In northern Argentina, lush, green spaces of forest give way to wide, open clearings. In aerial photos, the contrast couldn’t be starker: treetops with varying tones of green, and next to them, brownish empty land. Such is the reality for some parts of the province of Chaco, home to a part of the Gran Chaco, the second-largest forest in South America, after the Amazon. This vast dry forest has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, losing more than 130 square miles every month. 

Now, a complaint filed in July by the nonprofit Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers with the federal prosecutor’s office in Chaco seeks to stop what the document alleges is a “deforestation mafia” in the province. In Argentina, a complaint can be presented by an individual or organization to a federal or provincial prosecutor’s office, which then evaluates it for possible investigation.

“We worked for years to gather information to demonstrate the common thread that shows we are facing a mafia, an illicit association, that profits from the clearing of the forest,” said Enrique Viale, the president of the Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers, a nonprofit that focuses on strengthening environmental protection regulations.

The complaint alleges that in late April, the Chaco provincial legislature approved a law rolling back previous environmental protections and allowing new forest areas to be cleared.

The complaint alleges that the law is part of a long-running system in which public officials grant clearing permits to companies those same officials have financial links to. Some lawmakers who voted in favor of the April law are also involved with forestry companies that extract quebracho trees and clear the forest for agribusiness, the complaint alleges.

The government of the Chaco province did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawyers analyzed all the land clearing permits in the last 10 years, said Viale, and then cross-referenced the permit data with information about the owners of the cleared land and their clients. 

The Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers said the law “allows bulldozers to advance over native forests, territories that belong to peasant and Indigenous communities, and endangered species such as the jaguar.” 

The group also called the law unconstitutional, alleged there were serious irregularities in its enactment and said it benefits those wishing to profit from business related to agriculture and tannins—a by-product of the quebracho trees used to transform animal hide into leather and as an additive in wine.

The production of tannin is a major driver of tree loss in the Chaco, according to the complaint. The tannin and wood industry has targeted important tree species, like the quebracho, leading to extractive logging across the Argentine Chaco, according to a 2022 study. Tannins are a compound found in many parts of the tree that protect it from infections. 

But tannins aren’t the only driver behind deforestation.

Much of the cleared land, not just in Argentina but the whole Chaco forest, which also spans into Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, has been driven by soybean production and cattle ranching. Nearly a million acres of native forest were lost between 2008 and 2022 in the Chaco province, according to the Agroforestry Network Chaco Argentina.

The complaint is the latest development in the region’s long battle to protect the Gran Chaco, the animals that depend on it and the people living within.

Fighting Against Deforestation

In 2007, Argentina marked an important milestone for forests by passing the Native Forest Law. This breakthrough helped protect the country’s forests by classifying them according to their level of conservation needs. The law also established limits on deforestation.

“The Native Forest Law recognized that we were in an emergency state in Argentina back then,” said Hernán Giardini, the forests campaign coordinator of Greenpeace Argentina, with “around 750,000 to 900,000 acres of forest cleared per year.”

One of the important aspects of that law was that it required every province in Argentina to map which parts of the forest could be cleared and which ones couldn’t. The map had three categories: red for Category I, forest areas meant to be conserved forever; yellow for Category II, areas that may be degraded but that can be restored; and green for Category III, areas with low conservation value that could be partially or completely transformed. The map was part of a plan to designate land use in the native forest, known as “territorial ordering.” 

“The map is always supposed to be improved, not worsened,” said Giardini, “and improved in the sense that deforestation is more restricted.”

Since then, the province of Chaco has gone through ups and downs in revising and updating the map. But in the late April update, legislators “incorporated new red areas in places that don’t have deforestation pressure, trying to exchange those for new green areas to clear,” said Giardini.

“But you can’t trade red for green as if the forest areas were all the same,” he said.

For Matias Mastrangelo, who studies the effects of deforestation in the Chaco forest, the April law has many implications. “We know that these new areas that are being cleared are important areas for biodiversity, they are biological corridors, they are in the buffer zone of National Parks,” said Mastrangelo, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina.

These areas are also home to many Indigenous communities.

If the forest is lost, it will be difficult to recover, Mastrangelo said.

In the first half of 2024, Greenpeace detected the loss of nearly 150,000 acres in northern Argentina through satellite images. “That’s the equivalent of three times the area of the city of Buenos Aires,” the organization said in a statement, and a 15 percent increase over that of the same period in the previous year, with the largest deforestation area happening in the Chaco province. 

It’s hard to bear witness to the forest being destroyed, said Giardini, the Greenpeace coordinator, but it’s even harder when there’s a human aspect involved.

“Because the destruction of the forest also has a human story,” he said.

Protecting Native Forests

When Karina Alonzo was a girl, she remembers her family members standing up against the deforestation of the Chaco forest. Alonzo, a local teacher and member of the Indigenous Qom community, grew up in a village called Pampa del Indio, where her grandfather and great-grandfather were Indigenous leaders. Though she says she didn’t understand the situation regarding deforestation then, she understands it now and is part of a larger resistance against it.

“The Chaco forest is our life and our identity,” Alonzo said, “if we didn’t have these green spaces we wouldn’t be able to do our ceremonies or have natural medicine.”

She said the village has already experienced some of the more immediate effects of deforestation, such as water quality problems. “The river that passes through our lands has another taste to it,” Alonzo said. “The clouds of dirt in the sky are signs of deforestation.”

“The Chaco forest is our life and our identity, if we didn’t have these green spaces we wouldn’t be able to do our ceremonies or have natural medicine.”

Besides the complaint, other letters calling for a Chaco free of deforestation have been written to the provincial government, Alonzo said. 

The Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers’ statement about its complaint closes with a warning: one of the most important ecosystems in South America is on track to disappear. The lawyers call for an urgent measure to suspend the April law and to immediately stop all destruction of the native forest that puts the ecosystem at risk.

“I don’t know much about laws,” Alonzo said, “but I know the land like it’s the back of my hand. I know which soil to use and how to use it, which tree is sick and which one isn’t. I’m not a person who sees the forest with greedy eyes.”