Ferradas, Environment, Security and Terrorism

417

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 11: 417–442, 2004

Copyright © Taylor & Francis, Inc.

ISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 online

DOI: 10.1080/10702890490493563

Environment, Security, and Terrorism in the TrinationalFrontier of the Southern Cone

Carmen Alicia Ferradás

Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University,State University of New York, Binghamton, New York, USA

This article analyzes the transformations of notions of governmentality, security, and

sovereignty behind recent processes of securitization in the trinational frontier of the

Southern Cone, which encompasses the cities of Puerto Iguazú (Argentina), Ciudad del

Este (Paraguay), and Foz do Iguaçú (Brazil). It examines how early concerns with

security that were primarily focused on the territorial integrity of nation-states have

been replaced with security concerns of a more global nature, which call into question

established mechanisms of control, particularly those related to the defense of national

borders. It examines how environmental concerns are increasingly becoming conflated

with other current forms of securitization such as terrorism, popular unrest, and

narcotraffic and it analyzes devastating effects of these processes on peoples of the

South, particularly the poor.

Key Words: environmentalism, security, borders, globalization, governmentality,

Southern Cone

Physically separated by the Paraná and Iguazú Rivers and partially surrounded bythe Brazilian and Argentine Iguazú National Parks, the border cities of PuertoIguazú (Argentina), Ciudad del Este (Paraguay), and Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil) havelong attracted world travelers interested in the natural beauty of this subtropicalarea of South America. Tourists come to see the majestic Iguazú Falls, a UnitedNations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heri-tage Natural Monument. But the forests have become more than a lure to tourists.Global and regional institutions imagine them as a borderless green corridor, anatural continuum where animals roam unimpeded. While this region is justlyknown as an ecological paradise rich in biodiversity, it is much more. Growing inimportance and population due to urban development and transnational immigra-tion, it is also increasingly seen as an insecure and dangerous place. Terms such astrinational frontier, triple frontier, and triborder area are generally used in associa-tion with these negative constructions. Although these terms allude to geopoliticalimaginaries linked to nationalist developmental agendas in which nation-states

play a relevant role, they are now being employed in a context in which security isnot seen as the sole responsibility of individual nation-states competing with eachother, but in a context in which extraterritorial forces attempt to have a say on whocirculates and who may or may not inhabit the region. These constructions thatemphasize the need to tighten borders and/or redesign them coexist with other“borderless” constructions, such as those that depict the area as the heart of Mercosur(Common Market of the South), evoking an image of a center—the “heart” formedby the three cities—interconnected through countless arteries to distant points withinthe larger body formed through market integration. It is the purpose of this articleto examine the various constructions of the region that reflect seemingly incom-patible political economic projects. By focusing on transformations of notions ofsecurity, sovereignty, and governmentality, I intend to show how recent processesof securitization/desecuritization (Waever 1995) coincide with a complex dynamicof bordering, debordering, and rebordering (see the Introduction [Cunninghamand Heyman 2004] in this issue) in ways that do not always correspond to thetraditional national frontiers. I draw the concept of securitization from Copenhagen’sSchool security scholars Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, who understand it as aspeech act, a practice that often frames an issue as an existential threat requiring anurgent response to guarantee survival. The invocation of security legitimizes theuse of force and/or extraordinary means to handle the threat (Buzan et al. 1998;Waever 1998; Wyn 1999). Inspired by critiques of the so-called traditional secu-rity studies, this essay examines: Whose security is at stake when we speak aboutsecurity (Mutimer 1999: 78)? What is under threat? Who and what needs to besecured? Who does the securing? What is the effect of securitizing certain issues?Who is the culprit in the security gaze? What is silenced in the attribution of guiltand threats?

Concerns with the security of the triple frontier intensified during the last de-cade. The three cities first acquired world notoriety in 1994, when intelligenceagencies from the United States and Israel linked the bombing of a Jewish institu-tion in Buenos Aires with the activities of militants from the Middle East in thisfrontier region. More recently, after the September 11 attacks, the United Statesidentified this region as one of the two South American sites of the “axis of evil”and it is often depicted as a haven for criminals and terrorists. Stories of contra-band, money laundering, violence, and illicit dealings are part of the global andregional folklore surrounding this area.1 Although themes of insecurity prevail, theunderstandings of what the threats are and what or who is to be blamed vary. InNovember 2001, for example, a headline from an online newspaper proclaimed,“International Terrorists Now Want to Meet Under the Shadow of the Falls.” Thearticle was illustrated with a photo caption in the body of the article that hinted atsomething more festive and less dangerous, yet not less disconcerting(MisionesOnLine 20 November 2001). The photo portraying a carnivalesque sceneshowed men impersonating Bin Laden and other Arab and Afghan fighters. Theylooked relaxed and more ready to dance samba with a strikingly beautiful woman

C. A. Ferradás418

dressed in a mini bikini than to engage in a bloody confrontation. This “party” at alocal hotel organized by the merchants and a local newspaper of the Brazilian Cityof Foz do Iguaçu was attended by a large crowd of people who chose parody todemonstrate their disgust with media coverage of the region and to challenge in-creasingly dominant constructions that represent the place as a haven for terroristsand as one of the most insecure sites on earth.

But while local business people felt that the idea that such a meeting could evertake place in this heavily guarded frontier space was ludicrous, United States StateDepartment representatives and United States-based news agencies have been think-ing otherwise. In November 2002, for example, CNN asserted that leaders from AlQaeda and Hezbollah indeed met in the Paraguayan Ciudad del Este, one of thethree border cities that have been in the midst of heated security debates betweenUnited States representatives and authorities from Brazil, Argentina, and Para-guay.

These two events suggest that security threats are neither uniformly experi-enced nor are constructed in a common way by the diverse regional, local, andglobal actors concerned with the future of the Triple Frontier. These differences inthe perception of the seriousness of the terrorist threat reveal disputes for the con-trol of a very problematic frontier space. On the one hand, we observe that extra-regional actors are making claims arguing that whatever happens in these borderstranscends that space and negatively impacts the world order. On the other hand,we are witnessing the alliance of regional actors from the three neighboring coun-tries to complain against the negative effect of global media allegations of terroristactivity on the local economy, particularly on tourism. The eruption of both typesof actors into the regional scene reflects a radical change in the dynamics of thispeculiar trinational frontier. In fact, throughout the phase dominated by ideologiesof national development, national authorities from the three nation-states wouldhave strongly objected to the activity of both types of actors on the grounds thattheir action constituted a flagrant attack to sovereignty. However, today, as variousauthors have noted, it is precisely the sovereignty of these nations that is chal-lenged on the basis that they are ill-equipped to control the new threats believed tobe putting the whole humanity—or the United States—at risk (cf. Donnan andWilson 1999: 57).

In this essay, I first explore how early concerns with security in the tri-borderregion, primarily focused on the territorial integrity of nation-states and the repro-duction of their national populations, had established mechanisms of control thatfixed nationals in space and inhibited the access of foreigners. I then explore howborders are being redesigned in the global phase of capitalism, increasingly con-cerned with the commoditization of nature. In this phase, nation-states have modi-fied their role by collaborating with supranational actors in the reproduction andprivatization of nature and in defending it from those that are said to threaten it. Ianalyze two processes of global interventions in the area: the creation of atransborder green corridor and the Guaraní Aquifer. While the greening of security

The Trinational Frontier of the Southern Cone 419

has often been presented as a retreat from the traditionally militarized forms ofsecurity, the case of the South American Triple Frontier contradicts these optimis-tic and more peaceful claims. As the second part of this discussion will show,discussions on the environmental future of this region are increasingly becomingconflated with other current forms of securitization, such as those concerned withterrorism, popular unrest, and narcotraffic. Attempts of extra-regional forces toimpose new regimes for controlling this complex frontier space often clash withnational governments that oscillate between complying with external pressuresand responding to the often contradictory demands of their constituents.

Security, national development, and the three frontier cities

Shortly after Argentina and Brazil defeated Paraguay in 1870 in one of the mostdevastating regional wars, the two victorious nations rapidly moved to assert theirsovereignty in the vicinity of the confluence of the Paraná and Iguazú rivers. Bothnations were concerned with establishing their physical presence in the vast for-ests rich in timber and wild yerba mate trees and with controlling the strategicrivers that are vital for communication and transportation in this largely unoccu-pied territory. The transformation of this space into sovereign territory followed aLockean logic; soils that were not transformed through modern agriculture were“waste lands” and wandering people—Indians and mestizos—who did not put theland to use were nomads with no sense of place (Kuehls 1996: 70). Regional lordswho amassed fortunes with the “green rush” of the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries threatened sovereign power by creating territories within a territoryand by controlling the means of communication, circulation, and surveillance(Ferradás 1998a). They also exerted absolute power over the lives of a nomadicpopulation with no clear attachments to a motherland. Brazil and Argentina as-pired to have absolute hegemony over the control of movement in this contestedfrontier space. With the goal of curtailing nonstate forms of power and of fixingpeople to a space to make them subjects of a nation, the two countries createdmilitary outposts that would soon become towns. These processes responded tothe new nations geopolitical concerns that envisioned the taming of nature andpeople and the creation of military garrisons and towns as a way to guarantee thepassage from a wild to a modern national order, from “empty” unsettled spaces toproductive spaces through ownership and tilling (Kuehls 1996).

Although for decades Brazil and Argentina could not completely achieve thismonopoly of force and control of the mobility of goods and people in the region,they did, however, develop a form of governmentality (Foucault 1991) that fa-vored the same capitalist interests that often challenged their power. They mainlypursued the domestication and reproduction of the scarce labor force for the ex-tractive economy. Until the late 1940s, the region was sparsely populated and theeconomy relied largely on the exploitation of natural resources of the area: timber,yerba mate, and hearts of palm. While some labor inspectors expressed their dissi-

C. A. Ferradás420

dence by denouncing exploitative labor conditions, the governments of the twonations were, for the most, part condoning and even actively participating in thecompulsory recruitment and confinement of workers in the sawmills of these iso-lated borderlands. Besides helping to restrain and/or to entice the movement ofpeople to guarantee the harnessing of nature in the frontier (Chindemi 2000), thetwo nations also became involved in enclosing nature to sustain a tourist economy.Both countries created national parks to conserve the subtropical forests and toattract visitors to the famous Iguazú Falls. Tourism gradually replaced the extrac-tive economy to become the major economic activity of the region in the 1950sand 1960s.

A nationalist developmental agenda guided frontier policies in this region. Ar-gentine scholars have examined how geopolitical preoccupations informed devel-opmental strategies in frontier regions (Ferradás 1998b; Grimson 2000, 2003: 11)constituting them as “spaces for the production of sovereignty” (Vidal 2000: 193).During the Cold War years, development and national security went hand in hand.Military strategists emphasized conflict hypotheses with neighboring countries andinsisted that economic and social development, coupled with population policiesin border regions, were effective ways to defend their endangered frontiers. Doc-trines of national security that relied on the militarized forms of security guidedthe action of both national and provincial governments. Analyzing the develop-ment of national security discourses in the United States, Dalby (1990) showedhow national security is usually defined in opposition to an “other” that needs tobe excluded. Security, for most analysts, was about protecting national popula-tions and territories from threats posed by “other” nations and was defined prima-rily in terms of the use and control of military force (McSweeney 1999: 34–35;Shultz et al. 1993; Walt 1991). Both in Brazil and in Argentina, concerns withnational security were emphasized by the military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s.In these countries, threats to an imagined harmonious national body were not onlyexternal, they were also perceived as stemming from within. In Argentina, forexample, border areas and border zones were legally defined as buffer zones, whichshould be subjected to special measures of surveillance. To safeguard the integrityof the national territory, foreigners were not allowed to own property in the prox-imity of neighboring countries. Even the “purity” and harmlessness of nationalcitizens had to be guaranteed by assigning the careful investigation of records ofany Argentine willing to reside in these areas to special security agents. Borderanxieties were expressed in maps depicting the weakness of the nation state vis-à-vis its neighbors, maps showing the alarming number of television and radio sta-tions, institutions of higher education, roads, airports, and hydroelectric plants con-centrated on the neighbor’s borders. These maps were displayed in different me-dia: newspapers, television programs, books, and public conferences. The barrenand isolated Argentine spaces stood in sharp contrast with the developed and mod-ernized neighbor spaces. The message was clear: foreign influences could pen-etrate the national body and subvert it.


Paraguay came late to these contested borderlands. Partly indexing a change inthe geopolitical configuration of the larger region, this Southern Cone countrydecided to “march to the East” by founding the city of Puerto Stroessner in 1957(renamed Ciudad del Este in 1990). First, through the construction of a highwayand of a bridge connecting the newly created city with Foz do Iguaçu and, a fewyears later, with the signing of the Treaty of Itaipú through which the two countriesconvened to build the Itaipú dam on the Paraná River, Paraguay’s increasing eco-nomic and political reliance on Brazil was spatially expressed. Until then, land-locked Paraguay largely depended on the good auspices of the Argentine govern-ment to use its Atlantic ports to transport imports and exports.

Until the late 1950s, Argentina was the hegemonic power in this region. PuertoIguazú was the most important and largest population center. In the absence ofhighways, goods and people mainly circulated down the Paraná River. Accessfrom and exit to the Atlantic was controlled by Argentina, because the SouthernParaná River runs through its territory. Argentina’s privileged position graduallycame to an end. Both Brazil and Paraguay played a key role in developing theborder cities and surrounding regions. They strategically favored policies con-cerned with the creation of development poles in borderlands regions in order toassert their national sovereignty. The joint construction of the Itaipú Dam in theearly 1980s is a good example of these countries developmental and geopoliticalstrategies.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Argentina and Brazil were stillunder military rule, development planning in border areas was mainly concernedwith population and territorial integrity. Planning constituted one of the mecha-nisms of bioregulation devised by the state (cf. Foucault 2003: 250). Both coun-tries had planning ministries and/or secretariats at regional and national levels tomeet geopolitical anxieties. In the early 1980s, demographers, statisticians, agrono-mists, anthropologists, and sociologists from the Super-Ministry of Planning ofthe Argentine Misiones province formulated a plan, Misiones 2000, to project theprovince into the future. The Ministry also worked on a military-backed project:the “colonization” of a forest area, Andresito, with the purpose of asserting sover-eignty and controlling land invasion by Brazilian intruders. Puerto Iguazú to thenorthwest of the Iguazú National Park and Andresito to the west were expected tooperate as human national shields to prevent the entry of foreigners into the na-tional territory. The military failed in the preservation of national purity in bothplaces, partly because, as one of the Iguacenses told me, poverty has no national-ity. In Puerto Iguazú, many Brazilians and Paraguayans cleared forests and settledin federal and provincial land. In Andresito, not all the settlers were as Argentine,as the authorities would have desired. Moreover, rather than remaining “fixed” toland and becoming model modern farmers, most left the area after selling all thevaluable wood they cut off from their lots. The project was also doomed to failurefor other reasons: low agricultural prices, price asymmetries with the rural econo-mies of neighboring countries, and water scarcity.

C. A. Ferradás422

Today, Puerto Iguazú is the smallest city of the three. Although governmentofficials generally estimate a total of approximately 30,000 residents, manyIguacenses told me that they believed that the numbers might be much lower be-cause of recent out-migration triggered by economic decline. In my last trip in2004, this tendency seemed to be reverting because of the slight reactivation of thetourist economy and the migration of people from other parts of the country seek-ing a more secure place to live—a paradoxical issue, considering that for othersthis is an extremely insecure place. Foz do Iguaçu is the largest city with roughly300,000 people, and Ciudad del Este is second with about 250,000 people. Thepopulations of these two cities have increased dramatically in the last three de-cades. For example, from 1975 to 1985, Foz do Iguacu alone experienced a growthof 385%. The unplanned and accelerated growth of the cities generated numerousproblems, mainly related to infrastructure and provision of basic services, such assewage, running water, electricity, transportation, garbage collection and disposal,and contamination.

The construction of the Itaipú Dam attracted internal migrants from differentBrazilian and Paraguayan regions seeking construction jobs. Many of them werelandless peasants ejected from rural areas with the expansion of agribusiness. Boththe Itaipú Dam and the development of soy production are also responsible for thedisplacement of peasants and their migration to these two cities. These two activi-ties are also linked to the loss of a great part of the Atlantic Forest that many globalenvironmentalist groups would now like to restore.

While many migrants initially found jobs associated with the construction ofthe dam, most of them became unemployed after its completion. A few were lateremployed in activities linked to the intense commercial activity of the 1990s. Oth-ers became involved in the many facets of the frontier trade informal economy,from becoming street vendors to aiding in the “passing” of goods, to incarnatingthe poverty version of recycling by collecting discarded tires, cardboard, andstyrofoam in Paraguay and smuggling them into Brazil for their commercializa-tion, to becoming “sacoleiros”—petty smugglers—who introduce electronics, al-cohol, and other commodities into Brazil by carrying them in big sacks on theirbacks. Many, however, joined the thousands of jobless people that are permanentlyoutside the labor force. Some of them now participate in criminal activities tosurvive. As economic conditions worsened in the three countries, unemploymentfigures and homelessness rose to unprecedented levels. Foz do Iguaçú had nearly80 favelas (slums) by the end of the twentieth century and the rate of unemploy-ment was one of the highest in the state of Paraná. In recent years, residents, au-thorities, and the media in Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguaçú have been reportingan increase in crime and widespread feelings of insecurity, undoubtedly linked tothe impoverishment of the population.

Since the time Ciudad del Este was founded, the city has been operating as afree-trade zone to attract flocks of tourists, mainly from Brazil and Argentina,lured by the possibility of buying imported goods either unavailable or with pro-


hibitive prices in their home countries, which enforced high taxation on foreigncommodities to protect national industries. It is quite ironic that the commercialactivity in the area reached its peak shortly before the Mercosur started enforcingcommon market regulations regarding taxation. Free-market policies, first in Ar-gentina and later in Brazil, and the economic recession in the three nations fatallywounded this amazing frontier economy in recent years. At its peak, in the mid-1990s, Ciudad del Este was a buzzing commercial center where the most variedgoods were traded. With undissimulated pride, local people often refer to newspa-per and magazine articles that claimed that Ciudad del Este was the third largestcommercial center in the world after Miami and Hong Kong. On a widely citedarticle, Forbes magazine said that trade in the area amounted to nearly U.S.$30billion, a sum larger than the Paraguayan national economy. Before Mercosur,residents of the three cities, tourists, and petty smugglers benefited from the rela-tively lax border controls and challenged tight restrictions on imports at a nationallevel. Once Mercosur started operating, it favored the circulation of goods mas-sively produced and controlled by multinational capital, but it drastically reducedthe movement of goods and people across national borders for a combination ofreasons, an issue that has also been examined elsewhere (Grimson 2002, 2003) butacquired unique characteristics in this region because of recent securitization pro-cesses affecting the area.

Frontier trade drew the most diverse regional and global actors to the region.With democratization, the nations initially abandoned conflict hypotheses and easedcontrol of the circulation of people. The gradual desecuritization of the region wasaccompanied by a relative debordering. This process did not unfold in the samemanner in the three countries. Argentine borders remained less “porous” to goodsand people. However, it experienced the illegal occupation of land by migrantsfrom neighboring countries. The identity of some of these occupants is quite prob-lematic, because many of them are undocumented and are not recognized as citi-zens by any of the nations. Some local people argue that this was strategically usedby the mayor of Puerto Iguazú, who encouraged their settlement and granted theiridentity papers as a means to guarantee political clients for electoral purposes.Besides the internal migrants, the intensification of the commercial activity duringthe 1990s also led to a dramatic change in the ethnic composition of the region.Migrants predominantly from China and the Middle East set foot in the area toparticipate in the commercial frenzy. Although the Brazilian Foz do Iguaçu al-ready had a large well-established Lebanese population, the newcomers were morenoticeable, mainly because they enforced Muslim attire on their women, an un-usual dress-style in this part of the world. The community became large enough tojustify the broadcasting of two cable television channels in Arabic. Although mostof the newly arrived families lived in Brazil, the majority of the men had businessin Paraguay.

The Chinese, on the contrary, chose to live in Paraguay. They came from main-land China and from Taiwan. By the mid-1990s, the press started to comment on

C. A. Ferradás424

the alarming accusations against some of the Chinese operating in Ciudad del Este.The presence of the Chinese Mafia was denounced by Chinese merchants whowere made to buy watches and electronic games from a group of Chinese import-ers attempting to monopolize the sale of their goods, most of them fake or intro-duced illegally into the country. The activity of this Mafia also brought to light themechanisms used to set up residence in the area, the issuing of bogus permits or ofvisas for a fee that could be as high as U.S.$10,000 in Paraguayan consular officesin various parts of the world.

The two communities differ in the way they interact with other city residentsand often in the way they are perceived and accepted. While many of the MiddleEastern men hold important positions in the Chambers of Commerce of Ciudaddel Este and Foz do Iguaçu and actively participate in meetings with various sec-tors of civil society to discuss municipal and regional policies and developmentstrategies, the Chinese rarely attend such meetings. Ironically, the only initiativein which the Chinese community played an active role, by sponsoring bannersdisplayed in prominent city sites, was an environmental municipal campaign inCiudad del Este with the motto “For a clean and attractive city.” Although federaland municipal Paraguayan authorities are involved in various commercial nego-tiations with the Taiwanese government, law-enforcement agents sometimes singleout people of Asian descent to ask for documentation in the otherwise generallyvery lax border between Brazil and Paraguay.

Vast sectors of the population of Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguacu rarely talkabout the border commercial activities in negative terms. On the contrary, manyproudly refer to the golden years of frontier trade. Very few seem to be concernedwith the fact that most of this wealth was produced by the sale of the clandestinelyproduced fake products and by smuggled and stolen goods. The local population iswell aware that those who dared to break the code of silence and denounce thecomplicity of municipal and state authorities in illicit activities had faced threatsand even death. At a local level, most border residents do not seem to be veryinterested in public exposés of the intricacies of the regional trade, probably be-cause they know they had become highly dependent, either directly or indirectly,on unsaintly activities. Who would want to bite the hand that feeds them? I onlyheard references to contraband in Puerto Iguazú and even in these cases, refer-ences were vague and scattered. They did, however, contrast the peacefulness oftheir city with the dangers of the other two and particularly discouraged venturingto Ciudad del Este. While most of the locals remain in denial, the United States haslong been demanding the securitization of this frontier space. Above all, they wantedto limit the circulation of certain goods and people. Claims over the control of thisspace were not about defending the welfare of a population living in the region,nor of protecting the integrity of the three sovereign territories. They were aboutsafeguarding the interests of capital that successfully lobbied the United Statesgovernment and about curtailing transnational movements that might eventuallyreach United States borders. Initially, the concerns were related to drug and arm


trafficking, the production of fake software that competed with the products ofUnited States-based companies, and the entry of migrants, mainly from China,who might have been using Paraguay as a point from which to gain illicit entryinto the United States. Today, these concerns have become conflated with allega-tions that the place is a haven for terrorists.

The greening of the Triple Frontier and the securitizationof the environment

In the year 2000, the scenario of the region altered dramatically. The commercialfrenzy dropped precipitously and nationalist geopolitical preoccupations eased butdid not disappear altogether. These changes created room for regional initiativesthat encourage cooperation among the neighboring countries and for global envi-ronmental initiatives. Earlier maps indicating the cultural and strategic menace ofneighboring countries disappeared—suggesting a radical change in the geopoliti-cal thinking about the region. Maps with carefully delineated national borders,highlighting differences in infrastructure and strategic energy resources such asdams and pointing at the imbalances in media and educational resources, werereplaced with satellite maps with no clear indication of national borders.

I saw these satellite images of the Southern Cone Borderlands during most ofmy interviews. They were on the walls of the offices of Brazilian, Paraguayan, andArgentine bureaucrats and of different environmental and other transnational agen-cies operating in the three nations. The media published them recurrently; theywere included in tourist brochures and in the promotion of environmental govern-mental and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and were used by local busi-nessmen from the tourist and commercial sectors involved in a transnational effortto change the image of the cities. The image is striking. While a gigantic green blotextends over a great part of what anybody familiar with the political geography ofArgentina knows as the Misiones territory, the border areas of Brazil and Paraguayare dominated by an offensive purple. In the regional environmental imaginary thegreen stands for unspoiled pristine forests, while the purple indicates human settle-ments. Although some experts recognize that the green disguises two types ofvegetation, natural forests and areas of reforestation with exotic trees, they stilluse the map to legitimize the proposed environmental policies. Reference to themap was an obliged warming topic of my environmentally focused interviews.The map both demonstrated the urgency of ecologically sound legislation to pro-tect the forests and offered reassurance that it was not too late to pass such legisla-tion. At one level, the map contributed to the construction of Brazil and Paraguayas the villains who destroyed natural environments and the Argentines as the goodguys who guarded the forests. At another level, the map was also employed tostress the need to work collectively beyond national frontiers to defend the littlethat is left.

The use of this map is very illustrative of the changes of the last two decades.

C. A. Ferradás426

The image taken from outer space contributes to normalize a global view of envi-ronmental realities in which national borders no longer matter. Unlike the maps ofthe 1970s and early 1980s that signaled sharp infrastructural and communicationdisparities among national borders, this map stresses the continuum of degradedand nondegraded environments well beyond national borders. The maps of the1970s ignored nature, the maps of the new millennium erased and/or de-empha-sized cities and nations. These changes reflected deep transformations in the hege-monic regional views of nature, modernization, and population.

Views on the environment at the regional level mirror global environmentalviews that emerged in the global phase of capitalism. Triumphant views of global-ization that depicted it as naturally unfolding in space concealed who benefitedfrom this construction: the advocates of a free market for whom national frontiersand national development policies were a hindrance. Likewise, constructions ofenvironmental problems as global tend to naturalize the phenomenon by propos-ing a common responsibility and concealing how power operates. Claims such asthose made in 1987 by the United Nation’s World Commission on Environmentand Development stating that “the physical effects of our decisions spill acrossnational frontiers” and those made two years later by Gro Harlem Brundtland,arguing for the extension of the “space of sovereignty beyond the nation-state”(Kuehls 1996: XI), are increasingly being used to impose “international regimes”that challenge the rights and responsibilities of nation states and alter the functionof boundaries (Liftin 1998). They do not completely advocate an elimination ofthe state, but they propose that its role should be supplemented by internationaland local organizations (Harvey 1996: 379).

Elsewhere, many authors have noted that the benign view of a global steward-ship of nature—“green sovereignty”—is far from innocent. It conceals who isgranted the power to speak for nature and who benefits from these global regimes(Ferry 1995; Keulartz 1998: 141). It often creates new enclosures that deny accessto vast sectors of the population and is a form of eco-imperialism (Harvey 1996;Kuehls 1998; Liftin 1998; Luke 1997: 92–94; Smith 1996). As we shall see, Bra-zil, Paraguay, and Argentina have recently embraced some of these views by at-tempting to work collectively and allowing extra-regional agencies to take a lead-ing role in the design of their environmental future. These borderless views of theenvironment are not universally accepted. They are contested by members of civilsociety and by various sectors of the nation-states’ structure that are not resignedto relinquishing national sovereignty.

The greening of the larger region and of the three frontier cities in the lastdecade is remarkable. The change is so noticeable that in Puerto Iguazú a taxidriver commented to me how now everybody is concerned with ecology and howwe should conserve nature within the city. Right after that he added, “these yanquisare smart, first they destroyed their natural environments and now they want topreserve ours.” Similarly, in one of my interviews, a man working for the munici-pal government noted: “sustainability is now fashionable, yes, everything is green—


green dollar.” To what degree are these associations founded in the current green-ing process of the region? Why do local actors link the greening of the region withthe United States and a feeling of dispossession?

Local perceptions of environmental issues are very telling. They speak of aprocess through which most urban and rural dwellers have been excluded. As weshall see, this process not only excludes local people, it also sees them as a hin-drance and often portrays them as threats. While “greening” has multiple mean-ings and is indeed used by the most diverse actors with most varied agendas, ahegemonic view on the environment became consolidated after the Rio Summit.This view proposes: 1) that environment and development are not incompatible;2) that science should have a privileged role in dealing with the environmentalcrisis; and 3) that global governance is the best means to meet the new environ-mental challenges for which nation-states are ill-equipped.

How did all this affect this region of the Southern Cone? In the early 1990s,global processes of restructuring led to the creation of regional common marketssuch as Mercosur, to meet the challenges of the New World Economy. As a re-sponse to this, peasant organizations of the three countries, together with othergrassroots organizations, NGOs, religious leaders, and academics from regionaluniversities came together to design their own vision of integration. They workedon a common position to present at the Rio Conference and criticized regionaldevelopment policies such as the construction of dams, mainly focusing on nega-tive environmental and social impacts. They mostly followed an environmentalperspective highly critical of the effects on nature of scientific and technologicalachievements of modernity. Their actions weakened after the Rio Conference thatimposed a hegemonic environmental view informed by notions of ecological mod-ernization, which proposes a rational and technocratic management of natural re-sources to insure “sustainable development” (Harvey 1996, 1998; O’Connor 1998;Sachs 1999). Since then, powerful global NGOs, in association with a limitednumber of national NGOs and governmental institutions, have co-opted the envi-ronmental agenda. Those with an alternative environmental vision are now rarelysummoned to participate in the discussion of regional environmental projects ad-vanced and supported by global environmental institutions. This is the case, forexample, with the negotiations around the Green Corridor discussed in this essay.Their exclusion is not surprising. Most of the new environmental players are nowattempting to secure nature from what they perceive as the predatory behavior ofcertain sectors of the population, mainly the urban poor and peasants. In doingthis, they are not different from various forms of environmentalism that developedelsewhere, many of them inspired by the Club of Rome “Limits to Growth,” thatbelieve that overpopulation puts pressure on scarce resources in an updated ver-sion of Malthusianism and advocate that natural resources be taking away formthe rural poor because they are the primary agents of destruction (Becker and Jahn1998; Connelly and Smith 1999; Harvey 1996; Kuehls 1998).

While federal, municipal, and global institutions have all adopted a green dis-

C. A. Ferradás428

course, they do not necessarily pursue the same goals. Nor are they are activeplayers in the same green strategies. Differences in strategies, alliances, and politi-cal and economic goals notwithstanding, they often coincide in their choosing ofscapegoats. The self-appointed new guardians of nature claim that recent migrantsto cities do not have a sense of place and pollute the soil and endanger the qualityof river waters by settling in the vicinity of river banks and cutting off the trees thatplay an important role in protecting river basins. For example, in Foz do Iguaçumunicipal authorities have been relocating poor squatters living by the ParanáRiver to create a safe green cordon along the river. In Puerto Iguazú, public offi-cials expressed their concern with indigenous peoples and urban squatters con-taminating a stream with garbage and human waste from where the city was tem-porarily getting its water. Public officials and many environmentalists also say thatpeasants pollute river waters with pesticides and deplete the soil with swiddenagriculture and they hold them responsible for deforestation and poaching. I donot imply here that these practices do not have a negative effect on the environ-ment. I am pointing at a politics of blame that focuses on the poor without examin-ing the economic inequalities that often force them into certain practices. I am alsoconcerned with what is ignored in the framing of environmental problems such asthe relationship between the recent dengue epidemics and changes brought aboutby development in the area (Itaipú Dam, deforestation because of soy production,population migration), river contamination with untreated sewage coming for hous-ing complexes built by the Binational Itaipú Dam project, and garbage disposalincluding hospital waste in open spaces as occurs in Ciudad del Este and PuertoIguazú (in the latter, it is done in the forests that some environmentalists wish toprotect). Many of these issues I observed during my field visits and I heard aboutduring interviews, but they were rarely part of the discussions among environmen-tal public institutions and NGOs.

In part influenced by the Rio Summit, municipal and provincial environmentallegislation was passed in the three neighboring cities and regions. The passing ofthis legislation clearly illustrates a phenomenon that has caught the attention of afew analysts: the shift from early preoccupations with the economic and politicalreproduction of society to include the ecological reproduction of society (Eder1990). Inspired by Foucault (1991), various authors contend that nowadays theworld is under a form of ecological or green governmentality, a biopower that mayextend the surveillance over human society to every form of life at a global scale(Keulartz 1998; Luke 1999; Rutheford 1999). How is this manifested in this re-gion? Building upon arguments made by Harvey (1996), I argue that with theopening of markets brought about by neoliberal policies, some sectors of the popu-lation are increasingly becoming redundant and getting in the way of capitalism’sdesigns. While the nation-states of the nationalist era were interested in promotingpopulation growth in their border areas to assert their territorial sovereignty and toguarantee a supply of labor power both for capitalist ventures and for state-ownedbusiness created mainly for geopolitical reasons (Ferradás 1998b; Ribeiro 1994;


Vidal 2000), in the neoliberal era, the state has drastically reduced its traditionalrole regarding the control of a population both to enhance its productivity and as ameans to guard a national territory, particularly in border spaces. The dismantlingof the welfare state—the neglect of health, education, and social security provi-sions—is a clear manifestation of this transformation. In the 1990s, convinced thatthe future relies on the capitalization of nature—“what was formerly treated as anexternal and exploitative domain is now redefined as itself a stock of capital”(O’Connor 1994: 126)—the various governmental levels of the three countriesstarted to devote their efforts to secure the value of nature form the dangers posedby people.

Various policies are now aimed at enclosing nature. The privatization of theBrazilian and Argentine Iguazú National Parks is a clear example of these pro-cesses. Local people used to access the parks for weekend picnics and to bathe inone of the pools created by the falls, but today they can no longer enter with theircars or circulate freely once they are there. While the movement of people is care-fully restricted by regulating their circulation through enclosed paths, the freemovement of animals is encouraged, not only within each national park, but alsoacross national borders. The agencies operating in the region have assigned a newrole to the population. People are expected to become guardians of nature but theydo have to stay off limits. To achieve this, the municipal governments, the ItaipúBinational Entity, the administration of the two national parks, provincial and fed-eral state agencies, and NGOs are involved in multiple campaigns to educate thepopulation—from programs for school children and neighborhood organizationsto degrees in environmental conservation. Environmental legislation also pursuesthe greening of urban landscapes and contemplates various aspects of the so-called“brown agenda.” Although some initiatives of the various organizations may bequite similar, they rarely operate in coordination.

Both at the national and regional level, the three nations experienced what Iwould call a transition from developmentalism to environmentalism that is re-flected in the dismantling of governmental structures of planning and the creationof governmental agencies dealing with the environment. It is relatively easy toexplain this change: the debt crisis, crisis in planning and of the development para-digm, and demonization of the role of the state in development processes togetherwith the imposition of market ideologies and structural adjustment policies. Glo-bal and local factors converge in the current “ecologization”: the co-optation ofenvironmental concerns by global agencies as it occurred in various conferenceson global warming and ozone destruction; the intensification of the commoditizationof nature as a new phase of capitalist expansion, mainly in spaces rich in biodiversity;the failure of agrarian-based strategies of development (seriously hurt with theonslaught of neoliberalism and Mercosur agreements); and the securitization ofenvironmental issues. Misiones province, for example, closed its Ministry of Plan-ning and endorsed the creation of a Ministry of Ecology. The former governor ofMisiones believed that the model of economic growth based on agriculture was

C. A. Ferradás430

untenable and promoted an economic future based on the sustainable managementof natural resources. These changes coincided with the easing of national securityregulations constraining the access of foreign investors to ownership of propertyin borderland regions. As a result, in recent years, most forestlands have passedinto the hands of multinational capital interested in the plantation of trees of rapidgrowth. A branch of the Ministry of the Ecology, located in Puerto Iguazú, super-vises forest management in surrounding areas and sometimes advises city officialson environmental issues. However, the Ministry’s interaction with municipal au-thorities is limited and it never deals with neighbor-city environmental officials.Moreover, local environmental authorities are rarely summoned to participate inglobal initiatives for the area.

Believers in global forms of governance and in the emergence of a global civilsociety have been emphasizing the emergence of international regimes in whichthe authority to negotiate environmental and developmental issues is being relo-cated to transnational or regional arenas, bypassing and or seriously challengingthe sovereignty of states (Altvater 1998; Stokke 1997). Some experts of environ-mental security see this as beneficial, because it enhances cooperation andmultilateralism, while others suspect that once an issue is securitized, it cannotescape militarization and the control of state apparatuses (Dalby 2002; Waever1995). Various authors argue that these options are misleading because they present“either/or” alternatives when in fact both represent specific interests and powerstruggles. The analysis of the creation of a green corridor and the management ofthe Guaraní Aquifer illustrate how these issues become complicated even furtherwith the recent conflation of environmental threats with other forms of securityand the development of anti-imperialist feelings among various sectors of civilsociety.

The Green Corridor

The Altoparanaense forest once covered 120 million hectares. Today, only a fewremnants remain—the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates 7.4% of the origi-nal forest, mainly in the Argentine province of Misiones. This forest surrounds thethree border cities and encompasses the Iguazú (Argentina) and Iguaçu (Brazil)National Parks, the Parque Moisés Bertoni (Paraguay), and patches of this forestalso include privately and state-owned land, mainly in Argentina. The efforts toconserve this bio-region are a good example of environmental constructions andpractices that give priority to nature and exclude a consideration of people. In amanner similar to other world green corridor initiatives, this project is pursuingthe recreation rather than the conservation of nature, insofar as most of the foresthas already disappeared (for comparison, see Kuehls 1996; Zerner 2003). The ac-tors involved in this initiative want to create unbounded corridors through whichlarge mammals, mainly jaguars and pumas, could circulate. Survival of these ani-mals is one of the major struggles of global environmental organizations. In the


case of the jaguars, biologists and researchers connected with Project Tiger toldme that their survival is crucial to the maintenance of the food chain. They arguethat their disappearance threatens the balance of the ecosystem, as it might encour-age either the extinction or multiplication of certain species. The WWF, in associa-tion with multinational corporations such as Shell, General Motors, and Exxon,has been an active player in Brazil and Argentina in attempts to “secure” greencorridors that guarantee and/or facilitate the circulation of carnivores. Even thoughthey speak of borderless green spaces, what they are proposing is a redefnition ofborders: the lifting of national ones to allow for the free movement of animals andrebordering around forests to impede the access of the poor (peasants, Indians, andurban dwellers). Similar processes have been documented elsewhere (see, for ex-ample, Greenough 2003). These spatial imaginings ignore the existence of humansettlements and cities. If acknowledged, they are presented as a hindrance. Advo-cates of the regional green corridor showed me a few scattered green blots in theBrazilian City of Foz de Iguaçú with great enthusiasm and told me how they wereworking to incorporate them into the green corridor project. Similarly, nationalpark specialists in Puerto Iguazú told me that they were thinking of connectingsome city forests with the forests surrounding the city. Nobody wondered, how-ever, the problems felines could create by circulating freely in an urban frontierspace encompassing three cities and more than half a million people.

The bioregional vision dominant in the region of the Triple Frontier I am study-ing ignores people because it is primarily concerned with the economic value ofnature. Creation of the corridor is justified on the grounds of “the benefits thatforests would offer to ‘humanity’ and the valuable resources for ‘men,’ food, me-dicinal and ornamental plants, and forestry” (Fundación Vida Silvestre n.d.). It ispresented as a reserve of genetic material, with a large number of species unique tothat forest. Documents do not clarify, however, what humanity and which menwould be allowed to enjoy the benefits. It is clear that those involved in the imple-mentation of the green corridor speak the language of markets. They have pro-posed different forms of valuation of nature, such as the sale of carbon bonds,payment for the ecological services of the forest, and forest management certifica-tion (introduced by the Forest Stewardship Council [FSC]).

Although many of these mechanisms are presented as means to secure naturefrom current indiscriminate deforestation, some nonmainstream environmental-ists suggest hidden objectives. One of them, for example, said that Monsanto wassponsoring many of the initiatives of the Misiones Province Ministry of Ecology,including the introduction of carbon bond sales. This seeming contradiction maybe due to what some forest engineers linked to that ministry assert: plantations ofexotic trees of rapid growth absorb more carbon dioxide. Monsanto sells the chemi-cals and seedlings necessary to this process, critics maintain. Specialists fromMonsanto also claim that carbon capture might offer a more promising future toimpoverished peasants if they become involved in the cultivation of geneticallymodified plants created to absorb more carbon. Despite these promises, most peas-

C. A. Ferradás432

ants and small farmers today are excluded from the Green Corridor plans and arein fact constructed as posing major threats to the sustainability of the forests. Thisis the case, for example, with Brazilian peasants who want to keep open the “stradado colono” (peasants’ highway), which winds through the Iguaçu National Park.Environmentalists, park authorities, and international agencies such as UNESCOvehemently campaign against this road, arguing that it would endanger the sur-vival of plant and animal species.

The WWF took the initiative to invite national and global NGOs, universityresearchers, and multilateral and bilateral agencies such as The World Bank andthe United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Probably be-cause cities do not enter in their model of bioregions, city authorities and localgrassroots organizations were absent from these meetings. Even though the WWFhas been very successful in mobilizing very diverse actors and setting the agenda,it did not accomplish its goals completely. Individuals from the Argentine Na-tional Parks Service and with ties with the Ministry of Ecology claimed that theauthorship of the green corridor project was theirs and expressed their concernswith extra-national interventions. The Misionero Law passed in 1999 has not beenimplemented. Forestry interests successfully lobby civil servants at the MisionesMinistry of Ecology to keep doing things as usual—logging in unauthorized areasand polluting rivers. Moreover, the deep economic crisis is complicating the imple-mentation of this project even further, because authorities are compelled to re-spond to pressures of the hungry and unemployed knocking at their doors. For themost part, the local population of the three cities remains outside the negotiationsof a project that would impact their lives. Although the press has discussed it ex-tensively at various points in time, the majority of the residents I interviewed knewnothing about these efforts.

The green governmentality regime behind the creation of the green corridordepends on institutions and regulations that base their operation on the generationof consensus and cooperation at a global and local level. This is the way the WWFoperates. As we have seen, these global–regional practices have benefited fromthe desecuritization and easing of national borders for certain environmental pur-poses—such as those related to biodiversity. The case of the Guaraní Aquifer illus-trates how multilateral regimes may be challenged by efforts to securitize environ-mental issues within a framework that conforms to more traditional militarizedforms of security.

Aquifers, hydrogen economy, and genomesin the Triple Frontier

The Guaraní Aquifer Complex extends over approximately 1,200,000 km2 in theterritories of Brazil (71%), Argentina (19%), Paraguay (6%), and Uruguay (4%).This aquifer is one of the largest underground water reservoirs in the world. Pre-liminary studies estimate that it contains 37 trillion liters of water. Until the late


1990s, researchers from Brazilian and Argentine universities were in charge of thestudy of the Guaraní Aquifer Complex. Global agencies have recently replaceddomestic ones in the assessment of the economic potential of this valuable re-source. This shift is linked to recent processes of the commodification andprivatization of water through the creation of water markets and legitimized by theconstruction of water as a scarce resource that requires global stewardship. TheGlobal Environmental Facility (GEF); the Organization of American States; TheWorld Bank; and the Argentine, Brazilian, Paraguayan and Uruguayan govern-ments have agreed to study the potential of the Guaraní Aquifer. Until quite re-cently, the regional media had rarely mentioned the existence of this aquifer, and ifit did, it was only as a sustainable source of water that could meet the needs of theapproximately 20 million people living in its proximity.

While aquifers have become the object of complex studies involving globalagencies and multinational energy corporations, the general public in the regionignores the political economic ramifications around these water resources. In fact,ever since I started studying environmental struggles in this frontier region, themajority of my interviewees seemed to ignore the existence of the aquifer. I onlymet two individuals who were concerned with its existence. Interestingly, the twoworked for global environmental agencies that endorsed the Green Corridor project.They believed that the forests would play a key role in maintaining the water qual-ity of this aquifer and expressed their concern with the pollution created by popu-lation settlements.

In 2003, the media finally brought the economic potential of this aquifer to theattention of regional actors. The provision of water to major cities (already hap-pening in many Brazilian and some Argentine cities) and the use of its thermalqualities for tourism are the focus of most of the publications. In keeping with thetone of the time and place, however, the story of a substance as pure and simple aswater cannot end with its traditional exploitation. Some local activists are nowshowing how the Triple Frontier’s water is connected to security concerns. AMisionero union leader, for example, has linked the demonization of the TripleFrontier and attempts to militarize the area with global capital’s interest in exploit-ing one “of the major reservoirs of water of the world” and suggested that thegovernments of the three countries took a more active role in avoiding the installa-tion of foreign military bases.2

Similarly, a document produced by CEMIDA, an Argentine group of demo-cratic retired military men widely cited in Internet sources, as well as Argentinemedia, suggests that the real reason behind the United States construction of theregion as a site of dormant terrorist cells is based on the wealth of this undergroundwater resource. These alarm-sounders claim that the area of the three border citiesis one of the main points of recharge for the aquifer. Echoing similar claims aboutthe Iraq conflict, they argue that control over resources is driving both conflicts.Furthermore, they denounce the militarization of the area, declaring that the gov-ernments of the three countries have accepted the United States proposal to jointly

C. A. Ferradás434

patrol the Paraná and Iguazú rivers running through this border region. These seri-ous accusations were also made in recent regional debates over the authorizationof military exercises without congressional approval in this highly politically sen-sitive region and to the request to grant immunity to United States forces involvedin Operation Aguila III (Eagle III).3 Ever since Bush included the tri-border regionin the axis of evil, the press has been reporting United States concerns with re-gional security. Envoys from the United States State Department and Congresshave argued that a combination of illegal activities such as money laundering,drug trafficking, and arms contraband are aiding terrorism by helping to financetheir activities. Local authorities insist that there is no proof of terrorist activityand remain silent regarding claims on other illegal issues. Fear of United Statesinvasion of the region escalated with the Iraq conflict to the point that the headlineof one of the major newspapers of Argentina said “Iraq finishes in the TripleFrontier”(Pagina 12, 23 March 2003).

While those resisting foreign involvement in the region suspect that what is atstake is the control of water that will become more valuable as it becomes a scarceresource at a world scale, those linked to global initiatives and to powerful nationsof the North are entertaining the potential use of aquifers for other purposes. In-deed, discussions of aquifers and of this one in particular are being framed in verydifferent terms in global arenas. Rather than stressing their conventional wateruses (such as providing water for drinking, irrigation, and industrial development),aquifers are now being examined in association with the development of the hy-drogen economy and as sources of geothermal energy.

The International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM), for example,has chosen the Guaraní Aquifer for one of its case studies. The coordinating com-mittee is drawn from UNESCO, FAO, UNECE, and from a commission estab-lished by the International Association of Hydrogeologists. Their studies includesome of the “exotic” uses of aquifers such as carbon sequestration—the removaland storage of atmospheric carbon—a topic commonly studied today in associa-tion with these underground resources. Indeed, this “exotic” use is also part of oneof the most ambitious projects of the Office of Science of the United States De-partment of Energy (DOE). This office is focusing on the linkage between energyand biology and includes among its many projects the sequestration of carbonthrough the use of global underground geological repositories, the removal of car-bon from the atmosphere by vegetation and storage in biomass and soils, and themanipulation of genomes for carbon management and for the production of biofuelssuch as methane and hydrogen. The Genomes to Life project of the DOE is con-cerned with finding biological solutions for meeting energy challenges.

One of the major concerns is solving the dilemmas of energy security and en-suring climate stabilization. These concerns have triggered numerous researchprojects that are pursuing the “complementary goals of increasing domestic en-ergy supplies and reducing greenhouse gas emissions” (http://doegenomestolife.org/energy_carbon.pdf). These strategies have gained momentum after the tragic events


of September 11. Various policy makers and oil-related business have been advo-cating a “New Manhattan Project” since then by stressing the urgency to developenergy solutions to displace the dependency on fossil fuels, many of them locatedin conflict ridden areas of the world. Water is highlighted as one of the nonfossilsources of this economy.

Interestingly, a few weeks after the beginning of the war in Iraq, a forest engi-neer declared that Misiones Province should take advantage of this exceptionalworld situation in which reliance on fossil fuels has become increasingly problem-atic and work on the development of the hydrogen economy, as suggested in Jer-emy Rifkin’s book (2002). This engineer mainly thought about the energy poten-tial of the biomass that Misiones could produce by concentrating in the plantationof rapid growth trees like eucalyptus.4 Likewise, the provincial government re-quested the collaboration of the National University of Misiones to assess the fea-sibility of such a project. Those in charge of making preliminary assessments didnot show much enthusiasm because they believed that this technology is too costly.They were unaware, however, of the studies conducted in the United States, par-ticularly those exploring the potential linkages between biotechnology, alternativeenergy resources, and the use of certain nonfossil sources for the production ofhydrogen. In assessing the costs and benefits of this new economy, they did nottake into consideration the role resources such as the Guaraní Aquifer might playin this development.

Conclusion

Changing constructions of security and their application have had intense and some-times devastating effects on sectors of the population. While different powerfulgroups express concerns with security, they do not necessarily agree on what orwho needs the securing and for what purpose. Differences among them stem fromtheir particular political economic agendas. Members of civil society, mainly fromFoz do Iguaçu and Ciudad del Este, have demonstrated on more than one occasionagainst the insecurity of their cities. Security for them is about crime, not terror-ism. They do not believe in extraregional allegations of “dangerous Islamic activ-ism,” as the party at the beginning of this article clearly exemplifies. They areprimarily interested in defending one of the major sources of regional income:tourism and the associated frontier trade. In their imaginings of the region, thepoor are a menace; they see them as sources of crime that may scare tourists away.

How have local and extraregional framings of security affected the populationof this peculiar frontier of Mercosur? While most regional actors disagree with theextra-regional securitization—and conflation—of what many political scientistscall “new threats”—contraband, terrorism, drug traffic, and environment relatedissues—some local groups may have benefited from the enforcement of securitymeasures imposed by foreign powers, mainly from those that either curtail thecirculation or displace unwanted others. The immediate losers are the disenfran-

C. A. Ferradás436

chised groups who have no role to play in the various processes of commodificationand valuation of nature at work in the region. The poor and local indigenous popu-lations “poach” and slash down trees from the recently privatized National Parks,the major attraction for ecotourists. They are “threats” to the sustainability of theGreen Corridor biodiversity, a project in which the most varied global and re-gional actors have vested interests

In some cases, the less powerful are explicitly blamed. In others, they are thesilent victims of policies designed with other purposes in mind. Concerns withsecurity turned the gaze of border patrols over petty smugglers and landless peas-ants who “illegally” trespass national borders and settle in natural reserves, state,and/or private lands. Computerization of migration procedures, an issue that theUnited States has been requesting for years, was finally implemented. Although itmight now be legitimated as a way to control the movement of international terror-ists, the measure has other effects. It limits the entrance of migrants from otherparts of the world on their way to their final destination: the United States. It con-trols the movement of local people who strategically take advantage of price dif-ferentials among the three cities. If their crossings are registered, they have tocomply with some of the countries’ regulations limiting the amounts of purchasesin border countries.

Bilateral pressures regarding the policing of the Muslim population and raidsand imprisonment following the September 11 events dramatically changed theethnic composition of the cities of Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguaçú. As a result,a great number of Muslims left the cities because they no longer felt secure. It isestimated that, since 2001, nearly 12,000 Arabs left Ciudad del Este(MisionesOnline, 23 March 2003).

These borderlands of Mercosur are experiencing a complex geopolitical rear-rangement, the outcome of which is difficult to predict. International powers insiston the vilification of the area. Frequent pressures from the United States depart-ment requesting authorization of military exercises of joint forces and a recentforum on “Global Terrorism and the Triple Frontier: Myth or Threat,” organizedby the Israeli Consulting Agency Security and Intelligence Advising (SIA)5 in PuertoIguazú in October 2003 are now portrayed as strategies linked to the Free TradeTreaty of the Américas (FTTA), which many Latin American Countries are reluc-tant to embrace. A network of grassroots organizations operating at local and re-gional levels have recently demonstrated against the FTTA and maintain numer-ous Internet sites to inform the public. The new governments of Argentina andBrazil are also challenging United States bilateral impositions attempting to exerta greater control over their population and production of goods. They are returningto more traditional nationalist agendas, but this time attempts to define barriers arenot directed to their immediate neighbors but to powers located outside the region.

The processes in this Southern Cone Frontier have striking similarities withanother ambitious project, the Plan Puebla Panamá. This project, also linked to thecreation of a Green Corridor, will displace thousands of Mexican and Central


American peasants and indigenous peoples in order to sustain nature for busi-nesses. These extra-regional plans to introduce forms of multilateral—and bilat-eral—control over Latin American borderlands rich in biodiversity and energydevelopment potential do not remain uncontested. Regional actors are becomingincreasingly aware that both the metaphors of a borderless nature; the more recentconstructions that propose that valuable natural resources should not be in thehands of the anarchic nations of the South will be used to legitimize the enclosureof these resources for the benefit of processes of capital accumulation for whichcertain kinds of people are increasingly expendable—not just the poor, who havealready been disenfranchised, but also people higher up on the social economicladder, some of whom are active participants in the tourist and commercial re-gional economy. But these attempts of exclusion and appropriation do not remainuncontested: in both regions grassroots organizations are vehemently opposingthese projects. Although resistance to global and bilateral projects was negligentuntil recently, in the Triple Frontier various organizations from civil society havedecided to take their first steps in challenging the security regimes affecting theirlives. Following the spirit of Porto Alegre’s World Social Forum, they are organiz-ing the Foro Social de la Triple Frontera (Social Forum of the Triple Frontier) todiscuss the connections between environment and security in this contested re-gion. Militarization, opposition to the FTTA, and the Guaraní Aquifer are the themesof this regional meeting.

This event opens a new chapter in the securitization and desecuritization sagaof the Triple Frontier. Time will tell whether the forum participants will have thepower to demonstrate that “another world is possible.” It is at this point uncertainhow they will envision such a world. Participants represent the people left joblessand landless after their countries embraced neoliberal policies favoring, amongother things, the privatization of nature and the adoption of global-managementregimes. Besides believing they are the victims of a green market-friendlysecuritization, many organizers also think that they are the true targets of recentforms of bilateral military securitization, which they perceive as imperialist at-tempts to seize resources and control civil protest. What kind of securitization, ifany, will they advocate? Will they promote a borderless South America by endors-ing Pan-American solidarity and a Mercosur of the people as the principles ofsome of the organizations seem to suggest? Will this debordering also implicate arejection of global and bilateral claims over these spaces? How will other regionaland national actors respond to pressures from these grassroots actors? Will localbusinessmen who challenge militarization but fear the poor support this initiativeor will they align with sectors of the military attached to old forms of nationalsecurity and, hence, promote authoritarian forms of security based on rigid exclu-sionary border policies? How will the recently elected national and regional au-thorities harmonize their own efforts to restore people’s faith in politics by makingcommitments to social justice and adopting neopopulist policies and their need toreact to pressures from their constituents to reject neoliberalism with global initia-

C. A. Ferradás438

tives to jointly administer natural resources and bilateral impositions of policingthe border? The reaccommodation and realignment of all these competing inter-ests is hard to predict; it is contingent on a constellation of processes as diverse asthe negotiation of the three neighboring countries’ debt; the acceptance or rejec-tion of the FTTA; decisions on energy priorities at the national, regional, and glo-bal level; and the resolution of world conflicts such as the Iraq War and the Pales-tine conflict.

Notes

Received 15 January 2004; accepted 24 May 2004.

Address correspondence to Carmen Alicia Ferradás, Department of Anthropology, Binghamton Uni-versity, State University of New York, Binghamton, New York 13902, USA. E-mail:[email protected]

Binghamton University, State University of New York, provided financial support for fieldwork in theTriple Frontier. I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Hilary Cunningham and JosiahMcC. Heyman, for encouraging me to contribute to this timely discussion on borders. I benefited fromtheir valuable comments on an earlier version of this article presented at the CASCA/SANA meeting atWindsor, Ontario. I also appreciate the critical reading and editorial suggestions from Thomas M.Wilson, Jonathan Hill, and anonymous reviewers for Identities.

1. I carried out preliminary research in the three border cities, in Asunción (Paraguay) and in Posadas(Misiones Province) in 1997. After interviewing city officials and members of NGOs, I decided tofocus on the examination of environmental struggles in the context of Mercosur, because this wasa central concern among those deciding the future of the region. I have been conducting fieldworkin the three cities since 1999. Besides interviewing members of state bureaucracies, NGOs, andgrassroots leaders, I followed various members of the local civil society through their daily rou-tines in this frontier space. This study is also based on the analysis of documents produced by local,regional, and global agencies; Internet sources; and Brazilian, Paraguayan, and Argentine newspa-pers. Security concerns were not part of my initial research design, but I had to incorporate themwhen it became apparent that environmental concerns were interwoven with other security issuesaffecting the region. I did not, however, conduct research on the “illicit” activities in the region,which are well documented in the national and regional media.

2. Mario Aníbal Rodríguez, a leader of the Union of Highway Workers, wrote a letter to the editorexpressing his suspicions behind the negative constructions of the Triple Frontier. His statementregarding the strategic interests around the controversial region is slightly ambiguous; it could refereither to the River Plate Basin system or to the Guaraní Aquifer Complex. He does not deny theexistence of illegal activities, which he attributes to favorable geographical conditions, but he stressesthat they might be exaggerated and that this negatively affects tourist activities in the region (seehttp://www.territoriodigital.com/Notas/Noticias/impresion.asp?2003/04/03/top.htm).

3. Grassroots organizations have published alarming online articles in their web pages on these mili-tary exercises. They claim that the object of these exercises is to annihilate insurgency. They seewith suspicion proposals to jointly patrol the Paraná and Iguazú Rivers with the aid of United Statesmilitary forces, and insist that their goal is to control the Guaraní Aquifer (see, for example, América

Latina en Movimiento, 29 August 2003, http://alainet.org/active/show_news.phtml?news_id=4449).Similar comments may be found in a transcript of an article which appeared in the Mexican JournalLa Jornada, 18 September 2003 (http://www.asambleas-argentinas.org/article.php3?id_articles=177).

4. See http://www.territorioDigital.com, 6 March 2003. In an article entitled “The Iraq Conflict, anOpportunity for Misiones,” forest engineer Gustavo Cetrángolo discusses the economic opportuni-


ties that the Iraq conflict might open to Misiones economy. He mainly advocates the developmentof biomass technology as energy source.

5. For a detailed discussion on SIA forum and local responses, see the 3 October 2003 MisionesOnLine

article “Demonstrations against the Forum on Terrorism in the Triple Frontier are expected in PuertoIguazú” (http://www.misionesonline.net/action.lasso?-database=noticias&-layout=web&-re-sponse=%).

References

Altvater, Elmar 1998. Global Order and Nature. In Political Ecology. Global and Local. Roger Keil,David Bell, Peter Penz, and Leesa Fawcett, eds. London: Routledge.

America Latina en Movimiento 2003. http://alainet.org/active/show_news.phtml?news_id=4449.29 August.

Becker, Egon and Thomas Jahn 1998. Growth or Development? In Political Ecology. Global and

Local. Roger Keil, David Bell, Peter Penz, and Leesa Fawcett, eds. London: Routledge.Buzan, Barry, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde 1998. Security. A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder,

CO: Lynne Rienner.Chindemi, Julia 2000. ¿Ciudadanos o Extranjeros? Esapacio Fronterizo y Soberanía Territorial en el

Corredor Internacional de Río Grande del Sur. In Fronteras, Naciones e Identidades. La periferia

como Centro. Alejandro Grimson, ed. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Ciccus- La Crujía.Connelly, James and Graham Smith 1999. Politics and Environment. From Theory to Practice. Lon-

don: Routledge.Cunningham, Hilary and Josiah McC. Heyman 2004. Introduction: Mobilities and enclosures at bor-

ders. Identities 11(3): 289–302.Dalby, Simon 1990. Creating the Second World War. London: Guilford.Dalby, Simon 2002. Environmental Security. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Donnan, Hastings and Thomas M. Wilson 1999. Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State.

Oxford, U.K.: Berg.Eder, Klaus 1990. The Cultural Code of Modernity and the Problem of Nature: A Critique of the

Naturalistic Notion of Progress. In Rethinking Progress: Movements, Forces and Ideas at the End

of the 20th Century. London: Unwin Hyman.Ferradás, Carmen A. 1998a. How the green wilderness became trade wilderness. The story of a South-

ern Cone Frontier. PoLar 21 (2): 11–25.Ferradás, Carmen A. 1998b. Power in the Southern Cone Borderlands. An Anthropology of Develop-

ment Practice. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.Ferry, Luc 1995. The New Ecological Order. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Foucault, Michel 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality

with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon,and Peter Miller, eds. London: Harvester.

Foucault, Michel 2003. Society Must be Defended. New York: Picador.Fundación Vida Silvestre n.d. La selva sin fronteras. Washington, DC: World Wildlife Fund.Greenough, Paul 2003. Pathogens, Pugmarks, and Political “Emergency”: The 1970s South Asian Debate

on Nature. In Nature in the Global South. Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia.

Paul Greenough and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Grimson, Alejandro 2000. Fronteras, Naciones e Identidades. La Periferia como Centro. Buenos

Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Ciccus-La Crujía.Grimson, Alejandro 2002. Hygiene wars on the Mercosur border: Local and national agency in

Uruguaiana (Brazil) and Paso de los Libres (Argentina). Identities: Global Studies in Culture and

Power 9 (2): 151–172.Grimson, Alejandro 2003. La Nación en sus Límites. Contrabandistas y Exiliados en la Frontera Ar-

gentina-Brasil. Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Gedisa.

C. A. Ferradás440

Harvey, David 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Keulartz, Jozef 1998. The Struggle for Nature. A Critique of Radical Ecology. London: Routledge.Kuehls, Thom 1996. Beyond Sovereign Territory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Kuehls, Thom 1998. Between Sovereignty and Environment: An Exploration of the Discourse of Gov-

ernment. In The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics. Karen Liftin, ed. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

La Jornada 2003. http://www.asambleas-argentinas.org/article.php3?id_articles=177. 18 September.Liftin, Karen 1998. The Greeing of Sovereignty: An Introduction. In The Greening of Sovereignty in

World Politics. Karen Liftin, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Luke, Timothy 1997. Ecocritique Contesting the politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture. Minneapo-

lis: University of Minnesota Press.Luke, Timothy 1999. Environmentality as Green Governmentality. In Discourses of the Environment.

Éric Darier, ed. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.McSweeney, Bill 1999. Security, Identity, and Interests. A Sociology of International Relations. New

York: Cambridge University Press.MisionesOnLine. 23 March 2003 Desde el 11 de septiembre, doce mil árabes abandonaron Ciudad del

Este. (http://www.misionesonline.net/action.lasso?-database=noticias&-layout=web&-response=%).MisionesOnLine. 3 October 2003. En Iguazú se esperan protestas en contra del Foro sobre terrorismo

en la Triple Frontera. (http://www.misionesonline.net/action.lasso?-database=noticias&-layout=web&-response=%).

MisionesOnLine. 20 November 2001. Ahora los “terroristas internacionales” quieren reunirse bajo la

sombra de las cataratas. (http://www.misionesonline.net/action.lasso?-database=noticias&-layout=web&-response=% 21paginas%2noticia.html&la_edicion=965&la)

Mutimer, David 1999. Beyond Strategy: Critical Thinking and the New Security. In Contemporary

Security and Strategy. Craig Snyder, ed. New York: Routledge.O’Connor, Martin 1994 On the Misadventures of Capitalist Nature. In Is Capitalism Sustainable?Political

Economy and the Politics of Ecology. Martin O’Connor, ed. New York: Guilford.O’Connor, James 1998. Natural Causes. Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford.Pagina 12. 23 March 2003. Kollmann, Raúl. Irak termina en la Triple Frontera. El Documento que

Estados Unidos difunde en los Organismos de Seguridad. (http://200.61.159.98/diario/elmundo/4-17944.html)

Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins 1994. Transnational Capitalism and Hydropolitics in Argentina. The Yacyretá

Dam. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.Rifkin, Jeremy 2002. The Hydrogen Economy. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.Rutheford, Paul 1999. Ecological Modernization and Environmental Risk. In Discourses of the

Environmen. Éric Darier, ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Sachs, Wolfgang 1999. Social Justice and Environmental Sustainability in the Post-Development Era.

In Ecology, Politics and Violent Conflict. Mohamed Suliman, ed. London: Zed Books.Shultz, Richard, Roy Godson, and Ted Greenwood (eds.) 1993. Security Studies for the 1990s. New

York: Brasseys.Smith, Neil 1996. The Production of Nature. In Future/Natural. Nature/Science/Culture. George

Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, and Tim Putnam, eds. London:Routledge.

Stokke, Olav Schram 1997. Regimes as Governance Systems. In Global Governance. Drawing In-

sights from the Environmental Experience. Oran R. Young, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Vidal, Hernán J. 2000. La Frontera Después del Ajuste. De la Producción de Soberanía a la Producción

de Ciudadanía en Río Turbio. In Fronteras, Naciones e Identidades. La periferia como Centro.

Alejandro Grimson, ed. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Ciccus- La Crujía.Waever, Ole 1995. Securitization and Desecuritization. In On Security. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, ed.

New York: Columbia University Press.Waever, Ole 1998. Insecurity, Security, and Security in the West European Non-War Community. In

Security Communities. Emanuel Adler, ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.


Walt, Stephen M. 1991. The renaissance of security studies. International Studies Quarterly 35 (2):211–239.

Wyn Jones, Richard 1999. Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.Zerner, Charles 2003. Dividing Lines: Nature, Culture and Commerce in Indonesia’s Aru Islands,

1856-1997. In Nature in the Global South. Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia.Paul Greenough and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

C. A. Ferradás442