THIS TEXT IS AN EXCERPT FROM AN ONGOING REPORT
Buenos Aires, Argentina
and the Paraná Delta
The Matanza-Riachuelo River is the most polluted waterway in Argentina. It is also home to more than six million human inhabitants and runs right along the southern edge of the city of Buenos Aires.
The river basin has been subject to the ecocidal processes of capitalist extraction since the first days of the European invasion, five hundred years ago. It is a turbocharged anthropocentric landscape that is entrenched within the sloppy machinations of the global supply chain; a microcosm of the woes that currently plague much of the region and the planet more broadly.
Today, two predominant land use patterns can be observed across the basin: in the lower section industrial activities continue to proliferate amidst a dense urban population; further upstream, vast fields of monocrops of soybean and maize leach petrochemicals from fertilizers into groundwater and nearby tributaries. Rainwater, unable to infiltrate these dead soils, instead runs off the impermeable surface as though it were asphalt. All this activity, just within this basin, accounts for nearly twenty percent of the entire country’s annual GDP.
As in the other parts of the city, a lot of the green space that does exist occurs in the form of water-intensive lawns that wilt in the summer heat, fed relentlessly by sprinkler systems despite the fact that the region is currently experiencing the most pervasive drought in its modern history.
The basin is a treasure chest of post-industrial artifacts. Since the nineteenth century, warehouses, grain silos, oil refineries, slaughterhouses and tanneries have emptied their effluent into its waters and onto its soils. Today many of these structures remain as a quasi-apocalyptic backdrop to the daily lives of its inhabitants.
In 2004, Beatriz Silvia Mendoza, along with 16 other residents of the Matanza-Riachuelo basin, filed a lawsuit against the State of Argentina, the Province of Buenos Aires, the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and forty-four companies, that demanded the recomposition of the environment, the creation of a fund to finance the sanitation of the basin and financial compensation for damages.
In 2008 the Argentine Supreme Court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. The government and industries responsible were charged with the task of reforming their activities and remediating the basin. ACUMAR, a Spanish acronym for the Authority of the Matanza-Riachuelo Basin, was established to oversee and manage the transformation. The agency is working to clean up the river and the basin, improve industrial sites and housing conditions of the poorest residents, among other projects.
While industrial pollution is problematic, basic infrastructure like plumbing and sewage within low income areas is lacking or nonexistent. In some areas, water has to be delivered in jugs to local residents. Access to food can be limited. Proper waste management, fifty percent of which is organic, is lacking. The state of most of the housing in the villas remains very poor.
Within other sections, the situation is less dire, but the pollution remains. Many sections along the Riachuelo will be subject to flooding as well. As we progress further into the climate crisis, these waterways will function as important vectors along which either more deterioration or amelioration of the urban-ecological interface will occur.
The Rio de la Plata basin, its biomes, and the Paraná delta.
The pollution and ecological degradation within the Matanza-Riachuelo basin, while perhaps concentrated, is not isolated. Hydrologically it is a subbasin within the vast Río de la Plata basin, which spans more than three million square kilometers.
Its delta, the Paraná, is a 15,000km2 expanse of rivers, marshes, and ephemeral ponds. Together the basin and delta form a complex hydrological entity as one of the world’s largest drainage basins that connects the urban populations and ecologies of Brasilia, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Asuncion, as well as many more less urban areas, through its web of arterial waterways fed by springs, aquifers, rainfall, snowmelt, glacial retreat and lakes which course, puddle and infiltrate through at least six different biomes as well as varied landscapes that range from deserts, forests, grasslands and wetlands.
For millennia the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, which constitute the hydrological backbone and animating force of the delta, have discharged, on average, more than 27,000 cubic meters per second, carrying in its fast-flowing waters heavy sediment that contributes to an annual growth of more that one hundred meters of fresh land on the eastern front, right next to Buenos Aires, as it mixes with the brackish waters of the Río de la Plata estuary. Flora, fauna, funga and bacteria commingle in this zone, yielding a viscous and sinewy substrate pulsing with micro- and macroscopic lifeforms.
The farther upstream you go into the delta, the further back in time you travel. At Rosario, about two hundred and seventy-five kilometers from Buenos Aires, the land was formed nearly 3,000 years ago. During dry times, like now, it gives the illusion that it is no different from the land on the continent, i.e., settled and static.
In fact, it is messy. It fluctuates. It oozes and secretes. It expands and contracts. It is filled with the gunk of a billion species known and unknown to us. Its interrelated processes are varied, heterogeneous and temporally incongruous. Clay, silt, sand, microplastics, and agricultural and industrial petrochemicals coagulate to form a dynamic geomorphology, an alluvial layer constantly sculpted by the erratic pulses of the waters’ ebb and flow.
Braided strands of distributary channels split from the main river then rejoin many kilometers downstream only to break off again. As water levels rise and fall, islands emerge and submerge. Ephemeral ponds appear after periodic flooding, hosting numerous species uniquely adapted to such impermanence as breeding ground for the perpetuation of their lineage. The delta is a meandering marshy maze that no human can completely map because each moment brings a new, never-before-seen, never-seen-again composition.
Mining, industrial agriculture, deforestation and unplanned urbanization patterns are just some of the entrenched agrilogistics (Morton, 2016) pervasive throughout the basin, practices that threaten local biodiversity and human populations. But in the delta, infrastructure is less widespread. Capital, despite its better attempts, has yet to fully tame this aberrant alluvial zone. And for this reason, for its lack of stasis, for its unpredictability, it has been largely left alone throughout the centuries of capitalist colonization, industrialization and modernization.
That is beginning to change.
The drought-plagued floodplain of the delta in August 2022
The delta in some ways is the “final frontier” of the Argentine colonial project, and ironically, the one that has resisted large-scale extraction, despite its proximity to the seat of political and economic power in the capital, Buenos Aires.
With the development of highways come highway-related activities, which proliferate on its edges — gas stations, eateries, toilets and souvenir shops. For some, this isn’t enough. The federal government issues speculative plans for more “infrastructural development” in order to connect more commodity flows that will likely disconnect more ecological and hydrological ones.
Throughout Argentina and central South America, the Paraná River exists as the Paraná-Paraguay Hydroway, one of the continent’s most important economic corridors and along which much of the population is organized (Hiba, 2021). As the third longest river in the Americas, after the Amazon and Mississippi, its waters flow for 4,880 km through three countries.
Since 2019, the waters of the Paraná River have been steadily receding. In fact, by summer 2023 the river was at its lowest level in almost 80 years, introducing a level of instability into the global shipping industry and local economies. When we look at the possible reasons for this, we shouldn’t be surprised. In terms of extraction, not much has changed in the five centuries since the first conquistadors sought riches via the Paraná.
Dammed on the north regularly, and clogged by vessels to the south, the Paraná River isn't so much a free flowing natural body as it is a nonliving entity meant to perform seamlessly in the background of frenzied commercial activity along its surface. The river is a commodity conveyor, a conduit along which soil extractions of ores and grains move downriver and out to global markets. Petroleum from the US and cars from China move up the river in their place and the process repeats.
The imposition of the drought for those in Paraguay and Argentina could be blamed on the cumulative emissions of (mostly) northern economies that initiated this most recent episode of climate change. However, extensive negative operations by individual farmers and large agribusiness throughout the northern Paraná region, who are ripping up and burning down the forests from which the Paraná’s tributaries originate, are, at times literally, inflaming an already dire condition. This is the same ecosystem. The afflictions of one are those of the other. As fields for cattle and soybeans replace the forests for everything else, fragile rain cycles are disrupted, droughts exacerbated, and the Paraná’s waters flow ever lower and slower.
Flood and drought can occur simultaneously. Here, flooding caused by a sudestada event in the Tigre section of the delta in August 2022.
Lower water levels are impacting the movement of ships that usually extend deep into the continent, past Asunción, which are now stalled because of the drought. The crops farmers have been able to harvest now lay in waste at ports throughout the region because shipping infrastructure is unable to cope with the severity of current circumstances, failing to get products to markets abroad. Those that are shipped come at a much higher cost than usual.
This has serious implications for the regional and national economies of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Upwards of twelve percent of Paraguay’s annual GDP is devoted to the agricultural sector; Brazil and Argentina’s is around six percent. Much of the land in the Plata Basin is devoted to industrial agriculture; it is one of the world’s largest food producers. When we combine agricultural lands with other anthropocentric land use patterns like mining and urbanization, upwards of fifty percent of the total area within the basin can be identified as a net carbon source (Esri, 2020).
In Argentina, agriculture accounts for more than thirty percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the country (OWID, 2020). In the Pampas, where most of the agricultural production occurs, land that is not built is almost exclusively soybean and maize monocultures (Song et al., 2021). This has led to a huge decrease in biodiversity and soil health, increased water and air pollution, habitat loss, ecosystem degradation and runaway emissions (Chiummiento, 2022). Farther north, in the Gran Chaco forest, cattle ranches continue to expand at alarming rates, accelerating an area already threatened with deforestation (Aizen, 2021). At the moment, it remains unclear if the drought will persist as a reality of the New Climatic Regime (Latour, 2017), or whether precipitation and water levels will eventually return to historical norms.
At Paso de la Patria the Paraná River forks east while the Paraguay continues north toward Asuncion. In this stretch of the Paraná begin the many hydroelectric dams. Only one is in Argentina, the Yacyreta. Another 400 kilometers upriver, the Itaipu straddles the border of Paraguay and Brazil and competes with the Three Gorges Dam in China as the world’s largest hydroelectric facility. As the Paraná continues into Brazil, the frequency of the dams increases substantially. While there are currently only six main dams along the Paraná proper, scores more proliferate along its many tributaries. Brazil and Paraguay have become increasingly reliant on this cheap energy source, which has recently become a liability as water levels fluctuate.
Agrilogistics, hard at work for centuries, is culminating in the complete collapse of the ecosystem (services) on which so much of the population relies. As the drought persists, locals and industries along the river are being forced into new methods of performing basic functions that were once taken for granted.
What’s happening in Paraná is a local variation of a global problem. There’s an imbalance in our collective metabolism. Due to our species' more recent ecocidal tendencies, depletion by way of extraction defines much of our modus operandi. So much goes out without going back in: ecological processes that once formed complete circles now end in a series of haphazard dotted lines.
This text is an excerpt from an ongoing report.