This chapter examines journalistic representations of the yerba mate industry created by the Hispano-Paraguayan author Rafael Barrett. It describes the long history of the yerba industry from its origins in the sixteenth century to the current vogue of nutraceutical herbal supplements before focusing on the conditions that led to massive exploitation of agricultural laborers in the debt-peonage system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This establishes the context for a detailed examination of the politics and poetics of Barrett’s chronicles. Barrett, known today as a pioneering anarchist intellectual in the Río de la Plata region of South America, was primarily focused on exposing the human rights and labor abuses of the yerba industry, but his writings also suggest a mode of ethnobotanical inquiry at odds with the Western ontological distinction between nature and culture, a mode in which yerba itself demonstrates a startling and fascinating agency.

Between 1870 and 1930, wars in Latin America reveal an increase in the disproportion between political ends and technological innovation. They also show a continual professionalization of armies and soldiers as they attest to a conclusive appropriation of war as a state-sponsored practice and become acts of violence toward space, but only insofar as they are a key element in the production of capitalist space. The Chaco War (1932–1935) serves as a case study, for it exemplifies a critical moment in the history of state violence and capital accumulation. For Bolivia, it gave birth to a new generation of writers and a very distinct literary movement, as it also embodied a historical transition towards ecological imperialism and petroculture. For Paraguay, it was the end of a “national culture of defeat” originated at the end of the War of the Triple Alliance and meant the final territorial annexation of the Chaco Boreal and its resources.