Sergio Rojas recalls how, as a child, he would see bulldozers rolling intoArgentina’s Gran Chaco region, razing the forests to the ground and setting the felled trees alight. Animals would scatter and flee, with armadillos, deer, snakes and lizards darting across the ground in search of a new home.
The forests of the Gran Chaco were also Rojas’s home. He and his family, members of Argentina’s Indigenous Qom community, lived a nomadic lifestyle in the forest, relying on the woodlands and rivers for shelter and food, relocating about every 20 days to allow the land to regenerate and recover.
The Gran Chaco is an expanse of arid woodland that stretches across the northernmost regions of Argentina and into Brazil,Paraguayand Bolivia. It is also the centre of rampant deforestation, driven predominantly by cattle ranching, logging and agriculture, especially the soya industry.
“The Chaco is in danger of extinction. We are witnessing an ecocide,” says Rojas. “This has to stop now because otherwise, there won’t be anything left. Nobody is doing anything – not the state nor the justice system; only the Indigenous communities. This directly affects our daily reality and our needs to survive.”
A new report published todayby the international environmental and human rights organisation Global Witness shows that the Spanish bankSantander, the 14th largest in the worldand a familiar presence on the British high street, has been indirectly funding deforestation activities in the Gran Chaco, an ecosystem sprawling across Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay.
The company Santander has invested in,the Argentinian agribusiness group Cresud, also operates in the region through the Brazilian company BrasilAgro, of which it owns 34.2% of the shares.
Global Witness says: “The company [Cresud] has deforested over 170,000 hectares [420,000 acres] in South America since the turn of the century, an area more than three times larger than Madrid.”
Known to local Argentinians as the “Impenetrable Chaco”, the area has an Indigenous population of5.6 million people spread across the four countries. It is also one of South America’s largest ecosystems and one of the region’s last climate-critical forests, home to more than 3,400 plant species and nearly 900 bird, mammal, reptile and amphibian species.
The report asserts thatSantanderhas “co-arranged”, along with “multiple Argentinean and international banks”, a total of $1.3bn (£980m) of financing for Cresud since 2011.
“The total of $1.3bn was jointly underwritten by Santander with multiple Argentinean and international banks, with Santander frequently taking the role of a lead underwriter,” the report says. “Santander co-led banking groups have helped underwrite over three-quarters of the bonds issued by the company since 2011, and the bank has provided over $50m in loans to Cresud directly.”
Santander’s financing of Cresud took place despite the bank introducing adeforestation limitation policyin 2018 and committing to a goal ofnet-zero emissions in its portfolio by 2050. “Since the policy was first published, Santander has been a co-underwriter of $850m of debt for Cresud,” says the report.
According to Global Witness, “Santander is a lead or principal underwriter for 35 of the 47 bonds issued by the company since 2002, and consortia co-lead by the bank accounts for over 90% of the total dollar value of bonds issued by the company.”
Part of the funding backed by Santander would have been used to buy and deforest land across the Chaco region via a “real estate model”, according to Global Witness.
Santander, one of theEU’s five largest banks by assets, is also the bloc’s leading lender to “forest-risk” companies. In 2024, it provided more than$600m (£452m) in financingto firms linked to beef, palm oil, soya and other agricultural supply chains that are significant drivers of deforestation.
Charlie Hammans, author of the Global Witness report, says: “The business model is finding areas to develop, purchasing them cheaply, clearing them and then selling them on. The Chaco is deemed non-productive land to be converted into productive land, as opposed to a vital ecosystem and also home to vast amounts ofIndigenous peoplesto be defended.”
Global Witness asked Santander if its financing of Cresud breached the bank’s policies. In response, Santander says its “practice is not to comment on information relating to clients or specific transactions”.
A Santander spokesperson also described the allegations in the report as “containing imprecision and potential information regarding our policies that is not accurate”, but did not provide specific evidence to support that statement.
Janus, head of the banks and nature campaign at the financial monitoring campaign organisation BankTrack, says: “Looking at its policies, Santander does not appear to be a very prudent organisation. There’s a lot of space for improvement in making those policies stringent.
“To truly stop these issues, we need a fundamental transformation in how the financial sector operates because it’s still neocolonial.”
Neither Santander nor Cresud responded to the Guardian’s requests for comment.
In recent decades, the Gran Chaco has become an agricultural hub and driver of the regional economy. Cultivation of soya beans has expanded, with a 30% increase of the area under production in Argentina between 2001 and 2022, while Paraguay saw a 15-fold rise from 2012 to 2022, according to theWorld Economic Forum.
Livestock production has also increased, especially in Paraguay, where67.4% of beef exportsoriginate from the Gran Chaco. In Argentina, the region is home to33% of the country’s cattle.
Clearing of forests across the Chaco linked to such agricultural expansion has left the region morevulnerable to the climate crisis, worsening theeffects of droughts, floods, heatwaves and forest fires. Argentina suffered $2.67bn inexport lossesdue to drought in 2022.
According to Global Witness data, most of the deforested land – more than 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) – is in Argentina, where deforestation has long scarred the northern provinces of Formosa, Santiago del Estero, Salta and Chaco, where companies such as Cresud operate.
In the past 25 years, Greenpeace Argentina calculates that approximately 8m hectares of native forest land have been lost in the country, withalmost 80% of that deforestation occurring in Argentina’s Gran Chaco.
“In the last few decades, the Gran Chaco is probably one of the most deforested areas on the planet,” says Hernán Giardini, coordinator of Greenpeace Argentina’s forest campaigns.
He notes that, besides the loss of biodiversity, local communities are also affected. “Indigenous people are often the ones who suffer the most from the impact. They may be reduced to a limited space where their way of hunting, gathering and fishing becomes unviable.”
Communities inthe Argentinian Chaco have complained repeatedlyabout feeling excluded from the consultation required for agrobusinesses to obtain land.
International law recognises the right of Indigenous peoples and local communitiesto reject projects that affect their way of life. Any such projects require their free, prior and informed consent to proceed.
“The expansion of the logging industry means not only the plundering of resources but also of our languages. They are trying to wipe us off the map,” says a Wichí leader from Formosa province, speaking anonymously.
The leader adds: “We have the obligation, passed down from our grandparents, to always take care of and defend our land and to convey its importance. We are more than ready and committed to defending our land, languages and customs.”
Hammans says unchecked deforestation and the financing of companies linked to it are caused by the “lack of international scrutiny, outdated laws that are poorly enforced – if ever, lack of resourcing for the ministries that carry out the checks, as well as governments that stand completely behind the agricultural industries”.
At the current pace of deforestation, Paraguay’s Gran Chaco region could completely vanish by 2080, Global Witness calculates.
Giardini and Hammans stress that Cresud and similar companies operate within the bounds of legality and blame feeble and outdated policies for fostering a climate that allows such practices to flourish.
“The environmental regulations regarding what these companies can do should be radically revised to determine whether any clearance going forward is viable. I really don’t think it is,” Hammans says. “The system is broken fundamentally, and to see real change, we need real regulation.”