths, functioning as a metaphor for the community of El Eco itself—the real name of this small town in the state of Puebla, located at an altitude of over three thousand meters—threatened by external factors such as violence, extractivism, and migration.

In Tatiana Huezo’s narrative, violence is not presented graphically, but as an atmospheric and structural presence—a hallmark of her filmography—linked to impunity and the looming threat of organized crime. Men are typically absent, working far away, frequently in jobs related to drug trafficking, which alters the social fabric and leaves women and girls vulnerable to dangers such as kidnapping.

The film renders visible a violence that traverses the territory through those who prey on their natural resources and logics of overexploitation that create economic suffocation for peasant families. Simultaneously, forced migration is driven by economic necessity and the aspiration of young women to move to urban areas to circumvent hierarchical and conservative patriarchal structures. This situation accelerates the disappearance of rural life, fracturing the generational relay necessary for the preservation of knowledge.

Precisely, the intergenerational conversations in El Eco reveal the structural gender dynamics present in this rural environment, where girls perceive and process the “echoes” of the life trajectories of the women who preceded them. The film’s narrative allows for the reconstruction of a succession of forced renunciations, beginning with the figure of the grandmother, who had to extinguish her artistic vocation for singing after being married off as a child and having to assume immediate motherhood. Subsequently, the figure of the mother also has a history of early marriage in adolescence, which prompts the daughter’s questioning: “Why did you marry Dad at fourteen? Do you even love him?”—an interpellation that not only seeks to understand the maternal past but also attempts to break a cycle of subordination. The mother’s response, telling her daughter to study so that she “won’t be ignorant of many things in life,” shows a painful awareness of the restrictions that the patriarchal model imposes on women’s development and autonomy.

The intergenerational transmission of expectations is complemented by domestic scenes in which chauvinistic attitudes emerge. “Leave the plate”—the father tells one of his sons—“that’s women’s work,” provoking a disapproving, yet nonconfrontational gaze from his daughter.

The discussion between a mother and an absent father reveals economic and emotional tensions: “It’s rough that you feel I do nothing, and that you only tell me to give it my all,” the mother expresses, demanding recognition for her domestic labor, while the daughter listens attentively, absorbing these relational patterns. Figure 3 shows the setting of these community challenges. This conflict is complemented by the subsequent image of the same mother carrying heavy water containers uphill, a visual metaphor for the weight of the responsibilities that fall upon her. This discussion reveals the tensions and challenges faced by women in this community, who must often deal with the burden of domestic work and the lack of opportunities to find well-paid jobs.

Figure 3.

Rural childhood in the body-territory (cuerpo-territorio) binomial. The image symbolizes female resilience in the face of an ecosystem lashed by climate change and the overexploitation of resources, where economic suffocation and the violence of organized crime shape everyday life, in which girls and women establish themselves as guardians of memory and biocultural knowledge, resisting a development model that, like the mammoths in the school lesson, threatens to extinguish their universe of meaning.

Migration also emerges as a central theme of the narrative through various scenes. The absence of a young woman who recently emigrated becomes a reason for reflection for her mother, who expresses herself with melancholy: “I think that maybe I am not the best mother for my daughter. Here, this is what we teach them: to walk in the fields, to work, to look after the animals, to feed them, to see how one earns a cent in the countryside.” This monologue reveals the tensions between rural traditions and the aspirations of the new generations, who seek to “forge their own path” in other places with more—and better-paid—job opportunities, such as Mexico City.

From an aesthetic standpoint, El Eco stands out for its meticulous visual and sound construction. Ernesto Pardo’s cinematography alternates between panoramic shots that contextualize the natural environment and close-ups that capture the gestures and emotions of the characters. In turn, sound plays a fundamental role in building the atmosphere, creating a soundscape where natural elements intertwine with human voices and diegetic music. As Tatiana Huezo remarks:

Tatiana Huezo captures not only the natural cycles that have ancestrally governed peasant life but also the tensions and reconfigurations that emerge when traditional patriarchal and authoritarian structures are challenged. In the absence of men—many of whom have migrated toward labor sectors, including drug trafficking—women assume both productive and reproductive roles, becoming the primary catalysts for social change. For instance, amid a teacher shortage, older students instruct the younger ones, simultaneously preserving fundamental community knowledge regarding agriculture and animal husbandry.

Ultimately, one of the most compelling aspects of El Eco is its nuanced portrayal of the community’s female universe. Huezo explores women’s internal and external conflicts, their rebellions, and their subversion of traditional roles within a patriarchal, conservative society. By centering daily life, she highlights the synergy between the women and girls who inhabit and contest these spaces. Whether in the domestic sphere, in the fields during harvest, or in the classroom, women of all ages predominate, forging bonds that encompass conflict and anguish as well as shared hope and resilience.

Huezo’s films—she was the first female director to win the Ariel Award for Best DirectionFootnote ¹⁹ —are narratives based on the testimonies of women, especially mothers of the disappeared, organized through a montage that constructs visual metaphors. They go beyond a direct representation of violence, embracing a cinematic poetic narrative rather than a formal complaint or a journalistic report, always drawing sustenance from the accounts of the women interviewed.Footnote ²⁰

The documentary El Eco transcends contemplative observation to position itself as a critique of the logics of extractive modernity that suffocate rural subsistence in the Mexican interior. The work visualizes economic suffocation not as a natural state of poverty, but as a systemic consequence of natural resource predators who operate with a rationality of overexploitation that deteriorates the well-being and survival of peasant families. By distancing itself from a romanticized vision of the countryside, the film denounces the short-term logics of agribusiness that transform living ecosystems into zones of environmental vulnerability, where land degradation generates a productive transition that threatens peasant culture with extinction in the face of the advancement of extractive capital.