The verdict came in February: a precise and aggressive campaign by citizens' groups, coupled with support from the media and the public, managed to rescue nearly 124,000 acres in Paraguay's Chaco region from development.

According to Víctor Manuel Valdovinos of the Environmental Law Institute in Paraguay, the controversy began last year, when a government agency, the Rural Welfare Institute, surveyed Defenders of the Chaco National Park. Although the park was created in 1975, its borders existed only on paper. With two million acres in northeastern Paraguay, the Chaco is largest park in the country. It is a little known, hot, and arid land of cactus and tangled thorn-tree forest.

The Ayoreo, a reclusive indigenous group, hunts in the Chaco, and the park is a refuge for such large mammals as jaguars, pumas, giant anteaters, and giant peccaries. This hefty wild pig is endangered, a victim of overhunting and agricultural sprawl.

The Institute's survey results were announced in August 1999 and caught conservationists off-guard, reports Valdovinos. Some 124,000 acres that were inside the park on paper were now decreed to be outside the park. The now unprotected land was among the most fertile in the Chaco and included one of the two supplies of fresh water in the region. The government also announced plans to turn some of the land over to the military and to sell the rest to the private sector, to be converted into farms and cattle ranches.

By January, ten conservation groups had formed a coalition and launched a masterful public information campaign. Nancy Cardozo is executive director of the Moisés Bertoni Foundation, a leading member of the coalition. She says that outside support, particularly from the AVINA Foundation in the U.S., the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Agency for International Development, was crucial to the campaign. Information specialists helped train others in how to write press releases, give interviews, and present a clear message. Trips to the park were arranged for journalists and decision-makers. The media responded with frequent and thorough coverage of the controversy.

"The issue was very sensitive," Cardozo says, "since the supposed beneficiaries of the land, which would be sold at a very low price, were business people, cattle ranchers, and even a former president."

She adds that the immediate and outspoken reaction from international institutions like the European Union, The Nature Conservancy, and the embassy of Spain boosted the conservationists' cause. Eventually, 45 diverse citizens' groups in Paraguay joined the coalition, including the Boy and Girl Scouts, who managed to collect 12,500 signatures on a petition of protest in just 15 days.

On February 21, the Rural Welfare Institute announced they would respect the original boundaries of Defenders of the Chaco National Park. Cardozo says the campaign's success was mainly due to people who were tired of being passive and wanted to "wake up Paraguayan citizens, with the decision to join together to change things."

Marciano Barreto, director of Paraguay's National Parks and Wildlife Service, says he was pleasantly surprised by the public's passion for the park. He thinks the time may now be right to promote a proposal to join Chaco park with Bolivia's Kaa'lya park, creating a binational protected area of nearly 15 million acres. @