- In Paraguay’s Amambay department, the arrival of agribusiness, armed groups and drug traffickers has caused the fragmentation and displacement of Indigenous Paĩ Tavyterã communities, who have been threatened and in some cases killed by the invaders.
- The region has been greatly affected by climate change, which has caused cycles of floods, droughts and deadly wildfires that destroy people’s homes and food gardens.
- With little protection from the state, the Paĩ have had to build fences to keep invaders out and have enrolled in firefighting courses to learn how to combat fires more effectively.
- Residents also participate in agroforestry workshops where they exchange ancestral knowledge and learn how to restore native plants and forests.
Rosalba Gomez says she remembers many fires throughout her childhood: bright orange flames feeding on the natural grasslands surrounding her community, engulfing homes, trees and animals.
Her parents spent hours in their food garden, known as kokúe, where they planted corn, manioc and beans. During the dry season, they burned the plot to improve soil quality and revitalize the land. But they had to be careful. High temperatures, strong winds and low humidity in Paraguay’s Amambay department, where some Indigenous Paĩ Tavyterã peoples live, often caused fires to spread out of control. Native fruit and medicinal plants were lost in the blaze, still to be recovered to this day.
“We lost a lot,” Gomez, a Paĩ leader from the Ita Guasu community, tells Mongabay in a video call. “Even our house would burn.”
About 25 years ago, a Paĩ leader traveled to Bolivia, where he was taught by other Indigenous peoples how to make fires in a more controlled way. The method involved creating a barrier around the kokúe to contain the flames. This helped, Gomez says, and for a while there were fewer fires.
“Before, people didn’t have that awareness,” she says. “But after they realized what they were losing, they began to control it.”
While the Paĩ learned how to control their fires, they haven’t been able to control the actions of their neighbors. In recent years, Paĩ communities have found themselves surrounded by cattle ranches and soybean plantations. Residents say the landowners cut down forests, destroy native plants, and contaminate their water sources.
The Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP), a guerrilla group, also operates inside titled Paĩ community lands, as do drug cartels from neighboring Brazil. Many communities say they’re unable to access sacred sites, and complain of armed people violently forcing them out of their homes. In some cases, large-scale farmers are involved in drug trafficking, laundering their profits through their lands and cattle businesses.
Amambay is the epicenter of organized crime in Paraguay, where cocaine trafficking, marijuana production and the presence of armed groups have driven the murder rate to almost 10 times the national average.
‘We suffer because of this’
Gomez left her community when she was 12 years old to attend school in the nearby city of Pedro Juan Caballero. She studied during the day and worked at night. Once she completed her studies, she signed up to study nursing at university. “I thought that if I did, I could take care of my community,” she says.
But eventually the costs became too much, so she had to return home. There, she noticed many changes. The native foods she enjoyed as a child had disappeared, and the wild animals were also gone.
Sometime in the 1990s, it rained seeds of brachiaria (Urochloa brizantha), a species of grass native to Africa. Neighboring landowners had used planes to seed the earth for cattle pasture. Soon, like an incoming tide, waves of bright green leaves began to swallow everything in their path, including the communities’ native fruits and medicinal plants.
“Where it is planted, it thrives,” Gomez says of the grass. “If we do not clean it or burn it, it advances. We suffer a lot because of this.”
After a bad fire season in 2021, with both cattle ranchers and communities setting fires to clear their lands, the Volunteer Firefighter Corps of Paraguay (CBVP) carried out a post-fire assessment. It determined that the invasive grass species was a major threat to the conservation of Jasuka Venda, a sacred hill the Paĩ people consider the birthplace of humanity and central to their spiritual existence.
At the time, the local NGO Áry Ojeasojavo Estudios Ancestrales found that 50% of Jasuka Venda had been destroyed by the flames. Across the charred landscape, they observed the brachiaria’s bright green leaves breaking through the dark gray ash, hungrily feeding off the newly deposited nutrients before any native species had a chance.
Although some communities have learned to better control their own fires, the triple threat of land-use change, deforestation and climate change has created the perfect breeding ground for more deadly wildfires that spread out of control. Last year, representatives from different Paĩ communities enrolled in firefighting courses that taught them how to prevent, mitigate, detect and control fires.
The experience was “unprecedented” in Paraguay, Sofía Espíndola Oviedo, a coordinator of socio-educational and gender processes at Áry Ojeasojavo, tells Mongabay by voice message. However, they don’t yet have enough tools, such as appropriate clothing to fight fires.
“They have to defend their territories as best they can,” she says.
Invaders with false land claims
After Gomez abandoned her nursing studies, she decided to focus her energy on her community. Very few Paĩ speak Spanish, as their mother tongue is Guaraní, so she began by helping them to translate documents or speak to non-Guaraní people. She also helped local leaders with their meetings, trainings and with other tasks. Eventually, they offered her a job as a secretary.
As part of her role, Gomez was expected to accompany leaders on visits to other Paĩ communities, where she saw firsthand the issues they faced. “There was so much,” she says. “I saw things that weren’t good.”
In 2019, the Paĩ Yvy Pyté community, around 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Ita Guasu community, were kicked out of their lands by armed groups. The invaders showed up with forged documents laying claim to 2,000 hectares of the community’s 11,000-hectare titled land, or about 4,900 out of 27,000 acres. Land title fraud is common in Paraguay, where official figures indicate that 20% of registered properties don’t actually exist.
After a legal battle, the community received an amparo action, a judgement for protection of their rights, but the invaders refuse to comply.
In 2022, two community members living in Jasuka Venda, including a prominent spiritual leader and his apprentice, were killed during an armed confrontation at the site between Paraguayan forces and the EPP. A year later, the spiritual leader of the Yvy Pyté community in Cerro Corá, Arnaldo Benítez Vargas, was killed by invaders, according to a press statement from the Federation for the Self-Determination of Indigenous Peoples (FAPI).
Nora Rosati, a leader from Yvy Pyté, tells Mongabay that the invaders demolished the school and fenced off nearly 4 hectares (10 acres) of their land. Residents have tried to remove the barriers themselves, but each time they returned, the fence had been rebuilt again. To this day, they’re still unable to access their homes.
Many children have suffered, Rosati says. “They are not attending classes, cultural practices are not being taught, and the community is still under threat.”
The National Institute for Indigenous Peoples, the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, and the National Commission for the Defense of Natural Resources didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment before publication.
In March, officers from Paraguay’s National Anti-Drug Secretariat carried out an operation to dismantle a drug trafficking base in Yvy Pyté. The first phase led to the discovery of a clandestine airstrip, hangar and aircraft, allegedly used to transport large quantities of cocaine. Four of the 11 people arrested during the operation have been charged. During the second phase, agents destroyed 18 hectares (44 acres) of marijuana crops that were located close to the site.
The Paraguayan authorities have declared Jasuka Venda, the sacred hill, a red zone. This means no one can enter without special authorization from the military. But it also means the Yvy Pyté living inside the restricted area are unable to access emergency services, such as police, ambulance and health care, when needed. “While [services] await authorization, people often die,” Gomez says.
The Yvy Pyté community has filed numerous legal complaints and taken legal action against the invaders who falsified the land titles; the latter case is still pending. In some communities, such as Ita Guasu, residents have managed to keep the invaders out themselves by building their own fences and continuing to monitor them.
Climate change impacts
In 2019, the environment ministry published a report showing that cycles of drought and flooding in Paraguay have intensified and that the frequency of heat waves tripled from 1980 to 2019. According to reports, the country is the most vulnerable to climate change in South America. Amambay department experienced serious flooding in 2023, while this year there’s a severe lack of rain.
In Ita Guasu, residents have a specific planting schedule they follow to ensure crops aren’t affected by the frosts in May. But for the last few years, Gomez says, the weather patterns have shifted: “We lost a lot of seeds, the manioc didn’t come out, the corn didn’t come out.”
Two years ago, they experienced a flood, which was rare for the area. They lost all their manioc and black beans that were ready for harvesting. “Everything was left like puddles,” Gomez says. “We lost all the seeds. We were left poor because we didn’t have enough to eat.”
Celine Arce, a leader from the Yapy Poty community, about 90 km (56 mi) from Ita Guasu and 80 km (50 mi) from Yvy Pyté, tells Mongabay by phone that they’ve been greatly impacted by the drought, which has hit with greater force since 2019. Crop yields are poor, and they’re scared of setting fires, she says. “When there are fires, precisely because of the drought itself, they are very large and spread quickly.”
Another concern is that the streams, already contaminated by runoff from the soybean farms and cattle ranches, are drying up due to the lack of rainfall, Arce says. In some areas, the little water that remains has been redirected away from Indigenous communities by canals created by the landowners.
In response, Arce’s community invested a lot of time into protecting water resources, such as by planting native trees near the streams. “People make a great effort to be able to strengthen their forest because it is what stops fires,” she says.
Some Paĩ communities have received assistance in the form of training workshops by Rodrigo Ramirez, an agroforestry specialist who was invited to help the community in 1993 for two to three years and never left. “I liked working with them so I stayed,” he tells Mongabay by phone.
The workshops are led by technical experts from a local organization called Asociación Paĩ Tavyterã Rekopave (APTR), as well as trained leaders, who teach groups of 10 to 20 people, sometimes more, each time from several Indigenous communities. They focus on caring for water basins, sustainable forest management, how to grow many varieties of crops without chemical inputs, crop rotation without burning, and other skills. These are held two or three times a year inside the communities.
“They grow cassava, sweet potato, beans, rice, banana, watermelon, melon, pumpkin, a bit of everything,” Ramirez says. “We do not burn the place where we are going to plant, and we respect the surrounding forests.”
Gomez decided to return to Pedro Juan Caballero to study law. Every weekend, she visits each community to help the leaders, saying this is what motivates her to study.
“At first, I didn’t like law,” she says. “Then I saw the reality of each community and I knew I had to study.”
Sometimes, she says, she feels tired of studying. But then she sees something terrible and it reminds her why she decided to study in the first place.
She says it fills her with pride when members of a community tell her they’re happy that she will be able to defend them in the future. “It’s what gives me that motivation,” Gomez says. “I can’t stop my work because they have hope. That’s beautiful to me.”
Banner image: Two Paĩ leaders. Image by William Costa / Áry Ojeasojavo.
Paraguay’s drought hits biodiversity, Indigenous communities the hardest
Citation:
Ioris, A. A. R. (2024). Socio-economic geography and the land rights of indigenous peoples in Paraguay. Journal of Social and Economic Development. doi:10.1007/s40847-024-00347-3
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