Rising water cements need for solidarity in Asunción

Latir (heartbeat), a mural based on the song Soy de la Chacarita by Lali González. A woman's hands lift the neighborhood from the flood water. Photo © William Costa.

Reportage • William Costa • August 8, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Christian Núñez makes his way down the long public stairway to the lower levels of Chacarita, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the Paraguayan capital, Asunción, and home to some of the city’s most marginalized areas.

“Many people don’t understand that this has always been a cradle of social activists, musicians, poets, actors, social leaders and political leaders,” said Núñez, an activist and longtime resident of the neighborhood, which is officially known as Ricardo Brugada, as he walks past houses adorned with colorful murals.

Núñez, who is dressed in a T-shirt and cargo pants on the humid afternoon we spoke, organizes tours highlighting the rich history and art of the neighborhood to challenge the stigmatization and criminalization of the community by media outlets, which often portray Chacarita as if it were entirely dominated by drug-related violence. 

When he reaches a well-maintained public square at the bottom of the stairway, Núñez pauses and states, “This is the part of the neighborhood that floods. During the great flood of 1983, the water came up to here,” he said, raising his hand to forehead height. 

This lower section of Chacarita forms part of the Bañados, which translates as wetlands. They are a series of Asunción neighborhoods built on the floodplains of the Paraguay River, one of the country’s great waterways. 

According to a Shelter Projects report, historically, large-scale cyclical floods have occurred roughly every ten years, lasting up to ten months. Núñez points out that smaller floods also cause damage and says that every flood brings enormous suffering, displacement, and economic loss. Approximately one fifth of Asunción’s 500,000 inhabitants call the Bañados home. Some 3,500 families live in the floodable section of Chacarita, just blocks from the city’s downtown.

Residents of Chacarita have long pushed for measures to lessen the impact of the flooding. With the next major flood perpetually looming on the horizon, Núñez and other residents continue working to build a grassroots movement that can press authorities to act. 

In the short term, they demand that adequate measures be taken for flood response, including the preparation of shelters and emergency supplies. In the long term, they are fighting for infrastructure, such as new housing, the reinforcement of flood protection around the streams that flow through the neighborhood and the improvement of garbage collection and sewage processing facilities, so that residents can live in sanitary conditions, without fear of the rising waters.

Defined by Water

From its origins in the eighteenth century, Chacarita has been defined by its proximity to water. 

In her book-filled office, Celia Vidallet, the 90-year-old founder and principal of the Santa Maria Goretti primary school, recalls the fish that used to be caught in the river, the washerwomen that worked nearby in one of Asunción’s thirty-three streams, and the Ykua Payagua, a well near her home that was famed for the quality of its water.

“They used to say that those that drank water from the well wouldn’t leave the neighborhood; they’d end up staying,” she told me as children and teaching staff popped in and out.

However, the abundance of water could quickly lead to disaster. Vidallet says that as far back as 1905 her family would shelter flood victims in their home, which was on slightly higher land. “They would all build their temporary homes in our yard,” she said.

Chacarita is different in many ways today. It has grown enormously due to internal migration from rural Paraguay, and the water flowing through and around the community is laced with the pollution from a city lacking in water-treatment facilities and refuse-disposal services. One thing that has remained constant is that floods displace residents. 

Raquel Dupont, a teacher at Santa Maria Goretti, says that since she was a child, her family has been forced to periodically construct temporary shelters in improvised camps set up in public parks and squares.

“You have to move all your things and you don’t know where to go or how to do it,” she said from the other side of the school office. 

Dupont’s family was one of approximately 60,000 Paraguayan families displaced by devastating floods in 2019, which was the third major flood event in a five-year period. She was unable to return home for almost a year.

Though there has been no major nationwide floods since 2019, an official report indicates that flooding, drought, and heatwaves have increased sharply in Paraguay in recent decades. Climate change has heightened concerns about what’s to come.

“We still live with worry. When the river starts to go up, we keep track of how many centimeters it rises each day. We live with that fear,” said Dupont. A lack of state support during floods exacerbates residents’ suffering, she noted. 

“[Aid from the state] depends on politics,” she stated. She explained how local political leaders distribute humanitarian aid through a patronage system. “You have to belong to their party.”

In addition to widespread corruption in the management of emergency aid funds, authorities have also failed to prepare for the repeated and predictable floods, according to activist Núñez. 

“The authorities always react late: when the families are already in the water. There isn’t a designated shelter for them anywhere,” he says. “They wait until the water is up to people’s necks before declaring an emergency.”

Núñez said that the General Coordination Group for Neighbours’ Committees, Organizations and Institutions of the Chacarita (COSIC), to which he belongs, mobilized this year in response to the forecast—which was incorrect, fortunately—that there would be a big flood in 2024. 

“We started to press the institutions to get moving and create a working group,” he said. “And they really didn’t react.”

A view over the lower, floodable area of Chacarita in Asunción, Paraguay. Photo © William Costa.

Soy de la Chacarita 

In the absence of state support, solidarity between residents has long been the norm in the Chacarita. As in other Bañados neighborhoods, residents have had to build much of the local infrastructure themselves.

Guillermo Cane, a 74-year-old former president of the residents’ committee of the Pocito ("little well”) area of Chacarita, told me residents pooled resources to build almost everything around him over the years, including the long, colorful staircase leading down into the lower area.

“We started by raising money to buy bricks and other things and we built the stairway,” he said. “We did it: my dad, my mom, my uncle.”

This solidarity is palpable during floods. Residents ferry one another across the highly polluted flood water in canoes. Cane pointed out two long planks in his front yard that were previously used as part of a communal emergency bridge.  

A mural outside of his home, part of a grassroots effort to convert Chacarita into one of the world’s biggest open-air art galleries, depicts a woman’s hands lifting the neighborhood out of the flood water. It is based on the song “Soy de la Chacarita” [“I am from Chacarita”] by Maneco Galeano, which narrates the hardships many suffer during the floods.

“I help you today, tomorrow you help me, and so we all help each other,” said Cane.

Emergency work to relocate the Elisa Alicia Lynch Elementary School in Chacarita, Asunción, Paraguay, away from the rising waters during a flood in 2018. Foto © Elisa Alicia Lynch Elementary School

Chacarita for Chacariteños

Residents have long pushed for a permanent solution to the displacement caused by flooding and municipal and national authorities have put forward dozens of schemes over the years. However, Núñez says that these ideas frequently fail to consider residents’ attachment to their community, which has often been forged over multiple generations. 

"It’s about having roots in this place, this culture, this way of living and sharing, of creating community,” said Núñez. “People who come with projects from the outside often don’t understand what living in community is and what being rooted really means.”

Several government programs led to residents being relocated to housing in distant areas, where they were cut off from their social networks, far from workplaces and had trouble accessing transportation and public services. Many of those relocated have since returned to Chacarita. 

Community organizations including the COSIC have demanded that authorities offer residents solutions within the neighborhood. As a result, several projects within the community to provide housing protected from flooding are in progress. Nonetheless, these projects have faced years of delay and even when complete, they won't be enough to house the 3,500 at-risk families.

“Our slogan was that the Chacarita belongs to the chacariteños, those who live in the Chacarita,” said Núñez. 

In the heart of the flood zone, Juan Carlos Pérez Torres, the principal of Elisa Alicia Lynch elementary school and vice-president of COSIC, acknowledges how hard their struggle has been, especially given that property developers are eyeing their community. 

“We have to deal with the government’s links to groups interested in the neighborhood’s land: it’s in a very privileged position near the Costanera Promenade and downtown,” he said, emphasizing that residents are being vigilant with all the processes and projects carried out by external organizations.

In the meantime, it is community solidarity that keeps institutions like Elisa Alicia Lynch going. Parents and teachers are forced to pay out-of-pocket for basic services such as drinking water for the 350 pupils, given that—ironically for a floodplain—piped water only reaches this part of the Chacarita for a few hours each day. 

As he flicks through photos of the process of relocating the school during a flood in 2018, Pérez Torres reflects on the difficulties and achievements of running the institution under such stressful conditions. To explain the fortitude of the school and the surrounding residents, he refers to the song “Soy de la Chacarita.” 

“As the song says, you leave your home, you go, but you always come back to recover and to rebuild once again.”