The Gran Chaco is a living organism. Inhabitants, nature, courses of water, climate, the sky. Let’s imagine it like a person. It is an organism, which in the course of a few decades suffered considerable transformation. Changes, yet more incisive, threaten it actually, as a result of massive development projects and different initiatives that are in preparation. More then ever, we are confronted with the obligation of asking ourselves: „What do our human presence and activity mean for this immense organism, called the Chaco?“
To answer this question, this contribution proposes to discern where the Chaco is at, to proceed by way of a careful observation, to a reading of what is happening. This observation will detect elements that contribute toward a useful diagnosis, and toward the delineation of some of the measures that should be taken into account.
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Usually the basis of such a diagnosis is formed by macroeconomic data, sociological- agronomic and lately also environmental data. However, the reading here proposed takes a somewhat different approach. It will throw light on data that in some way are complementary to the data usually included in this type of analysis: the characteristics of the Chaco, it’s way of being, processes – social and ecological processes – that are occurring, and which we have to take into account, when we decide what to do in the Chaco, for the Chaco, which projects, which measures to apply. Because – and here is the first observation – we know about the special characteristics of the Chaco, and we know that it is a delicate being. Not any new thing will necessarily benefit it.
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A first type of observations deal with the characteristics at the core of the Chaco’s way of being:
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Anybody who has come to the Chaco may felt and lived this similarly. Since the Chaco is a plain, to be here conveys a very particular impression. There’s no horizon. One travels and yet it seems as though one does not go anywhere. One feels a certain disconnection with the rest of the world. At times there is the impression of simply being, a kind of tranquillity, of serenity which, seen from the context of our usual hyperactivism, may make us feel immobilized. There’s nowhere to go. The farthest one can see, apart from the clouds, is some point in the vicinity. It’s like falling back on oneself. Being centered upon oneself is the prevailing feeling. The interior life, the local life, the details of life in the place where we find ourselves, become increasingly important. One is open to what happens here and now. And one is open to catch any opportunity that will arise out of the instant. It’s not surprising then, that the Chaco ethnic groups are gatherers. The characteristics of being in the Chaco have left their marks on it’s inhabitants. And we find these characteristics stamped on their way of being.
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The second observation refers to something that persons who have not always lived in the Chaco perceive as a basic condition of scarcity. There’s little water, and it’s not found everywhere. The vegetation is not exuberant, compared with other regions. The resources of nature seem to be very scarce, and even the persons. This observation becomes more acute, when compared with a way of life that is filled with the elements of our own modern life culture. The traditional Chaco inhabitant lives his life with resources much more precarious, much less abundant. It’s a way of life closer to the absolute minimum requirements and to pure survival.
The fact that there are fewer things, creates the impression that there is more room, more space, more silence, but also greater disposition. Where there’s not much, our senses need to become sharpened in order to capture what is there. And he/ her who sharpens his senses in the Chaco, starts to perceive a variety and wealth of natural elements, in a very particular way.
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The following characteristic seems to play in with the others mentioned with regard to the emphasis on the local dimension and on the minimum availability of resources. The social relations are very essential in the Chaco. And not only the social relations between its human inhabitants, but also the relations (which might also be called „social“), between the humans and their environment. To be able to survive in the conditions of the Chaco, one has to know how to rely on oneself, but one also has to know where to resort to, where to search for help when necessity demands. And there’s a moral obligation to provide help. The Chaqueños are very interrelated in a vital informal network of mutual help. One has to know also where to go in order to find those resources which happen to be be scarce where one is. One cannot live or survive in the Chaco in isolation and anonymously, and one needs to maintain an intimate and respectful relation with nature.
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The fourth observation, the last of this type, refers to a key element in the Chaco, – the water, the courses of water, and the rivers. There are underground rivers, like the Timane or the Parapití in the northern part. There is a watershed toward the north, the Amazon basin, and there are two toward the south, that both gather in the Rio de la Plata. In the Chaco, the waters flow apart. They do not flow into the Chaco, they flow out of it. An expert in geology and hydrology and a person well versed in the character of Chaco inhabitants also, once called the behavior of the Chaco rivers “errant” (in Spanish, he used the word “divagatorio”). They are not constant. The riverbeds vary in a natural manner, even without the human intervention in modern times. He added: „Chaco rivers are like the Chaco people, they have it their own way“. “Things happen which modify them, but on the long run they remain the same”. Except…one needs to add, when the modifications are very strong, very incisive, like deforestation, or the modification of the course of a river, or the changes in climate; we speak of those modifications caused by modern humanity.
This fourth observation places an additional emphasis on the image emerging from the Chaco. It is savage, and it escapes our control, does what it wants. But on the other hand we feel its inert being, “nothing happens”, everything remains immobile, as mentioned above. And should anything happen, everything just the same falls back to its original state of being. – But here we have to introduce a differentiation: there are modifications that the Chaco is able to digest without changing its nature, but there are others which in turn change it profoundly. There are modifications and modifications.
To resume the four observations, the Chaco conveys the image of an organism centered upon itself. The local processes have great importance, and it is important to be prepared to grasping any opportunity offering itself. The available resources are sufficient – depending on the life standard one pretends to have in the Chaco –, but these resources cannot be accessed but with a particular sensitivity, and their availability is limited in quantity. To be mutually interrelated in a vital social network is an important condition for life in the Chaco. And finally, as emerges from the fourth image, the one about the rivers, the Chaco has its own life, which we do not always understand: it is resistant to change, but is at the same extremely vulnerable to massive interventions.
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A second group of observations refers to the fact that different people perceive the Chaco in very different manners. Two or more realities superimpose themselves one on top of the other.
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The first example of this we have when we think of the groups of Ayoreo indigenous people who still live in the forests without direct contact with surrounding society and civilization. They move in their traditional territory. They live more or less their traditional life as hunters and gatherers. We know that at times they observe, well hidden in the height of some tree, the travelers, white people who pass through their territory, or one or the other of the scattered families who live in the midst of it. They gather elements left behind by white people, like plastic or aluminum…. And here the fascinating question arises: What is their perception of reality? When we try to put ourselves in their place and to imagine that we form part of such an indigenous group in the forests, we then live in the Republic of Paraguay, with its limits, with a political internal division, with roads, towns, with a government, but…we don’t know it. We simply live in our territory where we have always lived, it has limits, places of reference, the trails of our wanderings. We certainly feel it as becoming a little more narrow, there is more incursion by other people. But we know next to nothing about Paraguay, nor about anything else. Just barely we see the airplanes that cross the sky toward Bolivia on Tuesdays and Fridays, but we don’t know that it’s Tuesdays and Fridays. – Two perceptions of one and the same reality. The Ayoreo live on our map, and they live in our time, without knowing it. Or: we live in their reality, their world and their time without being aware of it, and in their territories without knowing anything about them… Meanwhile, we assume quite naturally that our perception of reality, based on our universal conceptualization of reality in the western world, is the correct one. What are we going do with this superposition?
Taking it from here, there are two visions of the future and about reality: ours – that of the majority – and “theirs”, of those that were always here.
There are also two superimposed maps, or social mapping systems. While ours separates Paraguayans from Bolivians or Argentineans, distinguishes between Indigenous and the Criollos and the Mennonites now living in the Chaco, the Ayoreo social map consists, over and above that, of an invisible network which extends over the whole Chaco to the borders of what was and is the traditional habitat of the different Ayoreo local groups, extending from the West to the Paraguay river and from the northern Bolivian Chaco to the central Paraguayan Chaco. It is a network of clanic relationships, which permitted every Ayoreo, be he where he may, to find help and support from those who belong to the same clanic and mythological family, which also extends to and includes the phenomena of nature.
Two concepts of land are equally superimposed. The white man perceives land as something which one can posses exclusively, as private property or corporate property, with all the rights in an absolute way, including the right to destroy it. – The other conception is the indigenous one, not only the Ayoreos’s in this case, which does not conceive property, but access and the possibility of making use of the territory. The indigenous conception also implies the existence of harmony with nature. To destroy nature, would be to destroy oneself. – At this point we discover that in the other reality, “their” reality, there exist concepts and the awareness of a relationship with nature, which is different to ours, in our reality, which is the consensus reality of the majority nowadays. To promote this awareness on a broader level could prove vital for the survival of the organism Chaco, and for our survival in general.
Finally, two legal systems with different conceptions find themselves superimposed, which define in sometimes even contradictory manner, what is licit and what is not. Usually we conceive this other legal reality not according to its own terms, but according to our terms. We speak of an indigenous right to their land, but we define it with images and concepts of our legal system. The question, which imposes itself, is: can a group of indigenous people live on the long term on land, which is conceived according to our own legal concepts?
Resuming these observations, we realize with perplexity that there exist two concurrent realities, two worlds, two or more systems of belief, a fact we cannot ignore, especially since one of these realities seems to contain elements which may be vital for the system Chaco in its totality. There is something there, which needs to be protected and preserved in the interest of the whole. On the other hand this reality, which seems vital, is today in a minority position, it is not well known, and it is under menace. – In fact we discover that the Chaco has an internal life of its own, delicate, fascinating, affected by conflict. There is a struggle between systems of belief and ways of life, which is being carried out with the use of great power and violence, and with very unequal arms indeed.
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A third group of observations will focus on a few aspects of social processes unfolding in the Chaco.
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The first of these draw our attention to the Mennonites of the Central Paraguayan Chaco. They arrived in very hard and precarious conditions in the late 1920ties, to occupy the land which today represents a center of political and economic power that nobody can ignore. The land which they bought for their settlements from an argentine company was indigenous land. The Mennonites themselves brought with them the bitter experience of a peoples who lost their land and were thrown out of their homes more than once because of religious beliefs. They also brought with them the will to defend the vital space now found in the Chaco, the only place left to them, where they could maintain their system of religious beliefs and a way of life concordant with this system. These interests opposed the indigenous interests, and today they do it in a sharply increasing way. Affected by the consequences of a religious conflict of Europe in the 18th century, the indigenous population of the Central Chaco today live within the mennonite colonies in a system somewhat like apartheid, which means that they are not in fact integrated. They have to compete with the growing expansive interests of Mennonites involving land claims, and they probably will represent the most problem afflicted stratum of society in the future, within the Mennonite colonies. At the moment the Mennonites still manage to keep land-less indigenous groups at a certain distance.
There’s a certain parallelism between the two described population sectors which draws my attention. Both groups of peoples, the Mennonites and the various groups of indigenous peoples, need vital space to maintain their collective identity, their beliefs, their way of life. At the moment the Mennonites can impose themselves because of their power, but with time this situation could erode. It could be that the indigenous will become dominant because of their sheer numbers or because of the existential pressure of intolerable conditions of life. Even though positive images are being projected, we have here a situation of conflict with an explosive potential. The question is whether there are alternatives to an escalation of this conflict.
The case of the Mennonites is not the only potential of conflict that was exported to the Chaco. For quite a while already the unjust distribution of lands in the eastern part of Paraguay has been causing the migration of thousands of campesino (small peasant) families to the Chaco, where they tried to find a place of life as precarious squatters. The same thing occurs also in the Bolivian and Argentine Chaco where these “criollos” – being victims of the dominant political and social system – come to confront and to compete with other victims of the same system, for the delicate and vital opportunities of survival.
In many cases the different parties that confront themselves, do not really look at each other. They are blind for the necessities of the other. Their own pain, their own needs and their own fears do not permit them to see the others. All of them have been victims and now defend, with mistrust, their perhaps last possibility of survival. Other than not looking at each other, they ignore, they do not understand the forces and the processes which envelope them and which are their enemies, and which make them enemies.
Yet other influencing forces which claim the Chaco, must be mentioned. The governments of the Chaco nations and other, more distant governments; big farm owners, cattle ranchers, land speculators, unknown people from outside the Chaco and from abroad which bought up huge extensions of territory, colonies of new immigrants, corporate national and foreign interests in the Chaco, searching to get hold of its natural resources, to put up bases of productivity, or simply bases to invert money. If we imagine our continent being a tree loaded with fruits, then the Chaco is one of the last fruits on this tree which can still be plucked. Until recently there were other more attractive fruits, closer to the outreach of the centers of power.
There are parties which need the Chaco to make a living, and others which do not need it, but use it for expansive purposes, in order to gain power and material wealth. That is another differentiation which we should take into account.
At the beginning we spoke of an internally conflicting situation; with the analysis of a few aspects of the social processes which actually unfold, we now see the Chaco also as being engaged in external conflicts. Wee can see this living organism which we have analyzed, as a gigantic scenario of conflicting interests of human groups, some of which are undoubtedly legitimate, whereas others are questionable.
The future of the Chaco is unthinkable without a solution which would permit the living together, the symbiosis of these groups, that is those groups which really need it to survive.
But it also becomes visible that the survival of the Chaco depends on its position in a wider context, as a social being, as a member of the worldwide ‘society of regions’ and territories which up to now where left in peace because they seemed far away and because they seemed poor and unproductive. Now this has changed, and even the most remote places of the earth are reached in order to nurture the future of modern humanity. And this organism is now in danger of being assaulted by the blind and uncoordinated necessities of this humanity. In a few cases such necessities are vital, in others they are artificial, and disproportionate, inflated necessity. The unity of the Chaco which for thousands of years enjoyed a stable condition of health, may not resist the impacts of the present.
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To finalize this brief analysis of the actual situation, we can draw a few conclusions and formulate a few criteria, which will have to be taken into account when assuming responsibility and becoming active with regard to the particular reality of the Chaco.
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It is important to consider the Chaco, as did the present contribution, not by parts, nor by sectors or interest groups nor professional perspectives, but as an integral living organism, whose life and survival, according to its own terms, has to be in the interest of all.
That means for any endeavor: holistic awareness, multi-disciplinary approaches, recognition of the global processes and the existing interrelationship between parts, groups, sectors, disciplines and interests. It also means the need to contribute toward a favorable management of the conflicts present, the human conflicts as well as the conflicts with nature, the environment. It finally means recognizing who we are, where our legitimate interests as a global society or as the social sector with which we identify ourselves are located, and where the interests of the Chaco itself in its integrity are located. These interests may be in conflict.
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Let us discover how the Chaco really is, before deciding which measures to apply. Let’s place ourselves as listeners. When we perceive its way of being, we have better possibilities to appreciate and to decide what measures the Chaco needs; the measures the Chaco needs may not be exactly the ones we like.
Concretely, this means to decipher the messages and to interpret the vital signals of the Chaco. It means trying to understand all its images we are capable of gathering on the field of all disciplines and all channels of our perception; it is important to extend our perception to new and unused such channels. It may mean that we temporarily need to suspend our own concepts, categories of perception and images, in order to be more able to grasp and capture what is strange to us, and the yet unknown.
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Let us respect the Chaco. This proposal may seem somewhat childish – like saying „let’s be good!”
But concretely it means to differentiate between our necessities and those of the Chaco, and to subordinate our necessities to those of the Chaco. It means to give force to our interests and necessities where they coincide with the interests and the necessities of the Chaco in its integrity, of all its peoples and all of nature.
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Let’s take the Chaco as our master. He teaches not only what to do with him, but will give us opportunities to learn, which may serve us well in other similar situations. The nightmare which the Chaco today lives, in part represents the same phenomenon that occurs in other parts of the world. If we attain vitality and livelihood for the Chaco, then we will have learned to give and to promote vitality and livelihood for other similar organisms and ecosystems, and, last but not least, for ourselves.
Among the lessons that the Chaco teaches us, there is the importance of giving attention to what happens locally; the necessity to measure and to use with care and with delicacy the elements necessary for survival; the vital importance of the social relationships and conscience and awareness that we can survive only on the condition that there will be mutual respect among humans, peoples, and respect for nature; the necessity of a favorable dealing with the conflicts which oppose diverse systems of belief, and of life. And finally, the re-dimensioning of our pretensions and the search for a more favorable equilibrium between our own will and intentions, and the global processes.
Benno Glauser (1996)