by Fred Pearce
The Mennonites had been on the move for centuries, because they would not give their loyalty to any nation. They shunned military service and even refused to send their children to public schools. They became international nomads. But that independent spirit proved no problem in the Chaco, where the Paraguayan state was effectively nonexistent anyway. In effect, the Mennonites set up a state within a state. It wasn’t easy. In the early years, they suffered typhoid epidemics, droughts, plagues of grasshoppers, and invasions of soldiers demanding provisions en route to fighting Bolivia. But they persevered, setting up schools and hospitals and factories. And buying more land.
Their main town, Filadelfia, appears like a mirage in the thorn bush. Though it has only ten thousand people, it is still the biggest place for 250 miles. It is, by its own lights, a success. After decades of poverty and deprivation, the fierce Mennonite devotion to taming the Chaco has brought dividends. The main streets, such as Avenida Hindenberg, are wide enough to turn an oxcart, but this is Land Cruiser territory now. Filadelfia is one of the most prosperous towns in Paraguay, full of air conditioners and four-by-fours. The big-box store still has a wide range of farm implements, but they are being pushed aside by garden furniture and barbecues. The agricultural college boasts a Conservatorio de Musica on the side.
Filadelfia’s museum celebrates both the Mennonites’ past and the wildlife that they are continuing to destroy. I spent an hour exploring one room full of stuffed armadillos and boa constrictors; skunks and red-bellied toads; a giant anteater and a six-foot caiman; a maned wolf as big as the jaguar and a greater rhea as tall as a man; a bizarre range of rodents and a rare Chacoan peccary. Another room displayed mementos from the Mennonites’ former lives, including Russian fur overcoats, delicate Chinese porcelain, and a German trombone. There was a picture of a tree trunk that someone had hollowed out to make a child’s coffin during the typhoid epidemic of 1927. Poignant group shots of migrants on their way to the Chaco in 1930 showed children with downturned mouths, women looking wry and sad, and strong-jawed men with scared eyes.
Filadelfia’s Mennonite farms and factories now attract other Paraguayans and indigenous Indians to provide labor. But the pecking order on the streets seems pretty clear. When the factory horn at the dairy sounds at 7 a.m., the white-skinned Mennonites drive their Mercedes out of their compounds on the north side of town, Spanish-speaking Paraguayans buzz about on motorbikes, and the indigenous people walk from their barrios.
It would be churlish to deny that the Mennonites have earned a place here in the Chaco. They were the first outsiders to figure out how to raise cattle here. They now graze and till an estimated 5 million acres. They produce two-thirds of Paraguay’s milk and much of its meat. They export to Bolivia, and even have a Tetra Pak plant. In the eyes of most Paraguayans, they have ceased to be bizarre aliens in an even more bizarre wasteland. They have become the pioneers of a new wave of commercialized cattle ranching, joined by many fellow German-speaking ranchers from Brazil to create a new front line of Latin American agriculture in one of the continent’s most forbidding environments.
But equally we cannot forget that the land taken over by the Mennonites was never empty. A picture in the Filadelfia museum, dated 1931, shows a meeting of Mennonites and unnamed natives in the Chaco. The natives are near-naked and carrying spears and bows and arrows. The Mennonites wear panama hats, white shirts, bow ties, and even a tuxedo. In these encounters, the Mennonites presumed they were in charge. But while some of them said the Indians should be “located in remote protectorates where the savages could live unmolested in their original ignorance of the whites,” others thought that they should be educated and forced into a sedentary life. As the Mennonites themselves took ever more land and needed laborers, the latter view won out. Through the mid-twentieth century, most of the indigenous people were lured from their land by missionaries, and bundled by overseers into shanty settlements, work camps, and worse.
Today, several thousand Ayoreo, along with other tribal groups such as the Enxet and Sanapana, live in roadside camps dotted among the Mennonite villages. Of the eighteen Ayoreo settlements in Paraguay, thirteen are in the Mennonite zone, mostly created by the evangelist New Tribes Mission at Campo Loro, north of Filadelfia. Last time I checked its website, the New Tribes Mission had seventy-two conspicuously pale-faced and mostly American missionaries in the country. Most of the Ayoreo in their charge work on the Mennonite farms.
Some isolated groups of Indians remain in the bush. Of the two thousand or so Ayoreo in the Paraguayan Chaco, some one to two hundred are wandering hunter-gatherer families who remain uncontacted, a term that, in reality, usually just means they live apart from people other than their own kind. But, often lacking immunity to common diseases, they are immensely vulnerable to almost any contact with white people. And the outside world is closing in. Our Cessna flew over a giant ranch covering some 190,000 acres, owned by Yaguarete Pora, a Brazilian company. Local NGOs, backed by Survival International, accuse the company of invading and clearing forest claimed by a branch of the Ayoreo known as the Totobiegosode, or “people of the peccaries.” An uncontacted band there reportedly hunts wild pigs and tortoises, and grows beans and melons on small plots within earshot of the company’s bulldozers.
In 2010, when the company’s invasion gained international publicity, executives acknowledged the presence of the Ayoreo. They did not deny converting thousands of acres of their forests into cattle pastures. But they said they were going to leave a third of the land as a nature reserve in which the Ayoreo would be free to hunt and fish. As I write, the dispute remains unresolved. But meanwhile, immediately to the south of the Yaguarete Pora ranch, another Brazilian company, River Plate, had by April 2011 bulldozed almost 10,000 acres of a newly purchased 55,000-acre tract of forest. This land is also claimed by the Totobiegosode. Paraguayan officials said they regarded River Plate’s felling as illegal, since the company did not have a license.
According to a study by the Union of the Native Ayoreo of Paraguay, other uncontacted groups of Ayoreo live on other land recently occupied by Brazilian ranching companies. Those companies include Ganadera Umbu, which has a license to deforest 60,000 acres, and Los Molinos, which is at work on the northern boundary of the Defensores del Chaco national park. The leader of a group of Totobiegosode that emerged from the bush in 2004 said: “When we were in the forest things were good. But we could not stay because the whites have cut everything. The whites are violent. They just want land. We are afraid of them because they are very aggressive.” Who were the true savages here? I wondered.
Some tribal groups are fighting back against the grabbers of their land. They are taking their cases to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in Costa Rica. The court has handed down a series of judgments against the Paraguayan government, and there are signs that ministers in Asunción are taking notice. In 2010, following a nineteen-year legal battle and five years after a final ruling by the court, the government bought a 25,000-acre ranch from a private owner to house sixty-five dispossessed Enxet families. And sixty-six Sanapana families, who have won a ruling from the same court, hope they may now get the 27,000 acres they claim. The government’s 2011 budget also included money to buy 242,000 acres for the Totobiegosode clan of the Ayoreo.
It is progress. But the fifty different clans of the Ayoreo, including the Totobiegosode, between them claim the majority of the Chaco—tens of thousands of square miles, stretching north from the Mennonite colonies into Bolivia, and east to the River Paraguay. Many outsiders will say that such small numbers of people have no right to such large areas of land in our crowded, modern world. But why should a handful of Brazilian ranchers have the land, whereas a handful of native families cannot? Who is really being greedy?
Some parts of the Chaco forests are, for now, being preserved. As we flew north toward the Bolivian border, the ranches suddenly gave way to a big patch of forest stretc
hing toward the horizon. It measured roughly 60 miles by 25 miles. “That’s the Moonies’ land,” shouted Oscar Rodas, habitat coordinator for Guyra Paraguay, sitting beside me in the Cessna. Sun Myung Moon’s South Korea–based Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity has over the past two decades amassed 2 million acres of forest, both here and across the River Paraguay in Brazil’s Pantanal swamp.
Groups of mostly Japanese and Korean Moonies are setting up small communities amid the thorns and mosquitoes. One is at the tiny river port of Puerto Leda, where they have also constructed a VIP mansion reserved for visits by the Reverend Moon himself. They grow crops, largely for their own consumption. They maintain their borders and defend their property with large dogs. As ever in this part of the world, there are bizarre theories about the Moonies being engaged in drug running and right-wing conspiracies. Moon calls his Latin American domain “the best place to practice heavenly life on Earth.” But what that practice involves remains unclear. Maybe not even the reverend has figured that out.
Soon, we spotted an old railway snaking through the Moonies’ forest. This land was, until 2000, owned by descendents of a swashbuckling Spanish-born Argentine named Carlos Casado. He bought more than 12 million acres back in 1886. A lot of Paraguay was up for sale then. The country had contrived to go to war against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay all at once. A staggering 90 percent of its adult males are said to have perished. After finally admitting defeat, the bankrupt government sold millions of acres of public land to foreign investors to pay off its debts.
For a century, Casado stripped his forest of an endemic Chaco tree with extremely hard wood. It is known locally as quebracho, meaning ax breaker. The wood contains lots of tannin, which is used for tanning leather. The 90-mile narrow-gauge railway moved logs out of the forest to the tannin factory in the estate town, Puerto Casado. The accessible quebracho trees on the estate are gone now, and the railway is abandoned. But the six thousand residents of Puerto Casado were furious when they discovered in 2000 that the Moonies had taken over their town. The Paraguayan Senate ordered that the town be returned to the residents. But that decision was overturned by the Supreme Court. In 2009, the Moonies handed back some land, but the battle continues.
At least the Moonies’ purchase has protected the forest from further clearance by ranchers. And there is good news too upstream at the 11,000-acre Cardozo estate, 25 miles west of the sleepy river port of Bahia Negra. Much of the estate remains intact quebracho forest, but the owner agreed to sell out to conservationists from Guyra Paraguay and the World Land Trust. We flew low as the Trust’s Roger Wilson checked the tree cover. It was, he said, “due diligence” before the purchase went ahead in June 2011. The signing was a relief for him. A previous purchase at nearby Puerto Ramos had failed when they were outbid, at the last moment, by Scimitar Oryx, a land company headed by a former senior agriculture official in the Uruguayan government and a young British investor, Stephan Winkler. (The company also has land in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Vietnam.) Part of the cost of the Cardozo estate is being paid by Swire, a British shipping company that also owns the airline Cathay Pacific, in return for voluntary carbon offsets.
Can conservation be reconciled with the demands of indigenous groups? If sensibly managed, it should. After all, the tribes of the Chaco have a long history of protecting their environment. They are the only people who truly know how to live there. Before buying the Cardozo estate, Wilson reached an agreement with the 1,500 or so Ishir fishing people, who live along the west bank of the River Paraguay. They still use spears to fish, and bows and arrows to hunt. Guyra Paraguay and the Ishir will manage the forest jointly for twenty years, after which the Ishir will assume full title, on the understanding that the forest is maintained.
Sadly, however, not everyone conserving the forest wants to make friends with the former custodians. The Ishir are in a bitter dispute with the Moonies, whose territory includes Ishir sacred burial grounds near Puerto Leda. Candido Martinez, an Ishir community leader from Bahia Negra, told me: “Those cemeteries are our most precious land. We are not even allowed to visit them.” So much, you might say, for the Moonies’ view of “heavenly life on Earth.”
But the Ishir are resourceful. They want to live in the real world, not a mythical past. And they make friends. More than a century ago, a Czech cactus collector and ethnographer named Alberto Vojtech Fric visited their community on the banks of the River Paraguay. His romance with a young Ishir woman called Lora-y, or Black Duck, produced a child. That child, Martinez said proudly, was his grandmother. She only died in 2010, at the age of 104. After Fric returned home, he stood up at a conference in Vienna in 1908 to denounce German settlers in Brazil and Paraguay, exposing how they hired killers to eradicate the Indians, then enslaved their children and grabbed their land. Fric went back to Paraguay, taking medicine for a disease then decimating the tribe. The Ishir still remember him and maintain links with the Czechs. Now they have persuaded some British greens to buy back forest for them. They are survivors, I would say.
Back in Asunción, it still seemed to me that the odds were heavily stacked against both the Chaco and its traditional custodians. The commercial pressures to clear the thorn forests are intense. Paraguay is determined to compete with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in the booming market for agricultural commodities. The country has trebled its beef exports in the past decade. The cattle herd in the Chaco has risen to almost 4 million. And achieving that has taken a lot of land. Ranchers currently clear more than 7 acres of the Chaco to sustain one cow. And stocking rates are falling as they clear more remote, drought-prone, and waterlogged land. While paying lip service to protecting the Chaco and its indigenous inhabitants, the Paraguayan government continues to approve almost all proposals to clear the forest and extend the ranches.
Not everyone, even within government, approves of this. When I met the chief environmental prosecutor from the attorney general’s office, Jose Luis Casaccia, he was angry. Ministers neither knew nor cared what happened in the Chaco, he said. He was just back to Asunción from a boat trip up the River Paraguay, which sounded like the plot of the film Apocalypse Now. “There is a complete lack of government there,” he said. “The ranchers on their huge estates make their own laws. They pay hunters two hundred dollars for a dead jaguar or puma, because they want to protect their cattle. It’s all illegal. The animals are protected. But the Chaco is a no-man’s-land. Anything goes.”
Casaccia was briefly minister for the environment himself. But he said the current president, Fernando Lugo, removed him soon after taking office in 2008. Casaccia’s crime had been to suspend licenses to clear forests in the Chaco. Casaccia said his successor “is very weak and is doing nothing for environment protection. Right now 95 percent of the deforestation of the Chaco is legal, because the minister has issued so many licenses for ranchers to clear the land.” I asked what fate he thought awaited the Chaco. “Apocalyptico,” he replied. “On current trends, everything that is not protected will all be gone by 2025.” Was this a victory for the land grabbers? Only in the short term, he said. “They are wrecking the Chaco. It will be reduced to desert, with all the species in it lost.” Such a scenario would doom its indigenous inhabitants, too.
Chapter 12. Latin America: The New Conquistadors
The Vestey Group, a British private beef company, held out for a decade against demands from Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez that it give up its 500,000 acres of ranch land in the northwest of his country. Squatters came and went during that time, but the fourth generation of British corned-beef kings to raise cattle in South America stayed put—until 2010, when the Caracas courts ruled that their hundred-year-old estates were not being fully utilized. The owners of the Fray Bentos brand finally consented to the nationalization of their local subsidiary Agroflora—or la compania inglesa, as Chavez called it in weekly radio harangues against the old imperialists. The Vesteys gave up their
four surviving ranches, 130,000 cattle, and 5,000 buffalo to peasant farmers as part of Chavez’s “Bolivarian revolution,” which has distributed more than 4 million acres of large estates to landless peasants since his election in 1999. About time, too. But it was a rare victory for fairer land shares in Latin America.
The misuse and misallocation of land has been a huge issue across the continent ever since the arrival of the conquistadors half a millennium ago. The disputes intensified in the twentieth century, when the entire region became known as Uncle Sam’s backyard. American fruit companies, following in the footsteps of Europeans like the Vestey family, virtually took over whole states in Central America. They created and sustained servile and corrupt governments that became known as banana republics. These days the demand is more for crack cocaine than soft fruit, but the relationships persist and the history of centuries of land grabbing continues to loom large.
United Fruit was the creation of a boy from Brooklyn. At the age of twenty-three, Minor Keith was working for his uncle’s Tropical Trading Company, building a railroad in the Central American state of Costa Rica. It was the 1870s. The idea was to get the country’s main export crop, coffee, to the Atlantic coast for export to Europe. But the jungle, the mountains, and the insects made track laying expensive, difficult, and dangerous, with thousands of workers dying from malaria and yellow fever. When his uncle died, Keith took over the project. But, facing bankruptcy, he offered the Costa Rican president a deal. He had noticed how well bananas grew along the track, and how popular they were among his workers. So, he said, “give me land to grow more, and I will finish the railroad.” He eventually grabbed 790,000 acres of the Costa Rican interior, filled his underused trains with bananas, and began shipping the strange new fruit to the United States, where unzipping a banana proved an instant hit.