LA VENTOSA: Cain Lopez looks tiny standing near the seven enormous wind turbines that tower over his farm in the Mexican village of La Ventosa.

In this gusty rural region near the Pacific coast, the wind is so strong it sometimes flips over cars and even trailer trucks.

Lopez always considered it a curse, until an international energy company came along and said it wanted to build these 40 metre wind turbines on his land, offering him a small fortune by local standards.

Some villagers in the southern state of Oaxaca accuse the multi-national energy firms that operate here of breaking promises, tricking them into unfair contracts and failing to consult them sufficiently.

Last month, 15 people were arrested when the authorities broke up a protest in the town of Juchitan by residents demanding more money for their land.

And this month, residents of Union Hidalgo filed a court case seeking to rescind French energy company EDF’s permit to build nearly 100 new wind turbines there, saying it failed to properly consult the Zapotec indigenous community.

Now, some locals are threatening to shut the wind projects down completely.

“If we work together, we can close every single wind farm,” says Porfirio Montero, president of a local landowners’ association.

The landscape of this windswept isthmus has been transformed by the wind turbines, which look like gleaming white forests of stylized trees.

Some 2,000 turbines have been built in Oaxaca since 1994, generating 2,347 megawatts – enough to power half of Mexico City, the sprawling capital located some 700 kilometres away.

They are the drivers of a budding green revolution in Mexico, a country that has emerged as a leader on renewable energy.

Last year, green energy made up 28 per cent of its energy mix, according to the government.

Mexico is now the world’s 18th largest producer of wind energy, with 3,709 megawatts, and second only to Brazil in Latin America, according to the World Wind Energy Association.

But Porfirio Montero, head of the landowners’ association, says the energy companies have worsened inequality in the region, one of Mexico’s poorest.

“Some people earn just $1,700 a month for the same wind turbines” that Lopez has, he said. “There are differences of 25 to 30pc.”

And yet, he added, “The air is the air. There’s only one.”

According to Montero, one wind turbine generates electricity worth about $112,000 a day.

Non-landholders often get nothing at all.

Some companies are accused of breaking promises to fund infrastructure projects to benefit the community. The wind farms create jobs when they are built, but they disappear just as quickly when the projects are done.

EDF did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment.

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2017