“We were very happy when we lived on the banks of the Paraná River. We had our houses, we had our animals and our mint crops, which we sold on the Brazilian side of the river”, says Carmen Martínez.
With notable melancholy, the 84-year-old says that she does not know how to begin talking about her countless memories of her former home in the east of Paraguay alongside the Paraná—one of South America’s great waterways—and of the hardships she has faced since her indigenous community, Tekoha Sauce, was forced to leave it during the construction of the immense Itaipú Dam in 1982.
Carmen is sat on a plastic chair by the side of a dirt track. On one side of this narrow road is a seemingly endless field used for large-scale commercial agriculture. On the other side is the Limoy nature reserve—a 13.3 km2 area of dense forest administered by Itaipú Binacional, an institution owned and run jointly by the Paraguayan and Brazilian states that is also responsible for the Itaipú Dam. This thin strip of land between the two contrasting landscapes is, at present, the temporary home of the 43 families that make up Tekoha Sauce.
