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

Abstract

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.