Disrupting the patrón: Indigenous land rights and the fight for environmental justice in Paraguay's Chaco By Joel E.Correia. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 236 pp.

What are the future-oriented possibilities of environmental justice for Indigenous peoples? Can these efforts go beyond the limiting frames of juridical solutions to harm? Critical geographers, anthropologists, and political ecologists have collectively raised a warning call about environmental injustice wrought by an intensified moment of land-grabbing, especially in the Global South. From carbon markets that incentivize plantation forestry to mitigation of climate risks in food systems through vast financialized agribusiness holdings, it would appear as though investments in land are the frontier of corporate efforts to engineer climate-proof profit models. Joel E. Correia's richly detailed ethnography of Indigenous Sanapaná and Enxet struggles for environmental justice in the Paraguayan Chaco is an important entry into this multidisciplinary debate. Based on 20 months of multisited fieldwork spanning seven trips to Paraguay beginning in 2013, the book weaves together the perspectives of the Indigenous activists who are Correia's most important interlocutors and guides, with the accounts of human rights lawyers, ranchers, settler colonists, and state officials (p. 4). What emerges is a harrowing account of what it means for three communities—Yakye Axa, Sawhoyamaxa, and Xákmok Kásek—to live in legal liminality while fighting racialized regimes of land control. Correia captures a fundamental paradox of “dialectics of disruption”—of working within and against settler law—because the ethnography shines a spotlight on what he aptly calls “dispossession in place” (p. 38; my emphasis)—that is, the too-often-overlooked effect of settler-colonial projects of land-grabbing that create a “stable spatiality of property” (p. 39). This is accomplished through processes of simultaneous incorporation and exclusion of Indigenous communities by codifying racial difference through unequal access to regimes of ownership, appropriation of Indigenous labor, and restricted access to the basic commodities for everyday survival. In a setting where cattle vastly outnumber people (50:1 in the Chaco region), and where one of the most common forms of Indigenous labor exploitation is shockingly underpaid debt peonage to fence off and enclose paddocks for running stock, “dispossession in place” creates a cascading series of social, political, and environmental injustices wrought by living in “a land in the making” (chapter 1). The story of the Bajo Chaco is the story of making cattle country, and through it, the Paraguayan state as the ür-patrón in a hierarchical system of bosses, owners, benefactors, and political heavyweights. The dynamics of “dispossession in place” identified by Correia are especially revealing because Latin America has generally not been thought of as a settler-colonial context. Much of the scholarship to date has centered on colonial and postcolonial theories of multicultural politics. The book is notable for opening a generative dialogue with scholars of Native sovereignty (e.g., in Canada, the United States, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific). This lens offers a novel and generative complement to classic scholarship on neoliberalism and multicultural recognition in Latin America (explored in depth in chapter 2). Correia argues that the settler-colonial project in Paraguay produces a distinctively settler legal framework of “recognition [that] comes without guarantees” (p. 55). He suggests that the legal liminality and disappointments of rights hitched to a “recalcitrant state” (p. 54) arise through much older genealogies of racial capitalism in Paraguay, rather than being strictly attributed to recent neoliberal restructuring. To uncover these deeper genealogies of racial capitalism, the book follows the long and frustrating arc of the 2010 Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) judgment that found Paraguay culpable of human rights violations against Xákmok Kásek claimants (p. 3). Over a decade later, the claims were still in bureaucratic limbo as Indigenous leaders waited for the patrón—a polysemic category for boss/owner/patron that, in this case, referenced the president of Paraguay himself—to authorize restitution in the form of both land and social services. Scholars of political and legal anthropology will be particularly interested in Correia's account of Enxet and Sanapaná peoples’ strategic navigation of bureaucracy and efforts to disrupt legal regimes predicated on racialized control of land. His ethnographic account of “legal liminality” (p. 4) documents the mode of governance that the Paraguayan state uses to orchestrate Indigenous dispossession by creating “spaces, situations, and subjects that simultaneously lie within and outside the juridical order” (p. 4). Correia persuasively argues that we must understand the state's recalcitrance to act on the IACHR judgment within a much longer genealogy of disenfranchisement linked to expanding agrarian commodity production. This in turn opens fresh theoretical insights, such as the incisive chapter on neglect as a form of biopolitics “because the provision of ‘care’ obscures the de facto denial of due process and other rights instead of addressing the root causes of Indigenous dispossession” (p. 98). This deceptively simple insight, that legal limbo foregrounds bureaucratic processes at the expense of actual forms of redress (p. 109), could certainly be generalized to Paraguayan governance more broadly, and likely will resonate with anthropologists and policymakers alike. The central arguments of Disrupting the patrón hold legal claims—working with and against the law—in dynamic tension. Correia insists that “the dialectics of disruption entail never totally rejecting the politics of recognition while never fully accepting the terms established by the settler state. Instead, the strategy rejects and uses the politics of recognition to erode the power relations and patterns of dispossession inherent in the logics of settler capitalism that shape the Bajo Chaco” (p. 159; original emphasis). At a moment when calls to tax the super-rich and end the billionaire class are starting to resonate, Correia's grounded ethnography offers pointed insights about exactly why it is so urgent to call the patrón to account. One can hope for a sequel that not only can “summon visions of a more just future” (p. 159) but also document the dismantling of the category of the patrón altogether. Eat the rich. We can hope that Paraguay's patrón is the first course.

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