CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 38, Issue 1, pp. 8-35, ISSN 0886-7356. DOI: 10.14506/ca38.1.02

OF FERAL AND OBEDIENT COWS: Colonization as Domestication in the Paraguayan Chaco

VALENTINA BONIFACIO

Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1472-4160

---

¿Cómo se puede amansar a la gente—how to tame people? It is 2004 and the Aquidaban, a boat carrying people and goods along the Paraguay River, is navigating toward the frontier with Brazil. After discovering I am an anthropologist, Ramón Zevallo, an Ishir man from Alto Paraguay, begins narrating the arrival of Columbus to Paraguay to me and a crowd of local boat passengers. It’s a myth about the encounter between whites and Indigenous people at the dawn of colonization. After coming to the Chaco for the first time, Columbus supposedly “tames” Indigenous people by offering them great quantities of bread. Having earned their trust, he receives a bride in return. This gift exchange continues until, later in the narration, a new race (raza)—formed by the descendants of this marriage—fences off and appropriates Indigenous lands. The relationship between Columbus and Indigenous people, initially characterized as an exchange, transforms into an act of dispossession, finally revealing its deeper purpose: the colonization of the territory.¹

Pointing to a specific strategy of domination among human beings, Zeballo’s use of the verb taming escapes the common meaning of the word as limited to human-animal relationships. The words taming and colonizing work here as interchangeable categories, raising questions about the actual connections between these two historical processes.² Writing about cow-making practices in Colombia, Marisol de la Cadena and Santiago Martínez Medina discuss how hierarchy-making practices of raza (a Spanish term that translates both as “race” and “breed”) resonate with one another when switching from a human to a non-human domain. “The mechanism at work in creating [Latin American] elites,” they argue, “is not unlike that of raza in the sense of ‘breed’: it depends on paperwork” (de la Cadena and Martínez Medina 2020, 381). The Colombian idiom of raza thus functions in those contexts as a multispecies category “built historically on a tension between biology and culture” (de la Cadena and Martínez Medina 2020, 370). In the piece, “Why Do Malagasy Cows Speak French,” Maurice Bloch (1998) gives another example of interconnection between domestication and colonization practices. According to him, the act of addressing cattle in French, the colonial language, signals a relationship based on hierarchy and the imposition of absolute orders. “As man is to beast,” he writes, a “government bureaucrat is to village cultivator. The model and symbol of one relation has been transposed into another” (Bloch 1998, 195).

In this article, I discuss how cattle-human relations have influenced the way European colonization has been experienced, theorized, and performed in the eastern part of the Paraguayan Chaco, a vast territory marked by the extractive tannin industry for more than a century. In particular, I argue that idioms and practices of cattle domestication and un-domestication (or ferality) have been used to theorize and affect practices of colonization, racialization, and class stratification, as well as resistance to such processes. After demonstrating the centrality of feral and domesticated cattle in the history of the Paraguayan Chaco, and after presenting them as both agents of colonization and objects of desire, I focus my analysis on two particular kinds of cattle—the señuelo and the sagua’a—and on how they have shaped local history and imaginaries. Finally, I discuss the ways in which some commentators interpreted the end of the tannin industry in the Paraguayan Chaco as “the end of domestication.”

Since 2002, when I first came to the region as an international development worker, the Paraguayan Chaco has changed rapidly and drastically, becoming one of the main hotspots of deforestation in the world due to expanding cattle ranching and soy farming. I eventually came to question international development as an “anti-politics” machine (Bonifacio 2013a; Ferguson 1994) and decided to engage with the history of the people that international agencies had framed as “stakeholders” with “needs” by staying in the Chaco as an anthropology student and starting a participatory video project. Between 2005 and 2008, I lived with a Maskoy Indigenous community located thirty-five kilometers from the tannin company town of Puerto Casado and realized how deeply the tannin industry, which existed for more than a century, had affected people’s life projects and future possibilities.

I returned to the area in 2015 and 2016 and conducted interviews with more than seventy ex-workers of the Carlos Casado tannin company, as well as with missionaries and politicians. Most of the local politicians I interviewed were, and still are, cattle owners and farmers. One day, some Maskoy friends asked me to help them find new cowbells for their initiation rituals, in which dancers personifying different kinds of spirits tie bells to their hips to create noise. To my surprise, although the cattle population had grown rapidly all around us, cowbells had disappeared from the market. When I looked for them in a specialized shop in Asunción, the capital city, the shop owner explained that the rapid rise of deforestation had left the cows with no bush to hide or get lost in, so there was no longer any need for bells. I eventually ended up finding some in the Italian Alps, close to my hometown, which temporarily fixed the problem.

The objective of this essay is not only to highlight the centrality of human-cattle relations to the history of the Paraguayan Chaco but also to propose emic categories—geographically and historically grounded—for thinking colonization and its undoing on a regional level. The categories of taming and domesticating, for instance, are used by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to describe their unbalanced mutual relationship, as well as by the ex-company workers to talk about their condition of dependency on the company owners. Other lesser-known bovine categories are also used, such as sagua’a (cattle that live in the Chaco forest), to express instances and imaginaries of rebellion and repression, señuelo (a particular kind of hyper-domesticated bull) to describe alliance and dependency, or cambón (an iron joint), to point at specific architectures of power. These categories are used to define bovine beings and artifacts that have emerged at the crossroads of different historical genealogies and are characterized by distinctive class and race relations. In particular, the central part of the present article considers how local people relate to sagua’a, cattle that lived in the patches of forest scattered around the Casado territory, fleeing from humans. As insurgent beings, sagua’a provoked reactions of oppression, while also providing a powerful example of reversibility from a condition of domestication and control.

MEN AND CATTLE AS AGENTS OF COLONIZATION

In the mid-1880s, the colonization of the Paraguayan Chaco was still beginning to take form. In this essay, I will concentrate my analysis on a vast region, initially encompassing 5,625,000 hectares of public land, acquired in 1887 by an Argentine banker and entrepreneur of Spanish origins, Carlos Casado del Alisal. This territory, which Casado del Alisal baptized “New Spain” (Dalla Corte Caballero 2012), was administered for more than a hundred years by the Casado Sastre dynasty and by the company that bore the founder’s name: the Carlos Casado S.A. To his contemporaries, Casado del Alisal was an “archetypal colonizer” (Lagos 1949, 9), able to build an economic empire where others only saw impenetrable territory.

Indigenous groups of different origins (today self-identified as Angaité, Enxet, Enenhlet/Toba, Guana, and Sanapana) were the sole inhabitants of the region, and only a minority of them lived in settlements situated along the Paraguay River, where they traded goods and sometimes worked for the non-Indigenous population (Cominges 1892; Sušnik 1981). Explorers and colonizers categorized them alternately as indios mansos (tamed) or indios bravos (wild/aggressive; Boggiani 1894, 21). After taking possession of the territory, the Casado Sastre family established a prosperous tannin industry that lasted until the year 2000, when the remaining properties were sold to Sun Myung Moon’s Korean Unification Church. In just a few decades from its founding, the company town of Puerto Casado had become one of the most important centers for the commercialization of tannin on a global scale.

Like elsewhere on the American continent (Ficek 2019; Specht 2019), the first settlers chose cattle as their main allies in the colonization of the territory. The Italian explorer Adamo Lucchesi—who founded Puerto Casado on behalf of the Spanish entrepreneur in 1887—wrote in his memoir that after choosing a location for the factory, he immediately acquired two hundred heads of cattle from Brazil on the opposite side of the Paraguay River. According to Lucchesi (1936, 238), unlike the “zebus” and “franqueiros” that populated the Brazilian ranches, in the Chaco one could only find cattle of “an inferior breed [razza], half wild and of little value.” Lucchesi defined this “inferior breed” roaming around the region as “creole” (criolla). Their presence in the country had already been observed by Charles Darwin (1859, 84), who wrote that cattle and horses “swarm southward and northward [in Paraguay] in a feral state.” A North American cowboy working in the area in the 1920s, Thurlow Craig, described a docile population of creole cows and bulls of different breeds, but also mentions the existence of cattle that lived in the forests, and that he described as “outlaw.” These cows were creole of various types, “all horns and bone and wild eyes, tough as the devil” (Craig 1935, 184). Since no one officially owned them, the workers would treat them as game: “On the south side [of the territory owned by the IPC (International Product Corporation) tannin company] there were some outlaw cattle, that had been there for years. They were as wild as deer and as fat as butter, making the very best beef. We used to hunt them at night when they came out to drink … , sometimes roping them, sometimes shooting them. This was great sport” (Craig 1935, 313).

Neither of the two writers concerned himself with the origin of these “half wild,” “outlaw” cattle, which might have wandered there from neighboring regions: in fact, while some cows had moved to the Chaco with their owners, others had not. In a testimony gathered by Gastón R. Gordillo (2004, 62) in the mid-1990s among the Toba of the Argentinean Chaco, for example, his interlocutor claims that “prior to their first encounter with the Criollos, their ancestors stumbled on cattle roaming the area ahead of their owners.”

Zoologists consider contemporary “creole” cattle in South America the direct descendants of cows brought by the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers at the end of the fifteenth century, initially to the Caribbean, then to Brazil a few years later. These first cattle “dispersed” so quickly that by 1524 they were present all over the South American continent (Primo 1992, 422). However, their patterns and modalities of dispersion sometimes escaped human control. Soon after Columbus brought the first cows to the island of La Hispaniola, for instance, “massive herds of wild cattle dominated Caribbean islands depopulated by colonists who had moved on to new frontiers” (Ficek 2019, 261). From there, feral cattle proliferated all across Latin America. For about two hundred years, raising cattle in South America was “far less important than hunting them; [since] careful breeding was impossible in the unpoliced, unfenced, and thinly populated territories” (Baretta and Markoff 1978, 588).

As Rosa E. Ficek (2019, 261) reminds us, a new term—cimarrón—took form in the Caribbean to define these feral cows. The same word was also used in Castilian “to refer to native people who fled from the cruelties of conquest, to Africans who escaped from forced labor, and to the wild pigs, dogs, and cats that, alongside cattle, lived in these spaces of refuge.” Several scholars trace the etymology of cimarrón (migrated to English as “maroon”) to a Taino/Arawak expression indicating “wild varieties of domesticated plants” (Arrom 1983, 56). However, Gabriel de Avilez Rocha (2018, 15) argues that cimarrón was first used in La Hispaniola to refer to “enslaved-turned-fugitive people” of Native and African origins, and was only later adopted to indicate “domesticated-turned-feral” animals. In the following centuries, the word cimarrón continued to hold this double meaning, and was used throughout Latin America to indicate mainly fugitive slaves, but also domesticated plants or animals returning to a wild state.

In a similar way, a new term—bagual—was adopted in Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina to refer to feral cattle and horses. The origin of this word also dates back to early colonization at the end of the sixteenth century, though it hails from a different geographical area: Buenos Aires. Daniela Lauria (2010) attributes the origin of the word bagual to Querandi or Pampa Indigenous people, who used it to describe feral horses. Other sources, however, present the word’s first appearance as the proper name of an Indigenous leader, the cacique Juan Bagual, who was “assigned” (encomendado) with all his people to a Spanish captain in 1582 and was known “for his indomitable character and for his resistance to being reduced” (Lamas 2018, 81). In 1604, after Bagual led a rebellion against the Spanish, the word bagual came to indicate a different category of rebellious beings: fugitive horses and cattle.

Since the beginning of the colonization process, animals’ refusal of domestication was equated linguistically and conceptually, through the use of terms like bagual or cimarrón, with human refusals of slavery and subjugation. At the same time, the presence of feral cattle in remote areas—in the monte, or bushlands, of La Hispaniola (Rocha 2018) or in the South American Pampas (Baretta and Markoff 1978)—made it possible for some groups of people to survive at the margins of the colonization process by hunting and commercializing these animals.

The two terms, cimarrón and bagual, continued to circulate in South America for centuries, well beyond the beginning of colonization. Writing about the Pantanal, a Brazilian region located across the Paraguay River, Felipe Süssekind (2016, 141) notes that “the opposition between feral (bagual) and tame, as in many other parts of rural Brazil, seems to make more sense … than that between wild and domestic.” All beings, human and non-human, have the capacity to oscillate throughout their existence between these two states of becoming, neither of which is ever foreclosed. In a similar way, the opposition between local versions of tameness and ferality played a crucial role in shaping ethnic and class boundaries and strategies of domination in the Casado territory.

CATTLE AS BIOPOLITICAL POWER

By the 1930s, the company town of Puerto Casado had become one of the main centers for tannin production and commercialization in the world, shipping its products mainly to Europe and the United States. The factory, located along the Paraguay River, processed quebracho colorado logs from the interior of the Chaco and transformed them into tannin. For more than a century, the Carlos Casado S.A. company based its profits on a double economy that relied on tannin production, on the one hand, and on cattle ranches and beef production, on the other. This situation was common to other tannin industries in the area, such as the North American IPC (Glauser 2019).

As in the Argentinean cotton and sugar plantations of the first half of the twentieth century (Córdoba, Bossert, and Richard 2015; Gordillo 2004), the tannin industry from the outset incorporated and exploited a conspicuous number of Indigenous workers. While management positions were mostly occupied by Argentineans, the rest of the workers came from the Eastern part of Paraguay or belonged to local Indigenous groups. Between 2015 and 2017, I interviewed administrators and politicians in Puerto Casado, as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous ex-company workers who continued living there after the tannin factory closed. Some of them shared their family albums with me.

While the family albums of ex-factory workers displayed portraits of men standing in front of industrial machines—engines, lathes, locomotives—the albums of merchants and politicians contained images of men standing proudly in front of their cattle. These images stood out with respect to the others as symbols of personal and political power.

In his book The Two Shamans and the Owner of the Cattle, Rodrigo Villagra Carron (2010) explores an Indigenous myth and its historical transformations among the Angaité of the Paraguayan Chaco. In the myth, two shamans obtain a herd of seven hundred cows from the “owner of the cattle” who lives at the bottom of the river. However, they immediately lose the herd as a consequence of villagers breaking a taboo. According to Villagra, the Angaité identify the figure of “the owner of the cattle” as both “the Paraguayan President” and the owner of the North American IPC tannin company (located South of Puerto Casado), thereby condensing within one figure the political and economic power that ruled the Paraguayan Chaco in the twentieth century. According to Villagra, Angaité communities particularly appreciated cows because of the great quantity of meat provided by a single one slaughtered, which immediately expanded the possibility for commensality.

While some photos depict men surrounded by cows, others depict cows surrounded by men. The sharing of beef through collective asados (grilled beef) appears in the ex-workers’ family albums as a symbol of alliance and (mostly) male conviviality. At the time of the tannin company, all festive days, from the first of May to the visits of important politicians, culminated in the preparation of an asado. The visits of General Alfredo Stroessner,³ for instance, were always announced by the preparation of spectacular asados on the patio of the Casado family house. However, the general’s occasional refusal to take part in the event hinted at potential conflicts with the company owners. Asados thus came to signify the promise of a future political alliance or the strengthening of an existing one. In the memories of local Indigenous people, for example, the first visits of Colorado politicians to their settlements in the 1960s are regularly associated with the preparation of a big asado offered by the leading political candidate.

For about a century, thanks to the constant availability of cattle on its own cattle farms, the Carlos Casado S.A. company based its tannin production and the loyalty of its workers on the continued availability of beef. In the memories of ex-workers, the number of cows slaughtered per day was used as a measure of the company’s economic wealth at a given moment in time: if in the 1970s the company slaughtered between fifteen and twenty cows per day for a population of about 10,000 people, in the last decade before the closing of the factory it only slaughtered between eight and five, a fact later interpreted as a clear sign of decline.

In 1989, the hacheros (lumberjacks) of San Carlos called a strike to protest deteriorating labor conditions in the logging centers. In an audio fragment recorded at the time of the strike by a Salesian missionary who participated in the revolt, Sislao Ksiaze, a group of lumberjacks explains to a government delegate that one of their biggest concerns is the decline in the quantity of meat received weekly from the company: “Before, the company gave us between eight and fifteen kilos of meat per week, abundant meat they gave us. And this is our problem: meat. We’d like to know how we’re supposed to work while eating only white rice and white pasta, and still manage to use an ax. Using an ax requires a great effort” (Sislao Ksiaze’s personal archive, Puerto Casado).

In their testimony, the lumberjacks highlight the connection between cow meat, work, and physical strength, and therefore their right to beef—a demand they share with other social struggles in South America (Orlove 1997). The workers’ intervention is followed by a government delegate’s reply that seems to endorse the lumberjacks’ point of view, empathically explaining to the Argentinean representative of the company present at the encounter that “Paraguayans can’t live without meat [carne]: both human meat [la carne humana] and cows [las reces].” With this peculiar remark, the political delegate emphasizes the commonality of substance between people and cattle (they’re both made of carne), paradoxically measuring the value of workers’ bodies against those of their bovine counterparts, rather than the other way around. A symbol of political and economic power, cattle in this dialogue index class struggle (the workers’ right to beef) but also the source of life itself (in the form of flesh).

SAGUA’A AS INSURGENT COWS

Not all cattle showed complicity with humans’ needs and economic objectives. Some of them, on the contrary, openly displayed “very unruly” (Hribal 2003, 448) behaviors that defied humans’ ability to control them. Recent anthropological literature has shown a growing interest in the emergence of feral beings at the crossroads between imperial/colonial projects, extractive capitalism, and damaged ecologies (Swanson, Lien, and Ween 2018; Tsing 2015; Tsing et al. 2020). Stories about feral beings defy the linear narratives of progress, human mastery, and civilization that characterized colonization projects, such as the one that took place in the eastern part of the Paraguayan Chaco. In the Casado territory, a growing population of cattle inhabited the interstices of a dense network of logging centers and cattle ranches, where patches of forest functioned as “refugia” (Haraway 2016) for fugitive animals. People frequently refer to these particular cows—also called cimarrónas or baguales—as alzadas, a term used to define rebellious soldiers in the context of military uprisings, and one we can translate in English as “insurgent.” These insurgent cows are called sagua’a in the Guarani language.

In Puerto Casado, even though some people bore the marks of pointy horns on their bodies, many described sagua’a as beautiful creatures with wide open eyes able to see at night. As an ex-mayor once phrased it to me, their bodies were considered strong and healthy, “just like indigenous people before they met Paraguayans.” In the words of a cattle ranch owner and ex-governor of the Alto Paraguay region:

It’s incredible! Sagua’a have a different sense of smell, I think, or something like that. They’re ecological [not vaccinated]. Sagua’a never had an injection, nothing, they’re forest [silvestre] animals. They were never vaccinated. And yet, they’re more beautiful than the ones we’re sanitizing every day. It’s incredible. I don’t know what makes them unique, but I’m sure they have a spectacular sense of smell. They’re in a constant state of alert, you see, as they might be attacked by other animals. But sagua’a are so beautiful [muy lindos]. They have shiny fur. They’re fat. I don’t know why. I really don’t know why. (Justo Fernández Bauzá, interview by author, Puerto Casado, Paraguay, February 26, 2016)

Far from the human beings that once domesticated them, the cattle flourished, enhancing their physical strength and sensory ability: “Drought is terrible in the dry season. And yet, they know how to survive in the forest because there’s an underground fruit that retains water. The cow can smell it and find it. They call it yvy’a in Guarani, which means ‘fruit of the earth.’ They also know how to find a thistle. They step on it and drink from its middle” (Edoardo Del Río, interview by author, Asunción, Paraguay, January 15, 2016).

Although the Carlos Casado S.A. company invested huge sums of money to import bulls from the King Ranch in Texas, sagua’a were considered healthier than their racially “improved” counterparts. Imported breeds were indeed the result of a selection that made their bodies particularly efficient for economic purposes, but they were also extremely dependent on men for survival, and hopelessly clumsy in their movements. As an ex-worker once pointed out to me, a cow with a very big udder could never have managed to jump a fence and run into the forest. In a way, selective breeding manipulated the bodies of cattle to make them unable to become feral. Since the term race gradually came to identify only imported, improved breeds and their offspring, people would sometimes say that sagua’a had “no raza,” in the sense of “not having breed,” rather than saying they are criollas.⁴

Like their counterparts in other parts of the world (Lazo 1994), they began to reproduce on their own and adapted to the new habitat, becoming active at night and concealing themselves in daytime to hide from humans and other predators. Made possible by big patches of forest close to the cattle ranches, the emergence of sagua’a was seen as a mistake by the ranch managers, something that should not have happened. Drawing on a definition offered by the authors of the Feral Atlas (Tsing et al. 2020), we can say that sagua’a are “feral” because they emerged “within human-sponsored projects but are not in human control.”⁵ They are feral not only because they have learned to live in the forest but also because they have escaped the logics of efficiency (the logics of the plantation) that cattle breeders’ manuals refer to as “rational cattle ranching” (ganaderia racional; see Van Ausdal and Wilcox 2013, 78). In the South American cattle industry, feral stands in opposition to rational, suggesting a forced equivalence between rationality and domesticity. On the other hand, sagua’a elected the forest (el monte) rather than the estancias as the core of their domus (Lien 2015, 7), thriving in conditions radically different from those of their domesticated counterparts.

The archeologist Juliette Clutton-Brock (1994, 27) has described domestication as breeding animals “in captivity, for purposes of subsistence or profit, in a human community that controls its breeding, its organization of territory, and its food supply” in the context of a relationship where “only humans benefit from the association.” Along similar lines, Tim Ingold emphasized the element of “control” that characterizes this relationship, consequently framing the transition from hunting to herding as one from “trust” to “domination.” In his analysis, wild animals “are animals out of control,” and feral animals “are likened to convicts on the loose” (Ingold 1994, 3). This particular way of defining domestication highlights aspects of discipline and control rather than “interspecies engagement” (Tsing 2018, 245), downplaying the ability of animals to interfere with humans’ intentions to dominate and coerce.

Considering the domestication of salmon in Norwegian industrial facilities, Marianne Lien (2015, 3) writes that “mutuality, uncertainty and tinkering are better terms with which to capture the productive entanglements of humans and their surroundings.” Her ethnographic analysis brings to light the complexity of human-animal relationships in the context of domestication practices, showing varying degrees of mutuality and agency at work in a context of intensive farming (see also Anderson et al. 2017; Leach 2003). In particular, she describes the sea-based salmon farm as a temporal and fragile assemblage of beings, in a state of mutual becoming and with no clear limits between inside and outside, which she calls the “salmon domus.” Building on her analysis, I propose to think about the Casado territory as the domus of a variety of beings—cattle, quebracho trees, and humans among them—whose lifelines are temporarily held together by the Casado company’s colonization project. The space where this project unfolds has multiple centers (the factory, the family’s manor house, the ranches, and the logging centers) and dispersed interstices: the patches of monte where sagua’a, among other beings, found a temporary and fragile space of refuge from the same colonization project that brought them there (see also Richardson 2018). As descendants of domesticated animals, sagua’a simultaneously embody a residue from the past and a potentially disruptive break in linear time inside the very space of the domus.

In the Paraguayan Chaco, and in the wider Paraguayan imaginary, sagua’a occupy a third category in the dichotomy between the wild and the domesticated: that of the refusal (McGranahan 2016) of domestication. Similarly, Süssekind defines bagual cattle in the Pantanal region as beings that know humans but refuse to be tamed. For local people, being bagual is not a permanent state of existence but rather a certain way of relating (or refusing to relate) to humans and their domestication projects, just like taming “is a process in permanent tension with the animal’s movement towards becoming bagual” (Süssekind 2016, 133). The first time I met with her at a café in Asunción, Milda Rivarola, a famous Paraguayan historian, stressed just how deeply this element of refusal had become part of a shared imaginary in Paraguay. After telling her of my interest in feral cows, she looked at me intently and declared: “You know, I am a sagua’a! And as you know, they’d rather get killed than be dragged alive out of the forest.” Her reaction, on the other hand, was more the provocation of a sophisticated and unconventional intellectual than a commonplace response. Most people I talked to, who had grown up in the space of the city, reacted to my stories about the existence of sagua’a with incredulity or even sheer disbelief. Not only did sagua’a escape the dichotomy between civilization and domestication but, by becoming feral, they also challenged the very assumption that these are irreversible processes. Because they reversed domestication, sagua’a were unthinkable, “uncontainable” entities (Tsing et al. 2020).

SAGUA’A AS EXPENDABLE BEINGS

In Puerto Casado, sagua’a were real beings. So much so that the Casado company decided to create teams of specialized workers tasked with hunting them down. Contrary to the tannin factory, where labor was organized along rigid ethnic lines whose corresponding groups rarely communicated with one another, these teams of feral cattle hunters (sagualeros) comprised a majority of Indigenous workers led by a non-Indigenous one (the foreman, or capataz). In the testimonies I collected, non-Indigenous sagualeros stood out as the only ones able to speak an Indigenous language, in particular Enxet,⁶ and who explicitly admitted to believing in shamanic healing practices. At least in one case, the son of a capataz married an Enxet girl and went to live with her in the Enxet community. Though indirectly, the existence of sagua’a made it possible to blur the rigid ethnic barriers that ruled the everyday lives of people in the factory and its surrounding.

In 1979, with the international demand for tannin production in steady decline, the Casado company sold some of its largest cattle ranches to the Montes y Estancias San José S.A. Since the land for sale included patches of forest, the company decided to increase its profits by including feral cows in the counting of domesticated cattle. To be included in the deal, sagua’a had to be forced out of the forest:

They used helicopters at some point … the helicopters shot firecrackers while flying over the forest, and drove the animals out of the woods and towards the open fields. Once in the fields, the workers captured them. The cows went all crazy, together with tapirs and wild boars… . All the animals cried [lloraban los animales], even the wild boars cried while falling to the ground…. It was fun, really fun. A group of Indigenous workers waited for them in the open fields ready to make an asado. The boys ate asado. It was pure happiness. We had all the food we wanted… . It was an incredible thing to behold [era todo un espectáculo], the helicopter noise and the firecrackers, all together. (Benigno Arce, interview by author, Puerto Casado, Paraguay, March 11, 2016)

Since they had no owner and were considered untamable, the violence toward these sylvan animals needed no rational justification. Violence toward sagua’a was likewise justified in other contexts, where the term was applied not to animals, but to humans. In everyday language, the term sagua’a is used to indicate uneducated or messy kids, or else an adult person who behaves out of control, who is considered uneducated or uncivilized. Three of the past presidents of Paraguay—Nicanor Duarte Frutos, Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez, and Mario Abdo Benítez—were labeled sagua’a by the media during their time in office. A journalist in the newspaper La Nación described the current president of Paraguay, Abdo Benítez, as,

The typical sagua’a of our political fauna. Unsociable, indomitable, rough, and aloof. Cattle that resist domestication. There’s no way to push him gently back into the corral [read: the political arena], he can only be brought back in by force. The Colorado Party thought that before sacrificing him through the rifle of an impeachment, there was still time to look for him in the forest and talk some sense into him. Due to his stubbornness, though, this process implies hitting him a bit. (Torres Romero 2019)

Neither “property” nor “endangered species,” sagua’a are considered expendable beings. This is why, as Thurlow Craig put it, shooting outlaw cows in the Chaco became a “great sport.” Eugenio Hermosa, the Casado company’s cattle ranch manager for many years, had a special passion for hunting them down in the monte. When I met his widow, Nidia Hermosa, in Asunción, she showed me a rifle that her late husband had ordered from France in 1979. It was the same rifle, she specified, the French commonly used in Africa for big game hunting. She kept it on top of a cupboard together with the original envelope and a small supply of Rompun, a powerful anesthetic that her husband used to shoot sagua’a.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF DOMESTICATION IN THE PARAGUAYAN CHACO: Señuelos as Hyper-Domesticated Cows

My wife made me and my children into people (gente).

She tamed me and took me away [from the logging centers]

Juan Benítez Gonzáles, interview by author, Puerto Casado, Paraguay, April 28, 2016

While the local elite, in an impetus to identify with their European peers in Africa, anesthetized sagua’a with Rompun, the company’s hired teams of sagualeros had a different technique. They would wait for the animals at night in proximity to a water source they had fenced. Once a group of sagua’a got trapped inside the fence, sagualeros would stun the head of the herd by tethering the animal to a tree by its horns. When pulled by their horns, cows experience a high degree of pain, gradually losing their physical strength and ability to resist. The ex-workers use the word tambear, of uncertain etymology, to indicate this specific practice. When the animal finally reached exhaustion, the workers would tether him to another type of bull, the señuelo, through the use of a rotating tool, the cambón.

A cambón is a jointing mechanism in the shape of an eight where the two extremities are left free to rotate in opposite directions. Each side of the cambón is tethered to a different category of cow: if one extremity is tied to a señuelo by the neck, the other is tied to a sagua’a by the horns. In this way, the señuelo acquires a structural advantage and is able to pull the sagua’a by the horns to steer him away, while the rope twirls freely without causing the animals to suffocate. In more abstract terms, the use of the cambón facilitates a specific “architecture of relationships” (Anderson et al. 2017, 398) aimed at creating an imbalance of power between two beings.

The señuelo (literally, bait; sinuelo in Portuguese) is a particularly docile and hyper-domesticated ox trained from a young age to follow the cattlemen’s orders and walk straight. In the English language, these cattle tasked with leading their peers to the slaughterhouse are sometimes called “Judas cow” (Süssekind 2016, 131). Their compliant behavior is obtained by separating the calf from his herd at a young age, and by using physical force to teach him to obey orders. Once transformed into an obedient and loyal being, his service is rewarded for life. In the ranch, the señuelo is treated differently from the rest of the cattle. As Enrique Maas explained to me: “Señuelos live until they die a natural death. They are regarded as equal to any other farm worker. They do the same job as any other worker, and they cannot be sold or butchered. When they get old, as a sign of gratitude, [the owner of the ranch] lets them die of natural causes. They all had names: Cuello, Pinto, Onza, Tigre, Mariposa … and other names that I can’t remember” (Enrique Maas, interview by author, Asunción, Paraguay, December 2, 2016). When I visited Don Maas in his father’s house in Asunción, he showed me the skull of a huge ox in the living room, hanging from the chimney. A picture of the same animal, Cuello, while still alive, was kept in his father’s family album.

Like sagua’a, the term señuelo works as a jointing mechanism, a category that articulates the domain of humans with that of cattle.⁷ Its use is well exemplified in the story of José Iquebi, an Ayoreo boy kidnapped in the 1960s by two bulldozer operators while they were clear-cutting the woods in the upper part of the Chaco region. After they brought him to the capital city to be exploited as an attraction, José was finally rescued by Salesian missionaries and raised in Puerto Casado. The first picture I saw of him was in Albino Ortega’s family album. Ortega was by then a ninety-six-year-old man, who had been jefe de personal (human resources manager) of the Casado company for more than thirty years. Among the numerous portraits, the picture of Iquebi stood out as bearing a story of its own. It shows a young, tall Indigenous boy, surrounded by missionaries, standing on what seems to be a stage.

Behind the picture, a caption written in beautiful calligraphy says: “The Rector Major of the Salesians talking to the Moro indian [indio Moro] already tamed [ya amansado]. / Puerto Casado. / Father Dotto. Federico Britez. José. Renato Zigoti, 5th successor of Don Bosco.” One of the missionaries mentioned in the caption, Father Dotto, told Iquebi’s story in the book Misión: Etnocidio, an important text denouncing the conditions of Indigenous people during the Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay. In the interview, the missionary explicitly refers to the Ayoreo boy as a señuelo: “In 1961 José acted as a señuelo… . He approached them [the Ayoreo living in the forest] and explained that the missionaries were not soldiers, and all they wanted was to give Indigenous people a better life. The Ayoreo accepted. José had served his purpose” (Escobar and Vysocolan 1988, 79).

More similarities, beyond convincing the other Ayoreo to follow him to Puerto Casado, can be drawn on an abstract level between the way the missionaries treated Iquebi and the way señuelos are treated on the estancias. Once rescued in Asunción, Iquebi was transferred to the Puerto Casado parish to receive preferential treatment from the missionaries. At the same time, he was kept isolated from the other Indigenous people and had his private room in the parish, in the bell tower adjacent to the church. Although some non-Indigenous villagers considered this treatment a privilege, it is not clear that Iquebi himself experienced it that way. In a recent autobiographical text (Amarilla and Iquebi Posoraja 2011), Iquebi retells his life story, but he noticeably omits all his years working as a señuelo for the missionaries in Puerto Casado, focusing instead on his capture by the bulldozer operators and on the later reunification with his Ayoreo relatives.

TO THE HEART OF THE DOMUS: The End of the Casado Era as the End of Domestication

In the year 2000, at a public meeting in Puerto Casado, the owners of the Carlos Casado S.A. company—all members of the Casado Sastre family—announced that the factory, half of the town, and its surrounding territory (500,000 hectares of land) had been sold to Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. At that meeting, a company representative, and descendant of Casado himself, declared to an unprepared crowd: “From now on, you belong to a new owner” (Morinigo and Olmedo 2006, 33). Taken by surprise, the ex-workers swiftly decided to occupy the local airstrip to prevent the Casado Sastre family from leaving, in an attempt to negotiate with their old bosses. Newspapers accused them of kidnapping the company executives. After a government military intervention, the ex-workers were finally forced to surrender, and one year later, received orders to give their houses to the adepts of the Unification Church. Following a period of political reorganization, the ex-workers temporarily occupied the factory and the Casado Sastre’s manor house (casa patronal) to reclaim their right to the town. This choice proved a significant one. As in the domus of farmed salmon (Lien 2015), the limits of the domus Casado were porous and constantly shifting, yet its core was easily identifiable with the factory and the family manor house.

For a period of four years before the Unification Church retook possession of the place, the factory was managed by a cooperative and the house functioned as an alternative town hall. Between 2005 and 2009, the inhabitants of Puerto Casado organized four marches to the Paraguayan capital “for dignity and sovereignty.” They wanted to reclaim 52,000 hectares of expropriated land to develop independent economic activities through small-scale agriculture and cattle ranching. While this claim remains in dispute, some of the ex-workers now occupy a portion of land eleven kilometers from Puerto Casado, where they run an association of small cattle farmers. Once again, cows have taken on their role as humans’ allies.

When the Carlos Casado S.A. company announced the sale of the land and the factory in 2000, most of the non-Indigenous workers were taken aback. Tellingly, one ex-worker told me that Casado—a hybrid entity that at once served as a family and a company—had decided to sell the town tranca cerrada (with the gate closed), an expression that indicates the selling of an estancia at a fixed price with all the livestock (in this case, the inhabitants) inside. In describing his own passive attitude during the years preceding the factory’s closure, an administrative ex-worker explained to me that Casado had “domesticated” them. For nearly one century, he clarified, the company had provided the workers with basic services—a house, running water, a sewage system—making them mentally and materially dependent: “Even if we had to change a lightbulb,” this was a classic example, “we [workers] would contact the logistics office [taller de urbanización] and wait for someone to do it for us.” This situation of induced dependency was not unique to Puerto Casado, but was a common feature of many Latin American company towns in the early twentieth century (Bitlloch and Sormani 2012; Zapata 1977).

For several generations the workers of Puerto Casado trusted the company and its promise of civilization. At the same time, they were subject to a regime of total control, at least during the first half of the twentieth century. In those times, a company policy prohibited growing vegetables on the patio of the house or even raising small animals such as chickens or goats. The company provided all meat on a weekly basis, and even forbade private citizens to open grocery stores until the 1980s. The workers felt they had access to everything, yet they owned nothing.

For instance, for more than a century, the absence of fences inside the Casado territory had allowed workers to exploit the woods for small economic activities, such as hunting or wood fetching. With the arrival of the Unification Church, this continuous space suddenly became fragmented and inaccessible to the people. According to an ex-worker from the factory administrative sector,

In the year 2000, when this land was abandoned by the Casado family, the Koreans [employees of the Unification Church] began fencing everything. That’s something I kept saying: that the people of Casado were anesthetized by Carlos Casado. We suddenly felt as if we had nothing, because Casado did everything for us. Our water, our sewage, Casado did everything for us. You didn’t have to lift a finger. People lived well, we could say, but they realized how useless it was [to depend on the company] when Casado left. These people [the Unification Church] fenced everything, and we couldn’t even get firewood from the forest anymore. That’s when all problems began. (Hito Bobadilla, interview by author, Puerto Casado, Paraguay, March 9, 2016, my italics)

While most of the non-Indigenous ex-workers met the end of the Casado era with a mix of astonishment, rage, and regret, the Indigenous ex-workers experienced it from a different perspective. Contrary to the non-Indigenous population, which began its struggle for land only after the tannin factory closed, the Indigenous population had begun reclaiming land at the end of the 1970s. To strengthen their alliance, the Angaité, Guana, Enxet, Sanapana, and Toba/Enenhlet groups that formed the core of Casado’s Indigenous workforce adopted the common denomination of “Maskoy” (Bonifacio 2013b). In 1987, they finally obtained 30,103 hectares of land they called Territorio Riacho Mosquito. This territory included some of Casado’s best cattle ranches, such as Machete Vaina, which is now the name of an Indigenous community settlement located at the core of the Maskoy lands.

The paternalism that characterized the relationship between the Casado Sastre family and the Paraguayan workers never characterized the one between the company family and the Maskoy. Even when Indigenous people accepted to work for the company, their commitment was never taken for granted (see also Kidd 1997). In the context of cattle ranches, for instance, the administrators decided to give only a small ration of food to the workers at the end of each workday—instead of anticipating it early in the week—to prevent them from fleeing without finishing their job. In the context of the factory, on the other hand, it was well known that Indigenous workers had low tolerance for being aggressively bossed around by their superiors, and they would rather leave their jobs without pay than be subject to verbal abuse:

Indigenous workers [in the factory] are more docile to handle, but only if they like the situation. If they don’t like it, they just leave. One by one they all leave together, in silence. The first one leaves the room, and then another one, and then one more, until the work is suspended. But I never had problems with them, because I knew how to behave. They didn’t want to be bothered, to be scolded or to be told to hurry up. They didn’t want people ordering them: “work harder!” They didn’t like it. You had to leave them in peace, free to handle things on their own. (Lider Olazar, interview by author, Puerto Casado, Paraguay, June 17, 2015)

After settling in Territorio Riacho Mosquito, a decade before the factory closed, Maskoy people intensified their initiation rituals. With these rituals, they sought to strengthen their alliances not only among their own different ethnic groups but also with the other-than-human beings that inhabited the bush (monte), with whom connections had been partially interrupted following Casado’s colonization (Bonifacio 2013a). According to René Ramirez, cacique general (general chief) during the 1980s Maskoy struggle for land, sylvan beings invaded the manor house and the factory a few years before the Casado Sastre family sold the land and the industrial premises:

It took me by surprise: a snake entered [the factory], a tatu [armadillo] appeared on the floor [of the factory]. A karaya [monkey] came inside. A crocodile came in. Multitudes. I asked a man who knows [oikua’amba in Guarani, which the Maskoy translate to Spanish as chaman], and he said: “This is coming to an end.” It was true. It ended. Soon after, it ended… . It was a signal from people … [who] are forest [monte]. They came from there [the monte]. A signal … a signal. They came inside this very [factory] space. You’re not going to believe it, but let me tell you that they entered here … . What we call kure kaaguy [wild boars], four of them entered here. There were many armadillos in the factory. Including orange armadillos, the small kind. One of them ran around. I saw him running around here [pointing to the factory floor]. That meant that it was all coming to an end… . Who was going to believe it? Only now have we come to believe. It was impossible. Who would believe it? The Casado company were multimillionaires. They possessed two or three planes, four trucks, two big motor boats. (René Ramirez, interview by author, Puerto Casado, Paraguay, August 20, 2008; see also Bonifacio 2009, min. 07:59)

By invading the very heart of the Casado company’s domesticated space, the domus Casado, bush animals announced the end of domestication and the re-emergence of an untamed world that had for many years been pushed to the margins.

CONCLUSIONS

For more than a hundred years, the tannin industry deeply modified an area of the Paraguayan Chaco called “the Casado territory.” The introduction of cattle facilitated the colonization of this territory, which began at the end of the nineteenth century. These cattle thrived in the area to the point of escaping human control and living an autonomous life in the woods. At once allies and opponents of the colonizing project, cattle became a marker of economic and political power and the protagonists of a “moral imagination whose central object of desire is bovine” (Livingston 2019, 36).

In this article, I have highlighted the affective and material relationship between humans and cattle at the core of the colonization process. In light of this relationship, I have suggested temporarily abandoning colonization as a heuristic category in favor of adopting local (emic) categories—amansar, anestesiar, sagua’a, señuelo, domesticar, carne—and their related practices. Doing so allows us to better understand and describe local dynamics of dispossession, domination, racialization, and class formation.

The inhabitants of Casado used idioms of taming and domesticating to explain an ongoing situation marked by a strong imbalance of power: if Indigenous people in Zeballo’s myth did not immediately reject Columbus, and if the workers of Casado did not claim compensation before the factory closed, it is because they had been, if we adopt the local analytical framework, tamed or domesticated. These terms are thus used in the Casado territory to indicate a relationship based on trust and mutuality that was suddenly reverted and transformed into dispossession, leaving the dispossessed without enough time to react. Through colonization, domestication unfolded its potential for domination in the Chaco.

At the same time, the domestication/colonization project produced its own subversive idioms and practices. The presence of sagua’a in the Paraguayan Chaco, their history as the descendants of domesticated animals, their extra-sensory ability to adapt to a new assemblage of beings, and their ability to challenge a hegemonic narrative of unilinear progress, all opened up a space for imagining the undoing, and not only refusing, of domestication. Presenting domestication as the final stage of an evolutionary process constitutes but one way of defining cattle-human relationships. Moreover, portraying domestication as an irreversible process acts as a “political tool” to “naturalize and justify a specific and dominant way of life” (Swanson, Lien, and Ween 2018, 2).

Sagua’a have all but disappeared from the Paraguayan Chaco due to “rational” (Van Ausdal and Wilcox 2013), capital-driven cattle and soy farming and their related deforestation practices. This marks a transition to new configurations of power and interspecies relations, but as sagua’a have taught us, such relations are not irreversible.

ABSTRACT

RESUMEN

NOTES

Acknowledgments I dedicate this article to the memory of René Ramirez. This research wouldn’t have been possible without the care and support of Antonia Melgarejo, Amada Ramirez, Rita Rodriguez, and their families. I am grateful to Mario Blaser for his precious comments on the first draft of this article, to the anonymous reviewers for making this into a better piece, and to Manuel Tironi for his final suggestions. I would also like to thank Lia Colombino for sharing with me the research process that resulted in the exhibition Destiempo: Dynamogram of Puerto Casado; Glauco Sanga for teaching me the importance of language; my colleagues at the Vallecupa writing-up residency; Michael Taussig for hosting the online weekly seminar that kept my critical abilities and creativity alive during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, Lisa Stefanoff and Todd Ochoa for coordinating it; and Isa and Ofer for being with me in the intricacies of life.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 38, Issue 1, pp. 8-35, ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. © American Anthropological Association 2022. Cultural Anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. Reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. Use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the American Anthropological Association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. DOI: 10.14506/ca38.1.02