The winds that whip across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico’s Oaxaca state are strong enough to knock a man to his feet and strip the grain from the sorghum fields. They also propel the rotors of two dozen wind farms that have sprung up in the region over the past eight years, making the isthmus the centerpiece of Mexico’s plans to promote clean energy and boost its standing in the fight against climate change.

But the explosion of wind-energy production on this neck of land between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans has brought unequal gains to local communities and is resented by some, residents and political activists say. Weary of the wind farms’ rapid expansion and wary of impacts on fishing, farming, local fauna and indigenous religious sites, some communities are rejecting new projects. Such push-back is playing out in Juchitán de Zaragoza, where a group of indigenous residents and activists is battling plans by an international consortium, Energía Eólica del Sur, to build one of the largest wind farms in Latin America on their land.

The 132-turbine project, which would have an installed capacity of 396 megawatts, has been suspended since September 2015, when a judge ruled that obligatory public consultations in connection with the wind farm may not have been conducted properly. “We’re not ‘anti-wind’,” says Bettina Cruz, a human rights activist based in Juchitán and a member of the coalition fighting Eólica del Sur. “But if someone comes from abroad with a project that hurts our rights, we will oppose it. “

Some human rights lawyers and activists see Eólica del Sur as a tipping point in Mexico’s wind rush. They forecast communities will become more demanding of companies seeking to use their land, and may turn them away. Andrea Cerami, a lawyer with the Mexican Center for Environmental Law in Mexico City, says the controversy over Eólica del Sur “marks a break in how we do wind energy projects in Mexico.”

Mexico’s wind-power push is part of a high-profile effort to set and achieve climate-change goals. The country joined Canada and the United States in June to pledge that half of its energy will come from clean sources by 2025. This month, Mexico ratified the 2015 Paris climate accord, formalizing a commitment to bring the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions and so-called short lived climate pollutants 25% below business-as-usual levels by 2030, with 2013 identified as the base year.

Hitting those targets will require aggressive expansion of wind power and other renewable-energy sources, experts say. Accordingly, the government aims to boost wind energy from last year’s level of about 3,000 megawatts—or about 4% of the country’s installed power-generation capacity—to 9,000 megawatts in 2018, or about 12% of installed capacity. In Oaxaca, far and away the country’s top wind-energy producer, installed wind capacity could rise from 2,500 megawatts in 2015 to 5,500 in 2018, according to the Mexican Wind Power Association, the sector’s main industry group.

The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a region of rural indigenous communities and poor fishing villages, has world-class winds: a 2003 USAID-funded report by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that the wind-power density—a measure of wind energy that is calculated using wind speeds—ranked at the top end of its scale in parts of the region.

In the mid-2000s, the isthmus became the center of a high-profile effort by then-President Felipe Calderón to combat global warming, a campaign that has continued—though with less verve, experts say—since current President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in 2012. During 2006-15, Mexican and foreign companies installed more than 1,000 turbines in about two dozen wind farms across a 20-mile stretch of the isthmus near the Pacific Coast. Most farms operate under self-supply agreements, with one or more consortium members buying electricity from the farm to power, for example, manufacturing plants.

The rollout has drawn some US$9 billion in investment, according to Leopoldo Rodríguez, president of the Mexican Wind Power Association. Hundreds of landowners have signed contracts to rent their land to energy companies, and local workers have been hired to build infrastructure for the wind farms and to maintain the turbines. Rejecting suggestions that wind farms displace communities, the association points out that the population of nearby towns has grown at the same pace as that of the state as a whole. But as wind turbines fill the plains and circle towns, local distrust has grown, residents and activists say. “We’re surrounded by windmills,” says Alberto Toledo López, a resident of La Ventosa, a town about 20 miles from Juchitán that is the site of one of the first wind farms. Sitting in the shade on his dusty patio, Toledo, a 55-year-old security guard, says he refused to rent his 10 hectares (25 acres) of farmland to EDF, the French utility company that owns the wind farm. “We’re sacrificing ourselves to send energy somewhere else,” he says.

Cruz says bats and migratory birds are killed by churning rotors, although one study of flight patterns near a wind farm called La Venta suggests some birds avoid the farm. She echoes the worries of other residents and activists, who believe turbines affect the breeding habits of cattle and sheep that graze around them and that lubricant that trickles down their masts causes pollution. “What they have done to the landscape is terrible,” says Cruz.

Some residents complain there is little economic upside, asserting that wind energy projects create an employment boom in the initial stages and only a handful of jobs once they are up and running. Rogelio López López—president of the ejido, or communal land that belongs to the residents of La Ventosa, which is about 16 kilometers (10 miles) from Juchitán—argues that two wind farms near the town have created wealth and have funded improvements such as street lighting and paved roads. But those who did not get work or rent land to the wind companies “see the projects in a negative light,” he says.

By the time an international consortium proposed building a 396-megawatt wind farm on two areas of communal land near Juchitán in 2013, patience with the wind developers had worn thin. The consortium, which included Macquarie Mexican Infrastructure Fund, a branch of the Australian investment bank, Mitsubishi Corporation and Dutch pension fund PGGM, had already tried to build a wind farm around a lagoon on the Pacific Coast of the isthmus starting in 2011. The earlier project, Mareña Renovables, was defeated amid protests and lawsuits by indigenous communities who feared it would ruin their fishing and violate sacred sites, says Leonardo Crippa, an attorney at the Indian Law Resource Center in Washington. The project called for construction of turbines on a sandbank that is a sacred ancestral site of the Huave indigenous group, where fishermen exchange goods with members of other communities fronting the lagoon.

Macquarie represented the consortium publicly, but declined to comment for this article. However, a report issued in September by the Inter-American Development Bank, which had lent the project US$74 million, found local communities were not adequately informed or consulted and that too little was done to mitigate the project’s cultural impacts. Crippa says local people acting on the consortium’s behalf threatened indigenous representatives. Security contracts were offered to local strongmen who scared off opponents, he says. “They knew about the opposition and decided to go forward anyway,” he says.

With Mareña Renovables effectively dead, the investors moved their sights to land owned by the residents of Juchitán and renamed the project Energía Eólica del Sur. This time they faced a new hurdle: to win approval from the federal and local authorities and from the communities whose land would be affected.

The Mexican Energy Secretariat (Sener) held a public consultation in Juchitán in compliance with the country’s 2014 hydrocarbons law, which requires a “prior, free and informed” consultation as part of energy projects that might affect indigenous communities. The consultation, which began in Dec. 2014, was the first in Mexican history for a wind-energy project. Katya Puga Cornejo, director of social-impact assessment for Sener, says officials held over 40 open public meetings over eight months. Some attracted just 100 people; one drew well over a thousand, Puga says. She adds that the protocol for the consultations was discussed beforehand among stakeholders, and that “all the available information” the indigenous community requested was provided.

The consortium undertook to create a trust fund to subsidize residential energy consumption in Juchitán. In July, the project was approved by a show of hands at a crowded meeting. “The idea of the consultation wasn’t just to gather opinions,” says Puga. “It was to determine whether or not there was consent.”

Others disagree. James Anaya, dean of the law school of the University of Colorado, Boulder, spent three days observing the consultation in Feb. 2015 at the Mexican government’s invitation. Anaya, who served during 2008-14 as the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said in a report that the foreign investors were barely present during meetings and seemed to view indigenous people as “inferior.”

Several calls seeking comment from the offices of Eólica del Sur in Mexico City went unanswered.

Done deal?

Anaya, in his report, said information about the project was rendered in such technical language that it was hard to understand; and that proposed mechanisms for sharing the benefits of the project were inadequate. He and other experts assert the project was presented during the consultation as a fait accompli, rather than being designed with the participation of community members.

“It’s not a question of arriving and saying, ‘Here is our project. Let’s have a consultation,’ ” says Carlos Tornel, an energy consultant based in Mexico City. “You need to sit down with the communities way before the project, explain what you intend to do, how you intend to do it. It’s a long process.”

Stephanie Friede, a doctorate student in anthropology who was present at the consultation and wrote a report on Mexico’s wind-energy sector for the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. says the process became “a referendum on all the wind projects on the isthmus.” Says Friede: “It was a forum for everyone’s disgust: for corruption, officials, politicians.”

In Sept. 2015, a coalition of indigenous groups sued the government on grounds it had awarded permits to Eólica del Sur during the consultation process—thus violating their right to prior consultation. A judge admitted the case and ordered the project suspended pending a final decision. However, that judge was relocated in February to Tamaulípas state, one of Mexico’s most dangerous—a decision members of the class-action suit portray as punishment for his ruling against Eólica del Sur. A new judge threw out the suit in June, arguing the groups had received adequate consultation, and lifted the suspension. The case is now under appeal, but the groups’ attorney, Ricardo Lagunes, says he also has filed a complaint before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Human rights and green activists say that as the government forges ahead with plans for new wind farms in states such as Tamaulípas and Coahuila, in northern Mexico, and Yucatán, in the east, communities there are likely to get a raw deal. Three foreign consortia won the right in March at a government auction to build wind farms in Yucatán. But Scott Robinson, a retired anthropology professor at Mexico City’s Metropolitan Autonomous University who monitors wind projects, says no formal consultation took place. “It seems history is repeating itself,” he says.

Skeptical audience

Now, residents of Kimbilá, a village about 56 kilometers (35 miles) east of Mérida in the Yucatán, are debating whether to rent 77 hectares (190 acres) of their communal land to Elecnor, a Spanish company. As yet, there has been no formal consultation. Ezer May May, an anthropology student born in Kimbilá, says many there are skeptical because the terms are unclear and seem ungenerous. Plus, he says, “they heard what happened in Oaxaca.”

In the future, the government should establish clearer rules for consultations and introduce means of ensuring better sharing of project benefits, experts say.

“Part of what we have seen in the past decade in Tehuantepec is that the benefits have concentrated in a defined group of people and not to the people in general,” says Puga, the energy official. And rather than building soccer fields or paving roads, experts say, companies could offer communities a stake in the wind farms, or communities could form their own energy companies.

For his part, Rodríguez of the wind-energy association is optimistic that communities in other parts of the country will be more amenable to wind farms. “Oaxaca is a problematic region,” he says. “Other parts of the country aren’t as complicated.”

Cerami is doubtful. The Eólica del Sur case has damaged the credibility of the consultation process, he says, adding: “If the first consultation was riddled with problems, would you take part in the next one?”