Disappearing world: Paraguay's Ayoreo people fight devastating land sales

Cutamorajna rides to a recently cleared patch of land. The silvery skeletons of freshly felled trees dot the open fields. Cows huddle for shade beneath the few that remain upright.

“When there’s forest, we have everything we need,” he says. “Wild pigs to hunt, bugs and forest fruit to eat. Honey we take from the trees. Caraguata plants give us a thread that women use to weave bags. But when the forest is cut down, kaput! We lose what we need to survive.”

It is not just a material loss, he adds. His mother-in-law remembers a historic site within Cuyabia. Before contact with the missionaries, she had lived there during the rainy season, when Ayoreo groups, nomadic for the rest of the year, settle down and take advantage of a brief period of fertility to grow crops.

“When we first arrived, she liked to visit that place,” he says. “But then a cattle ranch swallowed it. It’s gone.”

Deforestation is transforming the entire Chaco, a region described by David Attenborough as “one of the last great wilderness areas left in the world”.

From their office on the banks of the Paraguay river, the civil society group Guyra Paraguay uses satellite imagery to monitor the changes.

“The Chaco in general has the highest rate of deforestation in the world,” says Alberto Yanosky, the organisation’s president. His assessment is supported by a 2013 University of Maryland study, as well as Guyra’s own measurements. They show that, every year, a quarter of a million hectares are lost in the Paraguayan Chaco alone.

A parallel process previously cleared Paraguay’s eastern half: the lush, rain-soaked land separated from the arid Chaco by the Paraguay river. As recently as the 70s, what is now a sea of soy plantations was covered in trees. This was the great Atlantic forest, which spilled into Paraguay from Brazil’s Atlantic coast.

Today, only 7% of Paraguay’s Atlantic forest remains intact. The severity of recent flooding is likely to have been exacerbated by its loss.

In 2004, a moratorium was placed on deforestation in eastern Paraguay. The result was an intensified struggle between cattle ranches and soya plantations, the region’s two dominant industries.

Yanosky explains: “50% of the soya in the east of Paraguay is grown on land originally deforested by rancheros, which was then replaced by soya. The cattle ranchers moved into the Chaco, where land was cheap.” Paraguayan beef exports have soared over the past five years, propelled by growth in its cattle herd – a growth enabled by the deforestation of the Chaco.

Yanosky loads up a series of satellite images, where swaths of green forest are blotched with pinky-white patches. He points to one place where the ratio is particularly tilted towards the pink.

“This department is called Boquerón,” he says. “It is essentially experiencing the highest rates of deforestation anywhere in the world.” In the department’s north-east corner, he zooms in on the elongated T-shape of Cuyabia. Strips of deforested land rip across much of the territory.

Deforestation in the Chaco doesn’t just harm Ayoreo communities already in contact with society. It also threatens to wipe out uncontacted people living in the remoter regions of the forest. Iniciativa Amotocodie works with Unap to protect them from contact.

“What we see when indigenous groups move to a settled life is a complete collapse of their world,” says Miguel Angel Alarcón. “They lose their self-determination, their autonomy, their leaders, their food, their control.

“This isn’t just the case for the Ayoreo, this is the whole experience of South America.”

At Cuyabia, Indi is undertaking a measurement to determine the location of the 25,000 hectares belonging to Cutamorajna’s community. Ricardo Ortega, a lawyer with Indi, admits that, even once this process is complete, returning the land to the community will be a challenge.

“The ranching firms have huge influence in the Chaco,” he says. “We’ll have to deal with each one on a case-by-case basis.”

Still, despite the corruption and intimidation, the Ayoreo and those supporting them are ready to keep resisting.

“I remember my father saying that we used to have to fight to defend our territory,” says Carlos Etacore, gesturing to several wooden lances leaning in a corner of the Iniciativa Amotocodie office. “Now we have to fight with the ways of the white man, with documentation and denunciations and paper.

“And sometimes, it works.”