In the Gran Chaco forest, vast green expanses – home to jaguars, giant armadillos and howler monkeys – have turned to fields of dust. The forest once brimmed with life, says Bashe Nuhem, a member of the Indigenous Qom community, but then came a road, and soon after that logging companies. “It was an invasion. Loggers came without any consultation and families moved away. Those that stayed were left with only a cemetery of trees,” she says.
The Gran Chaco is South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon; its 100m hectares (247m acres) stretch across Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. It is also one of the richest areas of biodiversity in the world – host to more than 3,400 species of plants, 500 birds, 150 mammals, 120 reptiles and 100 amphibians.
But as agricultural and logging industries have encroached on the territory, it has also become one of the most deforested places on Earth.
About 7m hectares of native forests were lost in Argentina between 1998 and 2023, according to official data, about 80% of which was in the Gran Chaco. New figures from Greenpeace show that nearly 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres) were destroyed in the forest in 2024 – a 10% increase from the previous year.
Strip after strip has been turned into farmland or burned, local people have been forced from their homes and wild animals are being caged in by fences. The only way to describe it, Greenpeace says, is a “forest emergency”. While the Amazon is afforded international scrutiny and publicity, environmentalists say the Gran Chaco is quietly disappearing.
Natay Collet, a park ranger and technician, has witnessed the destruction first hand. “First they chop down the trees of value to sell, then they come for the rest with machines and chains. Afterwards, they set fire to the land, killing everything. All that is left is a desert,” she says.
Collet says deforestation has happened since “the first colonists came” but that for the past 15 years “companies have come with everything they have”. “There is no hour of rest, it happens all hours, every day,” she says, adding that better technology and chainsaws have accelerated the process.
Juan Diego Ayala, an environmental researcher and member of the collective Somos Monte, explains how much deforestation goes under the radar. “It’s called pinprick land grabs: instead of deforesting thousands of hectares at a time, they will take under 500 hectares at a time,” he says. “It is difficult to detect until it’s too late. It looks like nothing is happening, but everything is happening.”
The Gran Chaco is home to a wide range of wildlife, including maned wolves, ocelots, tapirs, armadillos, capybaras and howler monkeys. With their habitat shrinking, many species are now at risk, biologists warn.
“We have animals in immediate danger of being lost from these parks for ever, like the Chacoan peccary, the giant armadillo, the ocelot. But I think that today, given the current situation, all of the animals are in danger,” says Collet.
The jaguar is one of the most vulnerable species, with conservationists estimating its range in Argentina has shrunk by more than 95% in the past 150 years. Officials believe there are only about 200 jaguars left in Argentina, and fewer than 20 in the Gran Chaco.
“The loss of habitat is the biggest problem of all. The animals lose their shelter, their prey, they are forced to migrate,” says Alicia Delgado, a biologist at Rewilding Argentina. “When the land is no longer connected – when it is split by roads and farms – animals have to move through populated areas. People get scared and hunt them.”
Collet explains that howler monkeys, which rarely leave the canopies, need tree connectivity to find resources and survive. She also worries about the giant armadillo, which is thought to breed only every three years. “A major change in the ecosystem can have a huge impact,” she says.
Deforestation worsens the climate crisis, as carbon stored by trees is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Nuhem says it has had a more immediate impact on the climate, too. “Now we have intense heat, the wind is stronger, the rainfall is scarce and the land is dry,” she says. Droughts have become longer, and floods more extreme, she adds.
The felling of trees continues despite the creation of Argentina’s Forest Law in 2007, which was introduced in response to “the expansion of the agricultural frontier”. The state now requires provincial governments to decide which areas should be protected, set limits on deforestation and devote resources to conservation. But Hernán Giardini, coordinator of Greenpeace’s forest campaign, says, “the law is not enough, and our justice system is not working to defend the forest”.
The deforestation also continues despite a 2019 ruling by the Chaco courts ordering its suspension.
“Deforestation has been prohibited in Chaco since 2019 – the courts banned it, but it is never enforced,” says Enrique Viale, an environmental lawyer and president of the Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers.
A recently retired police officer tells the Guardian that once, when he was in the process of confiscating trucks filled with illegally cut trees, he received a call from a government official. “He told me to let the men – and the trees and trucks – go,” he says. “Whenever I tried to do the right thing, to stop the deforestation, I was punished, while those that committed the crimes walked free.”
Nuhem says that local people attempting to prevent illegal deforestation have faced threats and violence for more than a decade.
“We started filming what was happening, collecting information and talking about it on our community radio. But then people started calling up the station and threatening us. They said, ‘If you don’t stop, something will happen to you,’” Nuhem says.
In 2008, one of Nuhem’s colleagues was kidnapped by a group of men.
“They told her to stop reporting the deforestation, and that, if not, she would be killed. They beat her and raped her,” Nuhem says. “She left the group and the village. The case was never solved and a lot of people helping to report the deforestation fell silent.”
Collet says illegal deforestation is treated with impunity because “the government sees Chaco as a resource to be used and exploited”. “The only thing the government sees in the forest is money,” she says.
Some of the main products of the Chaco province are timber, soya beans, beef, cotton and tannins.
The Chaco government did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but it has previously said it has seized bulldozers and suspended clearing permits to prevent illegal deforestation.
In an interview last year, the governor of Chaco province, Leandro Zdero, said that the government “wants to preserve the forest … but we also want to stop being poor”.
Viale says the state and businesses justify deforestation by saying it leads to economic development. “But Chaco is one of the provinces with the most deforestation in Argentina, and also one of the poorest,” he says. “Everyone mentions progress, but the bosses only enrich themselves.”
Viale and his team have filed a criminal complaint about the deforestation, which is with Argentine prosecutors to investigate. “It is the first time in Chaco we have had a case of this magnitude,” Viale says. “We want to break the cycle of impunity.”
But the Indigenous people, who consider the trees to be gods, say time is running out. “Deforestation is wiping out our cultural practices, our traditional knowledge, like our medicine and our language,” says Nuhem. “We are becoming weak, just like the forest.”
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