Disrupting the Patron: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay''s Chaco

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In Paraguays Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the worlds fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous wellbeing. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peonsa decades-long resistance that led to the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguays ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to unsettle enduring racial geographies and rebuild territorial relations, albeit with uncertain outcomes. Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change. Correias ethnography advances debates about environmental racism, ethics of engaged research, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin Americas settler frontiers.