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Between Flood and Drought: Environmental

Racism, Settler Waterscapes, and Indigenous
Water Justice in South America’s Chaco

Joel E. Correia

To cite this article: Joel E. Correia (2022) Between Flood and Drought: Environmental
Racism, Settler Waterscapes, and Indigenous Water Justice in South America’s
Chaco, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112:7, 1890-1910, DOI:
10.1080/24694452.2022.2040351

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 Between Flood and Drought: Environmental
Racism, Settler Waterscapes, and Indigenous Water
Justice in South America’s Chaco
Joel E. Correia
Center for Latin American Studies, The University of Florida, USA
This article advances a novel approach to investigating geographies of settler colonialism and environmental
justice through a critical physical geography (CPG) of water scarcity in the South American Chaco.
Drawing from multimethod research conducted in collaboration with Enxet and Sanapan
a communities in
Paraguay, I evaluate how waterscape change produces social vulnerability with a focus on Indigenous access
to safe drinking water. Stemming from a seemingly simple question—how have annual flood and drought
events in the Chaco become malignant for Enxet and Sanapan
a peoples—my analysis centers on current
struggles for Indigenous rights amidst Paraguay’s booming ranching industry. I use an eclectic data set—from
historical missionary accounts, seventy-two household questionnaires, mapping new waterscapes, and a
political economy of cattle ranching—to show how settler waterscapes produce environmental racism by
limiting Indigenous access to “good” water. I argue that the prevalence of water scarcity in Indigenous
communities across the Bajo Chaco is not a natural result of biophysical geography but a socially produced
outcome of how settler waterscapes rework hydrosocial relations along racial lines. CPG offers a way to
bridge biophysical analysis with critical social theory to expand geographic understandings of settler
colonialism and its effects on Indigenous environmental justice. Key Words: critical physical geography,
environmental justice, Indigenous rights, Latin America, water access.

C
lemente received a call as we sat next to a
small fire outside his home in the dawn light
and drank terer
e (cold yerba mate) made from
earth-flavored water drawn from a nearby stock pond.
After a brief exchange, he ended the call with the tri-
ple affirmative “Oima. Dale. Listo.” In other words,
Clemente was ready, and it was time to go. We
jumped in my little SUV along with three other men.
Our task was to drive thirty-five kilometers to pick up
some things left for Clemente’s community that had
recently reoccupied lands taken from them to expand
cattle ranching in the early 1900s. We arrived at our
destination to find twenty-five large, black, plastic
bags full of used clothing and toys alongside ten pal-
lets of twelve-ounce plastic bottles full of water.
Water access is a persistent problem that produces
severe hardships and health concerns in Indigenous
communities like X
akmok K
asek, where Clemente
lives (see Figure 1), and across the South American
Chaco. Looking at the pile, Clemente stated, “They
always bring us gifts before Christmas.” The items
were donations gathered by a church in the capital
city more than 400 kilometers away that often pro-
vides goods to X
akmok K
asek in solidarity with their
fight for land rights. The problem, Clemente stated,
was that “They just leave everything on the side of
the road, and we have to carry it back on motor-
cycles. Now we have your little truck. Let’s fill it
up!” We loaded goods into the SUV until the
shocks sagged and began the process of ferrying
everything to X
akmok K
asek. The summer sun tra-
versed the sky as the pile of bags and water bottles
grew larger in X
akmok K
asek and smaller on the
side of the road until we had moved it all. After the
move, community members divvied up the goods. A
woman near me, Nelsi, casually commented, “I only
drink good water once a year.”
That Nelsi can only drink “good water” once a
year indexes two conjoined processes I examine in
this article—first, how settlers produced a new
waterscape to support ranching, and second, how
that waterscape perpetuates environmental racism
by exposing Indigenous peoples to “bad” water.
Geographers often examine waterscapes in urban

# 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/
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transformed, or built upon in any way.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112(7) 2022, pp. 1890–1910

Initial submission, January 2020; revised submissions, April and November 2021; final acceptance, January 2022
 Between Flood and Drought
Figure 1. Map of the study sites.
contexts (Loftus 2007; Sultana 2013; Ranganathan
2017), to probe state formation through water con-
trol (Swyngedouw 1999; Akhter 2015), and to reveal
racialized water insecurity (Sultana 2011; Deitz and
Meehan 2019). Scant literature, however, evaluates
the formation of settler waterscapes and their effects
on Indigenous environmental justice (Hoover 2017;
Daigle 2018; Estes 2019; Curley 2021b). This article
elaborates a critical physical geography (CPG) of
settler waterscapes in Paraguay’s Bajo Chaco to
rethink the materialities of settler colonization and
their effects on Indigenous environmental justice.
The work contributes to burgeoning scholarship that
uses CPG to examine and explain relationships
between waterscape change, environmental violence,
and logics of elimination (Colucci et al. 2021).
The ability of Enxet and Sanapan
a residents to
access good water is an environmental justice concern
that shifts with seasonal fluctuations in flood and
1891
drought common to the Bajo Chaco. Historically, the
characteristic flood and drought regime in this region
did not adversely impact Enxet and Sanapan
a life in
the ways it now does. What has changed to make the
regularly occurring annual floods and droughts malig-
nant, and even deadly? I answer this question by
weaving insights from CPG (Lave 2014; Lave,
Biermann, and Lane 2018; Colucci et al. 2021), criti-
cal environmental justice (CEJ; Pellow 2017; Pulido
2017a), Indigenous geographies of water (Hoover
2017; Daigle 2018; Yazzie and Risling Baldy 2018;
Estes 2019; Curley 2021b), and geographies of settler
colonialism (Ybarra 2017; Curley 2021a; Launius and
Boyce 2021) with long-term multimethod field
research in Paraguay. I use CPG to show how the
inability to obtain clean, reliable drinking water results
from ranching infrastructures and the environmental
racism Enxet and Sanapan
a peoples experience within
the settler waterscape.
1892 Correia
I argue that the prevalence of water scarcity in
Indigenous communities across the Bajo Chaco is
not a “natural” result of biophysical geography but a
socially produced outcome of how settler waterscapes
rework hydrosocial relations along racial lines. Enxet
and Sanapan
a water access has become life-threaten-
ing because settler adaptations to local biophysical
conditions create geographies that disproportionately
expose Indigenous peoples to environmental harms
while ensuring the political economy of ranching
continues without restraint. Wolfe’s (2006) influen-
tial framing of settler colonialism as “a structure” of
social-spatial relations, not merely “an event,”
informs my thinking. In Wolfe’s calculation, land
theft is the basis of Indigenous elimination that ani-
mates settler colonization. Consequently, geographies
of settler colonialism often emphasize the social-
spatial relations of Indigenous land dispossession
(Barnd 2017; Velednitsky, Hughes, and Machold
2020; Hunt 2021). I suggest, however, that CPG
offers another way to examine and understand the
structures of settler colonialism by taking the mate-
rial characteristics of biophysical geographies seri-
ously and showing how settlers use them to colonize,
not merely as the site of colonization. Attending to
biophysical geography foregrounds spatial variegation
and the geographic specificities of settler colonialism
beyond the land dispossession and labor exploitation
dynamic often used in settler studies (Wolfe 2006;
Speed 2017). My goal is to rethink how geographers
might assess settler colonialism and the injustice it
produces through closer engagement with CPG.
The article is organized as follows. First, I present
the study design. Following that, the literature
review draws together CEJ, geographies of settler
colonialism, and CPG scholarship to develop the
analytical framework and chart relations between
this case and extant research on related issues.1 I
then present the data from which I derive my analy-
sis and argument. I weave Bajo Chaco biophysical
characteristics with historical settler accounts, the
political economy of contemporary ranching, and my
maps of the novel settler waterscape. I then make
clear how the settler waterscape undermines Enxet
and Sanapan
a human rights. Here, I highlight my
interlocutors’ testimonies alongside decisions from
the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
(IACHR) and recent media reporting. The article
concludes by discussing how CPG opens new ave-
nues for investigating settler colonialism as a
biosocial process and can be used to denaturalize
environmental racism.
Study Design
This article is nested within a broader project that
evaluated the politics of implementing IACHR deci-
sions regarding Indigenous land restitution in the
Paraguayan Chaco. During that time (2013–2019),
I collaborated with three Enxet and Sanapan
a
Indigenous communities that were, and still are,
involved in regaining portions of their territories
taken to establish cattle ranches in the early 1900s.
I tease out one thread of that work by mapping dis-
cursive, juridical, and biophysical changes in the Bajo
Chaco waterscape and their implications on
Indigenous water access along three axes. First, analy-
sis of historical accounts written by missionaries and
other colonists shows how settlers discursively framed
physical geographies to justify their use for ranching
and subsequently appropriated features of those geog-
raphies to advance colonization. Second, a geographic
information systems (GIS) assessment of current set-
tler infrastructures renders visible the extent of bio-
physical changes in the Bajo Chaco to make new
settler waterscapes, thus mapping and quantifying
geographies of water control. I created a robust quan-
titative and spatial account of the novel settler water-
scape by hand-digitizing the location of stock ponds
and above-ground earthen water storage tanks in two
study areas that cover
11,000 km2 surrounding
X
akmok K
asek, Sawhoyamaxa, and Yakye Axa.
Third, data from seventy-two semistructured house-
hold questionnaires (Table 1) coupled with analysis
of legal proceedings shows how water quality and
access have become an everyday environmental jus-
tice struggle for Enxet and Sanapan
a peoples. Insights
from participant observation that included living for
several months in each community during the most
intensive research period between March 2015 and
July 2016 complement other data used here.
X
akmok K
asek and Sawhoyamaxa leadership sug-
gested that I investigate access to health care and
services like water access, which I did through the
household questionnaires that inform this article.2
Per community governance norms, I discussed the
intent and design of the questionnaires during com-
munity-wide meetings, where I received feedback
and permission to conduct this facet of the broader
study. I used purposive snowball sampling to identify
 Between Flood and Drought 1893

Table 1. Detail of questionnaire participants

Gender Age 18–30 Age 30–50 Age 50þ Location Comment on participants

Male 8 6 9 X
akmok K
asek The sample, although nonscientific in design, is

Female 2 5 1 X
akmok K
asek representative of community membership and
Male 4 5 2 Sawhoyamaxa experiences. Questionnaire respondents in both sites
Female 11 13 6 Sawhoyamaxa included elected and spiritual leaders, persons central
Total 25 29 18 to political mobilization, elders, and young adults.
Over 90 percent of respondents had not completed
primary school and had no formal employment. At the
time of the survey, 63 families lived in X
akmok K
asek
and 105 in Sawhoyamaxa.

research participants and administered all question-
naires by interviewing participants in Guaran
ı,
recording audio when permitted, and later collating
and transcribing responses. For the questionnaires, I
used a conversational interview format that bridges
storytelling as method (Kovach 2009) with a dia-
logic exchange well-suited to local norms (Correia
2018). All participants had the option of reviewing
transcripts for accuracy. Normative gender roles in
Enxet and Sanapan
a communities required that I
focus much of my attention on male-gendered activi-
ties. The household questionnaire, however, created
an important opportunity to talk with women most
often responsible for water acquisition and social
reproduction through their domestic labor. I left cop-
ies of anonymized data with community leaders for
their records and use.
Critical geographic scholarship increasingly con-
tends with the colonial past and present of the disci-
pline. The surge in works aiming to advance
decolonial geographies and thereby create a more
just geography is necessary (see, e.g., Radcliffe 2017;
de Leeuw and Hunt 2018; Zaragocin 2019; Radcliffe
and Radhuber 2020; Mollett 2021; Sultana 2021;
among others). This article resonates with decolonial
geographies in several ways. Indigenous research
methods (Kovach 2009) that produced useful knowl-
edge in response to community interests (Tuhiwai
Smith 2012) informed the field research for this arti-
cle. Moreover, I engage scholarship that transcends
geography’s disciplinary, linguistic, and often
European–U.S. boundaries. Working with Enxet and
Sanapan
a collaborators to lay bare how settler colo-
nialism works in the Bajo Chaco and to denounce
environmental racism, I articulate with what Daigle
and Ramirez (2018) called “constellations of co-
resistance” (79). Through long-term collaborative
research based on solidarity (Harjo 2019), this article
and the research that informs it complement the gen-
erations-long resistance my Enxet and Sanapan
a col-
laborators have used to challenge colonial
dispossessions. Although I have long-standing rela-
tions with interlocutors named in this article and the
communities where the research took place, I am a
white, male settler living on unceded Timucua,
Seminole, and Miccosukee territories. Such contradic-
tions embody the limits and potential of decolonizing
geographic scholarship (de Leeuw and Hunt 2018).
I hesitate to claim that the article is decolonizing
because the Enxet and Sanapan
a communities I
worked with on this research do not refer to their
struggles as decolonial. My interlocutors most often
refer to them as efforts to live well and in peace by
reestablishing relations with their lands so their chil-
dren can have a better future. I contribute to those
efforts through engaged research that shows how
Enxet and Sanapan
a dispossession from good water
results from efforts to create a waterscape that supports
cattle while tacitly ensuring Indigenous elimination.
Environmental Justice and Critical
Physical Geographies of Settler
Colonization
The geographies of environmental justice are mul-
tifaceted. Scholarship and activism concerning envi-
ronmental justice emerged in the United States over
concerns about the disproportionate exposure of
communities of color and marginalized populations
to environmental harms (Bullard 2000; Walker
2012; Pulido 2017b). Research in this area has long
examined racial inequality through distributive jus-
tice, the spatiality of environmental hazards, and the
statistical prevalence of such hazards in marginalized
communities (see, e.g., Pulido 1996; Walker 2009)
1894 Correia
with a robust body of contemporary research and
applied work (Grove et al. 2018; Hargrove, Del Rio,
and Korc 2018; Stone et al. 2019; among others).
New lines of inquiry have also emerged, notably
the internationalization of environmental justice
(Carruthers 2008; Martinez-Alier et al. 2016;
Holifield, Porter, and Walker 2009) and what
Pellow (2017) called “critical environmental justice
studies” (see also Adamson 2011; Pulido and De
Lara 2018). CEJ studies (Pellow 2017, 14) highlight
intersectionality, multiscalar analysis, state power
and its relationship with inequality, and the indis-
pensability of human and nonhuman populations.
This article contributes to geographies of environ-
mental justice (Perreault 2013; Dhillon 2018; Curley
2021a; Wilson et al. 2021) by advancing a critical
analysis of Indigenous water access on a settler frontier.
Anishinaabek scholar Deborah McGregor’s (2018)
discussion of mino-mnaamodzawin, the ability to live
well, informs my approach. Drawing from
Anishinaabek intellectual traditions, McGregor argued
that Indigenous environmental justice must attend to
the ability of peoples to maintain their responsibilities
to one another, land, and other-than-human entities
through relational practices. Water and land disposses-
sions disrupt Indigenous systems of relations and
responsibilities and thus undermine the ability to live
well (see also Whyte 2016). Mino-mnaamodzawin is
specific to Anishinaabek peoples, yet resonates with
many Indigenous conceptions of living well in Latin
America, often translated as vivir bien in Spanish
(McGregor 2018, 19) but specifically named and prac-
ticed in myriad ways. Enxet and Sanapan
a interlocu-
tors expressed similar sentiments when equating the
ability to drink “good” water with the statements like
“roikose por~a”—literally, we want to live well. In the
Chaco, living well requires access to clean water that
sustains life rather than undermining it as a harbinger
of illness and epistemic violence (see also Sultana
2013). Ranganathan’s (2017) framing of the
“environment as freedom” is helpful here. Illnesses
wrought by the inability to access a clean environment
are unfreedom, Ranganathan argued. When broader
structural factors expose specific populations to pre-
ventable environmental harms, those factors take
one’s freedom from the ability to live well. In other
geographic settings, Deitz and Meehan (2019)
plumbed water insecurity through an analysis of race
and infrastructure to show how specific populations
are exposed to environmental harm through chronic
underinvestment, revealing how state violence flows
through the tap, or lack of access to one. I bring
these differing views on just environments into con-
versation to underscore that Nelsi’s notion of “good
water” discussed earlier indexes the unfreedom of liv-
ing with environmental harms and how settler colo-
nialism disrupts Indigenous territorial relations.
Geographers and other critical scholars have
advanced important studies that evaluate the social,
political, and economic processes accompanying set-
tler colonialism. Often in conversation with Wolfe
(2006), many works affirm that land dispossession is
the germinal condition of settler colonialism and
establishes a structure of unequal relations (Speed
2017; Ybarra 2017; Daigle 2019). Labor exploitation
(Wolfe 2016; Melamed 2015; Pasternak 2020), the
coloniality of settler law (Coulthard 2014; Correia
2021a; Curley 2021b), and a cultural politics that
works to erase Indigenous lifeways (Rowe and Tuck
2017) compound the effects of land theft. Another
stream of critical geographic scholarship shows how
settler colonialism transcends the materiality of land
dispossessions through attention to “cuerpo-territorio,”
embodied territorial relations that encompass land,
water, and other place-based relations (Mollett 2021;
Zaragocin and Caretta 2021). Reframing disposses-
sion as a territorial process shows how effects of set-
tler colonialism cannot be reduced to land theft but
must include embodied effects of environmental
harms like socially produced water scarcity that drive
Indigenous elimination (Zaragocin 2019).
Settler colonialism is a geographic process, a form
of social-spatial and ecological relations that perpet-
uate environmental racism. Voyles (2015) showed
this in Wastelanding, where she critiqued how the
U.S. federal government and uranium industries used
a discourse of “wastelands” to connote the desert
landscape as well as Indigenous life to legitimate dis-
possession through processes that directly exposed
Navajo peoples to toxic pollutants and other envi-
ronmental harms. Among her many pathbreaking
works on environmental justice, Pulido (2017b)
argued that racism against Indigenous peoples has
long been mediated by state-sanctioned violence
in struggles to control natural resources amidst
racial capitalism inherent to settler colonialism.
Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2016, 2018)
averred that settler colonialism is environmental
injustice because the process of enduring settlement
denies Indigenous peoples the ability to maintain
 Between Flood and Drought
their responsibilities to and with their territories by
radically altering the ecological systems vital to col-
lective ways of life. Whyte’s theorization dovetails
with CPG’s attention to biophysical geographies and
their relationship with justice.
CPG is an integrative field that bridges physical
and human geography to provide new avenues for
inquiry. Emerging from efforts to investigate rela-
tionships between the practice of environmental sci-
ence and political economy (Lave et al. 2014), CPG
has grown significantly more diverse since Lave’s
(2012) pathbreaking investigation and now incorpo-
rates a broader set of empirical concerns (Lave,
Biermann, and Lane 2018). Although justice-focused
analyses of scientific knowledge production, biophys-
ical processes, and landscape change animate
CPG (McClintock 2015; Simon 2016; Holifield and
Day 2017; Lane 2017), there is also an important
thread that examines how controlling water, from
stream restoration (Lave 2012) to dam construction
(Colucci et al. 2021), shapes social relations of
power and inequality. Lave, Biermann, and Lane
(2018) argued, “[t]he social and environmental injus-
tices on which critical human geographers focus are
profoundly material, and we cannot understand their
co-constitutive relations without studying biophysical
and social processes together” (7). It is precisely this
point that animates my thinking with CPG because
settler colonialism is an inherently biosocial process,
although almost always studied regarding the politi-
cal economy of land theft and its effects. CPG offers
a way to bridge biophysical analysis with critical
social theory to enrich geographic understandings of
settler colonialism, its effects at the landscape scale,
and how material transformations influence environ-
mental justice.
Geographic studies of settler violence can benefit
from a closer engagement with CPG. Evaluating the
material structures of settler colonialism through
attention to biophysical geographies complements
the political economic analyses of land left that pre-
dominates current scholarship. Following Prieto and
Rojas (2015), I derive biophysical data from histori-
cal missionary records of weather events and land-
scape change that show how settlers contended with
flood and drought by initiating waterscape change.
Holifield and Day (2017) used CPG to investigate
how wastelands become sites of intensive capitalist
extraction at the landscape scale, an approach I har-
ness to assess settler colonization as an adaptive
1895
biosocial system that has created a novel waterscape.
Building from these works, I contribute to CPG
research on racial violence (Colucci et al. 2021) by
attending to the geographies of settler colonialism.
Water scarcity in Enxet and Sanapan
a communities is
not natural or unexpected. The settler waterscape dis-
possesses Indigenous peoples of land and good water
in ways that undermine well-being and articulate with
long-standing practices to eliminate Enxet and
Sanapan
a lifeways so that ranching might flourish.
Making the Settler Waterscape
Despite settler accounts describing a region that
“produces practically nothing of workable value”
(Grubb 1911, 65), the Bajo Chaco is now a corner-
stone of the country’s beef industry, which ranks in
the top ten global exporters by slaughter weight (U.S.
Department of Agriculture 2019). Settlers had to
make a new waterscape to achieve this end. The pro-
cess began with land privatization, which began in
earnest after the Triple Alliance War (1864–1870)
when the Paraguayan state sold off much of its Chaco
landholdings. The ensuing resource rush saw over half
the region legally converted from state lands to private
property within a decade (Renshaw 2002). Foreign
investors purchased land by the league to establish lat-
ifundium (Kleinpenning 2009, 483) that enclosed vast
portions of Enxet, Sanapan
a, and other Indigenous
territories (Villagra-Carron 2010). English investors
were keen to acquire lands in the Bajo Chaco, and
the British Anglican Mission subsequently worked to
create an Indigenous labor force to work on the new
landholdings (Grubb 1911; Hunt 1933). Many of the
missionaries were avid writers whose travelogues pro-
vide biophysical data and a view into racial logics
long used to justify Enxet and Sanapan
a dispossession
from land and water. I weave their perspectives
through the following discussion of biophysical geogra-
phy and settler waterscape production.
The Biophysical Waterscape
A pronounced flood and drought cycle character-
izes Bajo Chaco’s biophysical geography. Most of the
Gran Chaco is arid, but the Bajo Chaco subregion
receives 1,300 mm of annual precipitation in highly
variable events across time and space with notable
differences across short distances (Mereles and Rodas
2014, 56) that include extended winter droughts and
1896
intense summer thunderstorms (Pezzoli and Ponte
2016). Seasonal floods driven by summer rains create
a mixed vegetation mosaic where subhumid and
semihumid hardwood forests intersperse with palm
savannahs. It is not merely the abundance or
absence of water that matters, but how precipitation
interacts with the soils and topography. The
Paraguayan Chaco is flat, falling less than one meter
every kilometer from the highest point at the north-
western Bolivia–Paraguay border (630 km above sea
level) to the lowest point at the Paraguay River near
the country’s capital city (60 m above sea level).
The flat landscape, predominately clay soils that
slow groundwater infiltration, and high seasonal
rainfalls create a biophysical waterscape where flood-
ing is common (Torres et al. 2018). Describing this,
Grubb (1911) noted, “It is not uncommon to ride
for miles … over what appears at the time to be
prairie-land, but in reality is a swamp bed; and a few
months after the rainy season has set in this same
land has become a vast swamp, with water in places
even five feet deep” (25).
Drought contrasts with flooding and is arguably
the most significant aspect of the region’s biophysi-
cal geography that influences ranching practice.
Most perennial streams and subsurface waters taunt
the thirsty during droughts because dissolved salts
make the water undrinkable (Glatzle et al. 2020).
Early missionary accounts make clear the many chal-
lenges that droughts pose: “Floods are unpleasant,
but unless they become too excessive life is possible
for man and beast. A water famine [i.e. drought], on
the other hand, is one of the most serious contin-
gencies to guard against in a wild country where the
inhabitants have to rely on natural conditions and
an uncertain rainfall” (Hunt 1933, 138). The com-
bined effects of evaporation, groundwater infiltra-
tion, and plant evapotranspiration amplify drought
duration and intensity across the entire region
(Marchesini et al. 2020, 1). A recently published
guide for ranch management in Paraguay addresses
the effects of drought, stating that “between 60 and
80% of water from rainfall ends up evaporating each
year in the Chaco” (World Wildlife Fund 2018, 41).
Moreover, interannual precipitation variability influ-
enced by the El Nin ~ o/La Nin ~ a Southern Oscillation
significantly affects the duration and strength of
droughts (Pezzoli and Ponte 2016) with a high prob-
ability of more extreme precipitation fluctuations in
the coming decades due to climate change
Correia
(Investigaci
on Para el Desarrollo 2017). Controlling
and containing water, particularly in rainy periods, is
crucial to Bajo Chaco ranching and has been a focus
of colonial settlements since the Anglican arrival.
From Wastelands to Ranchlands
Settler states often use discursive or juridical
means to frame Indigenous territories as wastelands
or sites devoid of value until colonists remake them
to facilitate extractive capitalism (Mollett 2016;
Bledsoe 2019; Estes 2019). Grubb (1914) made clear
the Anglican Mission’s role; “Only ten years ago it
would have been impossible for anyone to establish
an estancia [cattle-ranch] in the interior. …
Through the direct instrumentality of the Mission a
large English Company, with its headquarters in
London, has now been established at a point more
than ten leagues in the interior, where they possess
two hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, and
employ Indians” (294). In a report to British invest-
ors, missionary Hunt (1933) noted that the regu-
larly-inundated understory of palm forests produced
“various kinds of grass, making excellent pasture for
cattle” (11), thus recasting the region from a swampy
wasteland to natural ranchlands. Right Reverend
Edward Every (as cited in Project Canterbury [n.d.])
reflected on this in his remarks about the Mission’s
work, stating, “as no white man coveted it [the Bajo
Chaco], it formed for centuries a natural Indian
reserve. The conditions, however, are now rapidly
changing, as the land has been found valuable for
running cattle, and the Indian no longer has the
country to himself.” The accounts of Grubb, Hunt,
and Every enunciate logics of racialized disposses-
sion. Anglican missionaries justified appropriating
Enxet and Sanapan
a lands to satisfy British financial
interests by introducing cattle on stolen lands on
which Enxet and Sanapan
a labored. Such are the
“possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty
and the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty”
(Moreton-Robinson 2015, 193) that animate the
political economic structures of settler colonialism
across distinct geographies (Speed 2017).
Since the Anglican arrival, nothing has had a
greater impact on the Bajo Chaco than cattle ranch-
ing. Among the three administrative departments
that make up Paraguay’s Chaco, Presidente Hayes
comprises the Bajo Chaco and most Enxet and
Sanapan
a ancestral territories; it is also where
 Between Flood and Drought
ranching began and remains home to the largest
herd in the region (Baumann et al. 2017). With
almost 14 million cattle grazing Paraguayan territory
(Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganader
ıa 2019; U.S.
Department of Agriculture 2019) and just over 7
million people who live in the country (Direcci
on
General de Estad
ıstica, Encuestas y Censos [General
Directorate for Statistics, Surveys, and Census]
2018b), cows outnumber Paraguayans two to one. In
the Chaco, the ratio of cattle to humans increases to
nearly fifty cows per person. Cattle ranches now
cover millions of hectares of land in Paraguay’s
Chaco (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2019),
whereas Indigenous peoples control fewer than 1
million (Glauser 2019, 70). Private property covers
more than 95 percent of the Paraguayan Chaco with
most used for cattle ranching (Oxfam 2016; Veit
and Sarsfield 2017). Finally, ranchers in Paraguay’s
Chaco rear cattle through grazing, not feedlots (Le
Polain de Waroux et al. 2018), and require extensive
landholdings with reliable water sources to sustain
their herds.
The Settler Waterscape
Settlers created a new waterscape to adapt to the
region’s seasonal precipitation variability.
Swyngedouw’s (1999) work on the Spanish water-
scape is helpful. Through a historical geography of
large-scale infrastructure projects, Swyngedouw eluci-
dated how efforts to control water flow and access
reveal much about state formation and the produc-
tion of new socionatures. He argued, “the tumultu-
ous process of modernization in Spain and its
contemporary condition, both in environmental and
political-economic terms, are wrought from historical
spatial-ecological transformations” (Swyngedouw
1999, 445). In other works, I detailed the intimate
relations between settler ranching and state forma-
tion in the Bajo Chaco (Correia 2021b). Rather
than revisit that analysis here, the point I seek to
make is that settler ranchers helped the Paraguayan
state territorialize its tenuous grip over the western
frontier by extending material practices of private
property in land upheld by state law. In establishing
private properties as cattle ranches, settlers built new
infrastructures to create a novel waterscape based on
the control of land and water. Critical physical geog-
raphers have persuasively argued that “relationships
of social power shape, or are shaped by, the
1897
biophysical landscape” (Robertson, Larsen, and
Tulowiecki 2018, 240). Settler waterscapes in the
Bajo Chaco are biosocial systems where power is
manifest through creating and controlling access to
water (see also Sultana 2011; Curley 2021a).
The Bajo Chaco settler waterscape works through
two primary types of infrastructure: fences and
earthen water storage features. The former denotes
access regimes and the latter holds vital resources. I
discussed land enclosure earlier. Here, I focus on
water storage infrastructures historically and in the
present. In May 1918, the missionary Hunt (1933)
wrote, “We have had a terrible drought. … Naso
and I are busy in between times making a lake to
secure a safe water supply, one mile long, half a mile
wide, and three to four feet deep; a big work truly
and nearly finished; the indians [sic] have worked
well” (299). Settlers made such “lakes” by creating
large earthen stock ponds and holding tanks that
collect rain and surface floodwaters. Given that cat-
tle consume an average of fifty to seventy liters daily
in the Chaco (World Wildlife Fund 2018, 88),
securing reliable water sources is crucial to ranching.
A ranch with 1,000 head of cattle will need to ensure
their animals have access to 50,000 to 70,000 liters of
water every day, or roughly 18,250,000 to 25,550,000
liters annually. The fastest, cheapest, and most effec-
tive way to meet these water needs is the same
method Hunt and Naso used in 1918—build earthen
stock ponds that fill with rain or floodwaters for cattle
to access. The surface area and depth of ponds are
highly variable, contingent on local soil types, avail-
able equipment to excavate the holes, and the needs
of individual ranchers (see Figure 2). Ranchers now
also sometimes build elevated earthen tanks next to
stock ponds where wind or solar power pumps feed
water through pipes up and into the tank from which
it can flow by gravity to troughs located in more dis-
tant areas of the pastures. How do these settler water
infrastructures comprise a new waterscape?
I used ArcGIS and ESRI World Imagery satellite
images to digitize the location and surface area of all
stock ponds and earthen tanks built in two

5,500 km2 study areas surrounding X
akmok K
asek,
Sawhoyamaxa, and Yakye Axa to assess settler water-
scape formation.3 Table 2 details the number, diver-
sity, and extent of mapped features, and Figures 3 and
4 show the spatial distribution of stock ponds and
tanks in the settler waterscape. Mapped waterscape
features are located within private properties. I did
1898 Correia

Figure 2. Examples of different types of stock ponds in (A & B) X
akmok K
asek, (C) Yakye Axa, and (D) Sawhoyamaxa.

Table 2. Descriptive statistics derived from mapping the Bajo Chaco settler waterscape

Stock pond SWX and YA Earthen tank XK study SWX and YA

surface area XK study area study area surface area area– study area

< 500 m2 87 283 < 500 m2 104 33

500–1,000 m2 297 487 500–1,000 m2 306 90
1,000–2,000 m2 498 420 1,000–2,000 m2 172 54
2,000–3,000 m2 421 247 2,000–3,000 m2 33 33
3,000–5,000 m2 498 322 3,000–4,000 m2 16 20
5,000–10,000 m2 337 222 4,000–5,000 m2 3 7
10,000–20,000 m2 38 101 > 5,000 m2 0 4
> 20,000 m2 4 17
Total features 2,178 2,101 Total features 604 241
Total area 6,750,360 m2 6,391,454 m2 Total area 599,301 m2 361,468 m2
(
675 ha) (
639 ha) (
599 ha) (
361 ha)
Note: XK ¼ X
akmok K
asek; SWX ¼ Sawhoyamaxa; YA ¼ Yakye Axa.

not map all individual properties and fence lines
because no public record accurately depicts the extent
of privately owned land in Paraguay’s Chaco. The
available cadaster records are incomplete, leaving
much land area unmarked (see Servicio Nacional de
Catastro 2021). I referenced ESRI World Imagery,
however, to digitize fences in the immediate area
surrounding X
akmok K
asek and illustrate the extent
of land enclosure that severs Enxet and Sanapan
a
mobilities across their traditional territories (see
Figure 5). A similar dynamic is also evident in Figure
6, which details how the Yakye Axa community is
located within the settler waterscape but limited from
accessing viable water.
 Between Flood and Drought
Figure 3. The 5,335 km2 Sawhoyamaxa and Yakye Axa study area. Mapped water features appear as small green polygons.
These data render visible and quantify the extent
to which settlers have produced a new waterscape to
maintain highly unequal access to land and water.
Stock ponds and tanks are not as spectacular as the
megainfrastructure projects that feature in other
analyses of waterscapes (Swyngedouw 1999; Sultana
2013; Akhter 2015), yet they are no less significant.
In the aggregate, stock ponds, earthen tanks, and
fence lines radically reconfigure hydrosocial rela-
tions, drawing attention to how water becomes
scarce for some populations and abundant for others.
We see this dynamic because settlers built the water-
scape to sustain cattle life through the organization
of fenced pastures and the placement of stock ponds
and earthen storage tanks. Cattle have abundant
access to water of a quality and amount that enables
their lives to thrive (until they are slaughtered). In
contrast, members of Yakye Axa, Sawhoyamaxa,
X
akmok K
asek, and indeed most Indigenous peoples
of the Chaco suffer the embodied consequences of
drinking bad water—sediment-laden water contami-
nated with animal feces and detritus that washes in
with the floods.
1899
Waterscape change to facilitate the spread of set-
tler cattle ranching in the Bajo Chaco creates new
hydrosocial relations where Indigenous peoples dis-
proportionately experience water scarcity. In this
context, water scarcity manifests in the abundance
of “bad” water and the absence of “good” water.
Sultana (2013) showed, in her analysis of arsenic
poisoning and water infrastructure in Bangladesh,
that good water can be conceived as healthful
whereas bad water “is contaminated, undesirable, [or]
an embodiment of danger” (342–43). I show how
ranching infrastructures—fences and stock ponds—
interact with biophysical geographies in ways that
expose Enxet and Sanapan
a peoples to good and bad
water vis-a-vis the region’s flood and drought cycle.
Fences restrict Enxet and Sanapan
a mobilities by
enforcing the exclusionary logics of private property
in land (Blomley 2003). Stock ponds create reliable
water sources for cattle but have become the only
reliable water for Indigenous peoples, a source of bad
water. The abundance of water during floods not
only inundates homes, but fills stock ponds with
sediments, animal feces, and other contaminants.
1900
Figure 4. The 5,798 km2 X
akmok K
asek study area. Mapped water features appear as small green polygons.
The lack of water during drought leaves people with
few options other than to drink water from shrinking
ponds where evaporation concentrates contaminants
and renders the vital resource dangerous. Both the
abundance and absence of water thus create grave
health problems (Carneri 2019; UltimaHora
2019)—problems that resulted in several rulings
from the IACHR (2005, 2006, 2010) that found the
Paraguayan state guilty of violating Enxet and
Sanapan
a human rights in the communities where I
conducted this research.
Water Scarcity as Environmental Racism
The effects of the new settler waterscape on
Indigenous life make clear that the inability of
Enxet and Sanapan
a to access good water is the
product of environmental racism. The contemporary
propertized landscape inhibits Indigenous mobilities
and produces water scarcity. Enxet and Sanapan
a
mobility historically served as an adaptive practice
to ensure access to good water during varying condi-
tions (Villagra-Carron 2014). Many of the older
Correia
interlocutors I spoke with over the course of my field
research for this project explained these changes to
me by recounting memories of when the land used
to be “open.” In contrast, the establishment of
ranches “closed” the land and limited their ability to
freely move when desired. Such narratives index
how the juridical and material enclosure of the
Chaco established new racialized access regimes that
persist to the present through the enforcement of
private property rights because most cattle ranchers
deny access to their lands for anyone but laborers.
Given that every Enxet and Sanapan
a community
with land title now lies on what was once a cattle
ranch built on the community’s ancestral lands,
stock ponds previously used to provide water for cat-
tle on those ranches are now the primary water sour-
ces for Bajo Chaco Indigenous communities. Stock
pond water is not inherently “bad.” People across
the Chaco have survived on scarce, untreated surface
water for millennia. The overwhelming prevalence
of cattle ranching across this area has affected water
quality and availability by creating new access
regimes and introducing contaminants (e.g., fecal
matter) in water sources that cattle frequent.
 Between Flood and Drought 1901

Figure 5. Map detailing fences surrounding X
akmok K
asek lands, although this does not cover the full 5,798 km2 study area. The fences
visible within X
akmok K
asek are remnants of the cattle ranch built on these lands before restitution to the community in 2017. (A)
The map over color satellite imagery. (B) Same area over enhanced LiDAR imagery.

Enxet and Sanapan
a responses to my household
questionnaire, coupled with findings from the
IACHR, elucidate how settler waterscapes do more
than maintain cattle life. The waterscapes threaten
Enxet and Sanapan
a ability to maintain social col-
lectives and the ecological relations that support
them. Ignacia, an older woman from X
akmok K
asek,
reflected on this, saying:
When it floods, the water runs everywhere. It becomes
dirty and makes us sick. When the rains stop, there is
less water, and it starts to smell bad. It gets full of mud
and is hard to drink. Those are hard times. Between
1902 Correia

Figure 6. Maps detailing the waterscape surrounding Yakye Axa within the broader 5,335 km2 study area. (A) Settler water
infrastructures over real color satellite imagery. (B) The same area over an enhanced LiDAR image. (C) Detail of the Yakye Axa
community, located between Ruta Cinco and a fence that prohibits access to stock ponds on the neighboring ranch.
 Between Flood and Drought
the floods and droughts, life is hard in the Chaco.
There are only a couple months of the year when the
water is good. … A long time ago, we could get good
water in many places. Now, the only water for the
Indigenous is in stock ponds where cattle and animals
drink because there are ranches everywhere.
(Interview, 1 February 2016)
My interlocutors make every effort to gather the
cleanest water they can, yet the settler waterscape
confounds access to good water. Anivel, a leader of
the Enxet community of Yakye Axa that has been
located on the margin of a highway for more than
twenty-five years due to ranching-derived disposses-
sion, recounted the following:
It was really hard to get water to drink. The owners of
the ranch paid people to ride on horseback with
instructions to shoot trespassers. The only water
around here is in the stock ponds, so we had to sneak
across the fence at night to enter the ranch and find
water, but we were always afraid of getting shot.
(Interview, 11 February 2016)
State inaction forced Yakye Axa community members
into conflict with ranchers over water access because
responsible Paraguayan agencies neglected their legal
commitments to deliver potable water to the commu-
nity per agreements mediated by the IACHR. The
state’s failure to ensure Indigenous rights enshrined in
the National Constitution and reaffirmed by multiple
IACHR judgments further shows how settler violence
operates through juridical precedent that upholds pri-
vate property rights at the cost of Indigenous well-
being. Bel
en of Sawhoyamaxa made this point clear:
Getting water here is one of the hardest things. When
there are big storms, the water gets contaminated
because it floods and picks up and mixes everything.
Other times, when it stops raining, the water is worse.
It stinks and is full of dirt. The animals all gather
because they are thirsty and bring illness to the water.
Mostly, we have to drink bad water because the
ranches have changed everything, and the state does
not provide any support. (Interview, 13 January 2016)
These three quotes are not extraordinary. Each
account speaks to common Enxet and Sanapan
a
experiences with the settler waterscape and environ-
mental racism against Indigenous peoples normalized
over generations of colonial dispossession of land
and water. The reservoirs and stock ponds first
designed by missionaries, built with Indigenous labor,
and used by ranchers today ensure that cattle have
1903
reliable water. The cornerstone of the settler water-
scape has become the de facto drinking water source
for Enxet and Sanapan
a communities, a fact that
normalizes the unfreedom of drinking the same water
as cattle, water that is not good. Such parallels evi-
dence the subtle ways settler geographies produce
environmental unfreedoms that normalize environ-
mental racism through hydrosocial relations.
The United Nations (UN) suggests that the
human right to water entails having sufficient, safe,
clean, and accessible water with 50 to 100 liters
needed to meet basic needs (United Nations
Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2014).
At the time of this study, X
akmok K
asek,
Sawhoyamaxa, and Yakye Axa had no access to fil-
tered, treated, or well water. Over 95 percent of the
households I surveyed in Sawhoyamaxa and X
akmok
K
asek reported that their primary water source (for
drinking, cooking, and sanitation) has always been
stock ponds, seasonal ponds, or small reservoirs
behind check dams, and none had rainwater catch-
ment. The ability of families to store water fell well
below amounts suggested by the UN. Surveyed fami-
lies in X
akmok K
asek reported an average household
water storage capacity of thirty-three liters per per-
son, and families in Sawhoyamaxa reported an aver-
age capacity of just two liters per person.4 Across
both communities, the most common storage con-
tainers are ten- or twenty-liter plastic buckets,
although select families have fiberglass storage tanks
with 500- to 1,000-liter capacity that international
humanitarian organizations once provided.
The inability to store water is an especially acute
problem during droughts. As water levels recede in
available sources, the quality rapidly diminishes.5
Numerous individuals who participated in the house-
hold questionnaires reported creating ad hoc filters
to strain particulates from the water, often pouring
sediment-laden water through fabric stretched over
plastic buckets (see Figure 7). Felipe from X
akmok
K
asek recalled:
One time a few years ago there was a drought that
lasted two years. For most of the time there was no
water. We had to get water from mud. It was horrible.
(Interview, 10 November 2015)
Research participants from Yakye Axa reported simi-
lar experiences in several informal interviews. Water
catchment and storage systems are expensive; nearly
all Indigenous communities in the region experience
over 75 percent unemployment due to the prevalence
1904
Figure 7. During a survey, an Enxet woman demonstrates how she fills water for storage at her home. Note the cloth filter placed over
the bucket in the center right of the image. Photo by author.
of ranching as the primary economic activity and lim-
ited opportunities for work (Direcci
on General de
Estad
ıstica, Encuestas y Censos [General Directorate
for Statistics, Surveys, and Census] 2018a). Lack of
wage labor translates to a lack of economic resources
necessary to build water catchment systems that could
alleviate reliance on stock pond water. Therefore, the
scarcity of good water is a matter of intersecting fac-
tors, including scant employment opportunities, a
legal framework supporting private property over
Indigenous land restitution, persistent state denial of
legally codified Indigenous rights, and effects of flood
and drought. IACHR findings and news reporting
corroborate that settler waterscapes result in environ-
mental racism.
In three separate judgments, the IACHR argued
that denying water access to people in Yakye Axa,
Sawhoyamaxa, and X
akmok K
asek resulted in
human rights violations in each community
(IACHR 2005, 2006, 2010).6 Each judgment
expresses concern over the effects of cattle-ranching-
induced land dispossession on water access and its
implications on Enxet and Sanapan
a health. The
Sawhoyamaxa judgment contends that “the State’s
[sic] lack of due diligence to prevent the problems of
Correia
shortage of land, water, food, and medicines …
resulted in deaths” (IACHR 2006, 155). Between
1993 and the time the IACHR adjudicated each
case, the court determined that forty-one people
died across the three communities due to inadequate
state services, preventable illness, and in some cases,
lack of access to clean drinking water (IACHR
2005, 2006, 2010).7
The acts just discussed are not aberrations but sys-
temic effects of state violence mediated by prioritiz-
ing settler political economy and rancher rights over
those of Indigenous peoples. Investigations by the
UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous
People reported that racism and Indigenous dispos-
session related to the ranching economy are rampant
across the Chaco (United Nations Human Rights
Council 2015). Ranching has also changed hydroso-
cial relations in ways that disproportionately expose
Indigenous peoples to the environmental violence of
flood and drought in ways that non-Indigenous
ranchers rarely experience. Recent news headlines
make this pattern of systemic injustice clear: “water
condemns Indigenous people of the Paraguayan
Chaco to death” (Carneri 2019); and “Indigenous
communities of the Chaco suffer the consequences
 Between Flood and Drought
of drought. Most villagers are forced to drink salt-
water” (UltimaHora 2019). Headlines like these are
alarming on their own. Still, they appear at least
once a year and thus reference how Indigenous dis-
possession from good water and necessary mobilities
to adapt to flood and drought have become routinized
forms of violence. The environmental racism docu-
mented here harkens to Budds’s (2008) assertion that
the water–power nexus configures “socioecological
outcomes, which will be reflected in both the physical
waterscape and the social relations of access to, and
exclusion from, water” (65). The prevalence of physi-
cal water scarcity in Indigenous communities across
the Bajo Chaco is not a “natural” result of biophysical
geography but a socially produced outcome of settler
waterscape formation.
Conclusion: Toward Critical Geographies
for Justice
Through long-term collaborative research with
Enxet and Sanapan
a communities, I have learned
much about differences between good and bad water.
On hunting trips, interlocutors will sometimes make
a short side trip to a pond with “good” water that is
sweet, with a pleasant smell. A man from Yakye
Axa once told me that the plants growing in a pond
we passed cleaned the water, making it better than
other sources. On other occasions, interlocutors
would tell me never to drink from specific ponds
because animals frequented them and their water
would make me sick; it was “bad” water. Rainwater
captured in buckets or tanks was generally good,
whereas water captured in earthen ponds was ques-
tionable, requiring checking for debris, then smell-
ing, and finally tasting before drinking. None of the
“good” or “bad” water regularly available was as good
as the clear, contaminant-free water delivered in
small plastic bottles to X
akmok K
asek once a year.
Limited access to good water in Enxet and Sanapan
a
communities is not the result of biophysical pro-
cesses of flood and drought. Instead, the settler
waterscape designed to support cattle life produces
water scarcity for Indigenous peoples across the
Chaco by reconfiguring access to land, water, and
Indigenous adaptive practices that enabled life to
thrive amidst flood and drought.
Dispossession—from territorial relations, water
and life-sustaining resources, and legal protections of
core human rights—is an organizing principle used
1905
to normalize environmental violence against
Indigenous peoples across the Americas (see, e.g.,
Pasternak 2020; Liboiron 2021). Such dispossessions
do more than deny people access or take from them;
settler dispossessions work by transposing the notion
of “wastelands” onto Indigenous peoples (Melamed
2015) through dehumanizing acts—like creating
water scarcity at the expense of Enxet and Sanapan
a
life and to the benefit of cattle that graze on stolen
lands. Acts like these reveal two related processes
that helped create the settler waterscape. First, using
settler law to convert the Chaco to a space defined
by fence lines and private property limits Indigenous
mobilities and territorial relations while also exclud-
ing people from good water. Second, missionaries
recast swampy wastelands as verdant cattle pastures
alongside creating an Indigenous labor force initially
used to build the infrastructures of settler colonialism
(Correia 2021b). My work here thus shows how
water scarcity in Yakye Axa, Sawhoyamaxa, and
X
akmok K
asek is more than a biophysical deficit
produced by drought; it is the result of a new water-
scape that changed hydrosocial relations in the Bajo
Chaco. This article therefore advances CPG scholar-
ship and geographies of settler violence by showing
that the structures of settler colonialism are bioso-
cial, not just based on land theft.
Biophysical geographies and settler adaptations to
them matter for analyses of environmental racism
and Indigenous rights. CPG scholars Lave et al.
(2014) asserted that “we cannot rely on explanations
grounded in physical or critical human geography
alone because socio-biophysical landscapes are as
much the products of unequal power relations, histo-
ries of colonialism, and racial and gender disparities
as they are of hydrology, ecology, and climate
change” (3); my decision to engage CPG in this arti-
cle intends to show this very point. Geographic
analyses of injustice are well served by bridging
approaches on the “physical” and “human” side of
our discipline. Indeed, political ecologists, environ-
mental justice scholars, and critical physical geogra-
phers have a tradition of doing so. Few, though, are
the works that examine settler colonialism as a bio-
social system or take the role of material geographies
in those systems seriously. It is my hope that the
integrative approach I used here will inform subse-
quent studies of environmental justice in settler con-
texts that move beyond naming oppressive systems
and toward better showing how they work so that
1906 Correia
we, as critical geographers attuned to justice, might
use our research to dismantle oppressive systems.
Acknowledgments
Foremost, I thank Enxet and Sanapan
a interlocutors
who shared their time, knowledge, and personal experi-
ences with me, without which this article would be
impossible. The article benefited from conversations
during the 2019 American Association of Geographers
conference session on Critical Environmental Justice
and Critical Physical Geography where I first outlined
this project. Feedback from attendees of my colloquium
talk for the Syracuse University Department of
Geography and Program on Latin America and the
Caribbean helped sharpen the analysis. Generous yet
critical reviewer feedback and expert editorial guidance
from Dr. Meehan at the Annals strengthened the
work. Britany Green and Nashia Graneau helped digi-
tize waterscape features. Any errors are mine alone.
ORCID
Joel E. Correia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-
1679-4381
Notes
1. I do not exhaustively review those literatures, as
other scholars have already done so. On CPG, see
Lave et al. (2014) and Lave, Biermann, and Lane
(2018). On CEJ, see Holifield, Chakraborty, and
Walker (2018), Pulido (2017a), and Pellow (2017).
On settler colonial studies, see Velednitsky, Hughes,
and Machold (2020).
2. Members of Yakye Axa also requested I conduct a
questionnaire. I was unable to do so because I
contracted dengue fever.
3. For a full description of the imagery assessed, see ESRI
ArcGIS online, accessed at https://ufl.maps.arcgis.com/
home/item.html?id=10df2279f9684e4a9f6a7f08febac2a9.
My graduate assistants and I conducted this mapping
using satellite imagery posted to ArcGIS online
between November 2020 and March 2021.
4. I determined water storage capacity by asking
participants how they gathered and stored water. I
then multiplied the number of water storage
containers at a household by the number of liters
per container, then divided the total liters by the
number of people living in surveyed households to
approximate daily liters available per person.
5. I could not test water to ascertain specific
information regarding microbes, dissolved solids, and
so on, due to funding limitations and inability to
adequately transport water samples to labs in the
requisite time frame.
6. The IACHR tied Indigenous rights to communal
property guaranteed in the Paraguayan Constitution
with the right to a dignified life, as seen through the
prism of Articles 1 (the obligation to respect rights), 4
(the right to life), 5 (the right to humane treatment),
and 21 (the right to property), among others.
7. Other deaths could not be proven because, in many
cases, state officials had not issued birth or death
certificates and the IACHR could not substantiate
those deaths without proof of life and death. More
people have died due to waterborne illness before
and following the IACHR judgments.
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JOEL E. CORREIA is an Assistant Professor in the
Center for Latin American Studies at The
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. E-mail:
joel.correia@latam.ufl.edu. His research investigates
Indigenous rights, land politics, socioenvironmental
(in)justice, and extractive development, with a focus
on emancipatory social movements in Latin America.