Estrattivismo agricolo e territori campesino-indigeni nel Chaco Salteño (Argentina)

In this paper, I reflect on the agricultural “productive frontier” expansion on the territories inhabited by campesinos and indigenous people, in the Chaco salteño region (Argentina). I specifically focus on the socio-environmental consequences of deforestation carried out mainly for the large-scale cultivation of transgenic soybeans and for intensive cattle breeding. The current agricultural expansion reminds us of colonial forms of space and population control, updated and adapted to the new global scenarios and the neoliberal economy. For these reasons, adopting the perspective of those who suffer from deterritorialization, it is possible to speak about neo-colonial extractivism. The production model based on monoculture, and the logics connected to it, necessarily involves a transformative power that involves territories and societies and imposes a technological, economic, social and political change of an entire region that for centuries has been considered an unproductive desert populated by “savages”.