The Chaco: Uniqueness and Variety of a Threatened Region

We have already talked in our previous article (link here) about Paraguay and about how many travellers underrate its value and its beauty.

That's why we want to spend a few more words, telling you our experience from one of the hottest and most sparsely inhabited region in the world and one of the latest unspoiled frontier: the Paraguayan Chaco.

We volunteered in the central part of this region, divided in two by the Trans-Chaco Highway, the only paved road going through it. The others only 4km of asphalt, realised in 2009, can be found in the centre of Filadelfia, the main transport hub and administrative centre.

Johanna wrote a spontaneous prose straight-from-the-chest, a great description of the environment where we have been immersed for more than two weeks. Let’s start from here!

 “A thorn-bush savannah, where the landscape appears green and lush but is full of hostile spines and poisonous animals. A land with a nickname: “The green Hell”. A land of cactuses and bottle shaped trees with enormous thorns as a protection to not get eaten. Water is rare and Nature found its way to defend its few resources!

The hot sun starts burning the skin as soon as it rises at 7 in the morning. Fast reaching 40°C during midday! Vultures are circulating in the high sky, rattle snakes are digesting their last meal in the shade of stones, tarantulas are crawling over the sandy paths in search for a puddle. It feels like being in a Wild West movie.

Though, here and then a shrub with yellow blossoms is attracting elegant flying hummingbirds, green parrots are gathering in groups somewhere between the branches and an anteater is on its way to one of the countless ant nests.

An example of bottle shaped tree

The bush is home to many indigenous tribes like the Enlhit, the Nivaclè or the Guaraní but the villages are named Rosenort, Neuland, Schönhorst. Businesses are build around cattle farming as German rooted Mennonites got quite successful since 1929 in getting some money out of this bare ground. Obviously cattle ranches need space and so they buy more land in order to produce dairy products on their 600 ha estancias. And where do the indigenous people go? They find themselves working for good money at one of those farms. And they spend their good money in 3l Coca Cola bottles, in T-Shirts with Disney figures or in a nightclub dancing to reggae-ton.

Like the rest of us in this globalised world.”

From these words, you can understand how special this place is, appearing almost like a savannah but so full of life, despite the environmental difficulties, as the chronical lack of water. Jaguars, pumas, spiny anteaters, capybaras, giant armadillos, hundreds types of birds and fishes make the Chaco an unique biome, partly still unknown and undiscovered.

To our eyes, it looked really unbelievable how such a big area could be so green and lush despite the average maximum temperatures, practically being always over 35°C all year long, with peaks at even 45°C and relatively little rainfalls (400 mm/year).

Consisting of more than 60% of Paraguay's land area, but with less than 10% of the population, the Chaco is also one of the most sparsely inhabited areas in South America. However, remarkable is the mixture of different populations which are living here, a cultural diversity rare to find: German Mennonites, Brazilians, Argentinians, Bolivians and more than 15 indigenous tribes. Several of these groups remain still some of the last un-contacted humans on Earth, hidden in the hardly reachable heart of the Chaco.

This melting pot, which at first sight could appear like an incredible process of integration, unfortunately has another side too: so many different traditions, roots, ways of living could bring to conflicts and misunderstandings, likely created by economical and environmental reasons. Let’s explain what we mean.

The main pushing tractor of the economy here is the German Mennonites community, that since 1930s inhabited the area and began to build a great net based on cattle ranching, agriculture, dairy products and their commercialisation.

The Mennonite's migrations

The Mennonite faith is rooted in the 16th century and named after Menno Simons, a German priest that united the Anabaptists with the intention to split from the central Catholicism. Their convictions, since the beginning, led to persecutions and forced them to emigrate to Russia. Life went on peacefully for a couple of centuries until the Bolshevistic Revolution took place and banned private property and religious freedom, forcing the Mennonites to emigrate again. In 1929, 1.572 refugees were able to buy some land in the Chaco, where the Government, in exchange of a development of the territory, guaranteed them religious tolerance. Always considering the motto “common good before personal need”, they founded the Fernheim Cooperative and strengthen the boundary of their community.

Through the years, cattle ranching became really profitable but, at the same time, the always increasing need of pastures deforested huge areas of grassland, destroying the local ecology, as well as pushing out indigenous people from their characteristic environment. To underline how devastating is this process, some scientists believe that these lesser-known habitats are more threatened than even the Amazonas rainforest, involving hundreds of plants and animal species.

Unfortunately, the need of jobs and a more stable income brought many indigenous to accept the deforestation as a natural consequence and to begin to work directly as employees of the cattle farms. Changing their behaviours too: before isolated tribes living in the bush, nowadays civilised family groups trying to get included in the social and urban fabric.

That’s our summary about what we have seen and experienced in the Chaco and, despite all, we consider ourselves really lucky to have been witnesses of such uniqueness and variety. A wonderful biome characterised by an incredible fauna and flora but threatened by radical changes, which are bringing to an economical development but, at the same time,  activating a “ticking-time bomb”, as written by the Ascim (Association for the interethnic indigenous/Mennonite cooperation). A bomb that could provoke much worse consequences and internal conflicts than the present situation.

We strongly wish that the reality of the Chaco, a territory not yet entirely explored but already partially exploited, will rapidly improve again.

But you never know, things can always happen in an unexpected way. Like our further journey to one of the driest place on Earth, where we got flooded away in the Atacama desert.

Thank you for reading and follow us into our next wet episode...

Risk Curiosity!

Goodbye Paraguay