Frontier Constellations: A History of Land-use Regimes in Paraguay’s Pilcomayo River Basin

ABSTRACT

The Paraguayan Chaco is increasingly known for the extreme rates of forest loss caused by the rapid expansion of cattle ranching and crop farming over the last few decades. Knowledge of its twentieth-century land-use history, however, remains limited. In this article, I address that gap by discussing land-use dynamics since the 1900s in the Pilcomayo River basin, a part of the Chaco that borders Argentina and Bolivia, and hosts a great diversity of actors and land uses. Using the concept of land-use regimes, I show that the area, once characterized by what can be called an Indigenous mixed-use regime, transitioned to a land-use regime dominated by livestock herding by Argentine Criollo settlers after the Chaco War (1932–35), and then again to one of large cattle ranches managed by absentee owners toward the end of the twentieth century. No land-use regime ever completely dominated the area, however, and I use this fact as a starting point to then discuss how using the concept of land regimes can help direct attention to the coexistence of regimes in space and to their relationships in a way that helps refine our understanding of land-use transitions.

Keywords:

• Gran Chaco
• regime shift
• livelihoods
• Indigenous people
• Criollos

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the leaders of the Nivaclé, Manjui, and Guaraní communities in San Agustín, Tomás Diego, Silverio García, and Vicente Román, for letting me conduct this research in the community and for sharing their insights with me; to Rómulo Palomo, for his valuable assistance in the field; to Felix Peralta and Fabio Martínez Servin for logistical support in San Agustín; and to everyone else who gave me some of their time and trusted me with their stories. I would also like to thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers, as well as Verena Friesen and Megan Toth, for their valuable inputs on earlier drafts of this paper. This research was supported by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and contributes to the Global Land Programme.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ I use the denominations commonly used by people themselves today, which also correspond to those used by the Paraguayan Government. The Nivaclé are also referred to as Ashluslay or Chulupí in older texts, among other names (Chase-Sardi 1972, 245). The Manjui are part of a group called Chorote or Choroti, which also comprises the Eklenjui, the name Manjui or Eklenjui designating whether the group originally inhabited the left or the right bank of the Pilcomayo, respectively (Chase-Sardi 1972, 247). Chase-Sardi also noted the presence a few Tapieté groups along the Bolivian border (Chase-Sardi 1972, 281), and there were still some people who identified as Tapieté in the area of Pozo Hondo at the time of writing.

² The Guaraní Occidentales are also called Chiriguanos or Guarayos (Chase-Sardi 1972, 265), and are distinct from the majority Guaraní speakers of Paraguay and from other groups like the Guaraní Ñandeva.

³ While the word puesto may have originally (in the eighteenth century) referred to a division of labor within a larger estancia in which a Criollo herder took care of the estanciero’s cattle at a location with water on the land of the estancia, the term today is commonly used to designate an isolated Criollo livestock herder’s homestead (Zorzoli 2022, 56–57).

⁴ For a list of these lands, see https://elsurti.com/oligarquia/especial/los-invasores-vip-del-paraguay

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.