How Smugglers Conceal Themselves in the Chaco: An Airstrip in Paraguay’s Woods

08 июля 2025

2200

How Smugglers Conceal Themselves in the Chaco: An Airstrip in Paraguay’s Woods

It’s an unusually hot morning in June, and we’ve been driving for hours through the Chaco, a vast and rugged forest in northern Paraguay. The mud roads are winding, dusty, and so narrow in some stretches that tree branches scrape against the windows of our two trucks. We have seen no traces of human life since we departed at dawn; only dirt, trees, and sky. All the immensity of the Chaco lies before us.

After several hours, our small crew comes across a pair of shoes and some empty bottles discarded on the side of the road — signs we may be approaching our objective. A kilometer on we find an improvised camp with a couple of logs set up beneath a thin metal sheet. A motorcycle is parked with the keys in the ignition, ready to go. 

“You can tell that they never stopped operating here,” our local guide Gaspar says in Guarani, an indigenous language. 

Gaspar, who grew up in the Chaco and knows this arid terrain like the back of his hand, travels with two almost inseparable companions: his hat and an old shotgun. The firearm was once needed to defend cattle from wild jaguars and pumas. Now, we are on alert for a more dangerous species — drug traffickers.

Yet shortly after passing the makeshift camp, our journey is thwarted by tree trunks and branches that appear to have been laid across the road. Frustrated by the blockade, we send up our drone to investigate. And then we see it: some 400 meters from where we stand is a massive brown scar, cutting through the intense green of the forest. The size — equivalent to some 24 Olympic-sized pools — is astonishing. We have found what we are looking for: a secret narcotrafficking airstrip struck into the heart of the Paraguayan Chaco. 

An aerial view of the area the airstrip, with evidence of recent burns in the surrounding area.

Everything we see from above suggests the runway is still active. There are remnants of recent burns to the side, clearing the area for planes to land, plus fresh tire marks and several small roads connecting different sections of the strip.

Even Gaspar is impressed. He notes that encountering one of these remote runways — particularly an active one — is rare.

“We are facing a unique situation,” he says. 

‘One large airstrip’ 

Stretching into Argentina and Bolivia, the Chaco is a biodiversity hotspot, home to a rich array of plant life, birds, wild cats and vulnerable species such as the giant armadillo.

But the region’s extreme heat and lack of fresh water make it a harsh environment for humans — one of the top appeals for criminal groups looking to evade the eyes of the state as they shift large quantities of cocaine from producers to consumers. 

Our team set out on our expedition through the Chaco in June 2024 after learning that a landowner in the region had been alerting authorities to the existence of clandestine airstrips used by traffickers on their property. 

According to Paraguay’s National Anti-Drug Secretariat (Senad), 10 such runways have been detected and destroyed by authorities in the Paraguayan Chaco between 2017 and 2022. And traffic can be busy: investigators suspect that in just one part of the region they were used for more than 900 flights in little over a year.

For drug smugglers, the sparsely populated territory offers the cover of complete darkness at night, plus hundreds of kilometers of borderlands with minimal security. Until February of this year, Paraguay had been the only country in the region without radars to detect the type of low-altitude aircraft flown by drug smugglers. 

As a result, organized crime groups have been using the Chaco as a one “large airstrip, large camp or large warehouse, due to the lack of technology,” said Zully Rolón, a former Senad minister.

Satellite images showing the emergence of the airstrip seen by reporters between 2020 and 2024 (Credit: AirbusCNES/Airbus/Google Earth)

Paraguay’s slice of the Chaco is also appealing to traffickers for its strategic location.

In a report sent to prosecutors in 2022,  the Senad’s intelligence unit described how various international criminal operations have used the forest as a “safe transit” site for cocaine. Many of the planes come from neighboring Bolivia, the world’s third largest coca producer with more than 30,000 hectares of active plantations. The aircrafts land on the runways, which are equipped with improvised lighting systems for nighttime flights, drop off the drugs, fill their gas tanks, and take off again.

From there, the cocaine is typically carried by plane or truck in two directions. The first route runs east to Canindeyú, a region of Paraguay that shares some 200 kilometers of dry border with Brazil, which is both a major cocaine consumer of and a top exporter to Europe. 

The second path heads south to ports on the Paraguay river outside the capital Asuncion, which connect to the Atlantic. According to the UN’s anti-drug agency, this waterborne route has recently become a major departure point for cocaine headed to European markets. 

Investigations by authorities in the region allege that runways in the Paraguayan Chaco have been used by several notorious border gangs. For example, a 2022 report from Brazil’s Federal Police accuses Antonio Joaquin Mota, an alleged Brazilian mafia boss and fugitive known as “Tonho”, of using an airstrip near the border with Bolivia as part of his gang’s narco-trafficking operation. 

An investigation by Paraguayan prosecutors also alleges that Sebastián Marset, a Uruguayan fugitive on the United States’ most-wanted list, has made use of a clandestine runway in Cerro Cabrera — which is in the middle of a protected area of the Paraguayan Chaco — in order to move thousands of kilos of cocaine to Europe.

In Cerro Cabrera alone, investigators suspect that there were nearly 900 flights between 2020 and 2021. While Marset remains at large, a crackdown on his trafficking gang has seen five Paraguayans convicted. A ruling party senator who allegedly lent his private plane to Marset is also facing trial on charges of criminal association and money laundering. 

Five-Star Runway 

The airstrip that caught our attention, which measured 1,180 meters long and 55 meters wide, had been raided several years earlier by Paraguay’s Joint Task Force (FTC), an elite security unit.  In May 2021, authorities said they would destroy the site after agents discovered the runway plus a makeshift shed with 490 kilos of cocaine, lighting equipment, firearms, fuel, generators and dozens of drums.

The location of the airstrip in the Gran Chaco region, which also extents into Bolivia and Argentina.

Yet when we viewed the strip from above last year, all signs suggested it had resumed operation. This is typical, according to former Senad minister Rolón. Traffickers quickly fix runways or build new ones after they are dismantled by authorities, as the state lacks the capacity to carry out routine inspections, she said. 

"All the destruction we do is inconsequential. When you destroy a runway with explosives, all it does is put it out of use for a few days, because the track continues to operate, no matter the damage.”

A pilot who has experience operating small planes, and who asked to remain anonymous for security concerns, described the runway our team found as a “five-star” site. He noted the level terrain and said the site was large enough for small or even medium-sized aircrafts to land and take-off. In particular Cessnas — the American-made planes favored by drug smugglers. 

"Cessnas are air tractors. They can descend and take off anywhere," he said.

Tannin Factory

The land home to the airstrip our team visited has a unique history. It belongs to a large swathe of the Chaco that was purchased in the late 19th century by an Argentine businessman who established the continent’s first tannin extraction factory from the region’s towering quebracho trees. 

For decades, the small local population worked as if in feudal times under the rigid control of the firm, which officially ceased operations in the mid-1990s.

Since then, this territory has been divided up further, with nearly a tenth of it sold in 2000 to the Unification Church, a religion also known as the Moon sect that was started in South Korea. The sale triggered protests from locals who are still seeking to secure ownership of the land they’ve lived on for generations.

Last year, a company that owns a portion of the land, and which runs reforestation projects, made complaints to the Public Prosecutor’s Office about 10 clandestine airstrips and drug trafficking facilities it had detected on its property, similar to the one our team visited. The firm, Atenil SA, says it has only received a response from authorities about one of the sites. Prosecutors did not respond to our requests to comment. 

‘Better not to talk’

Despite its punishing climate, the Chaco is home to some human activity, including indigenous tribes such as the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, the Nivaclé, and the Yshir. Defenders of these indigenous communities say a small group of Ayoreos also continue to live in total isolation in the thick forest.

Women from the Ayoreo indigenous community in, Boquerón, Paraguay.

Cattle ranchers and religious Mennonite communities, who fled Europe a century ago, have also settled in the region.

On our return, our guide Gaspar explained that we had taken a longer route because a ranch foreman hadn’t allowed us to pass through his property. There was a story behind his refusal.

Months before our visit, a group of well-armed men dressed in military uniforms appeared at the ranch, claiming to be looking for drug gangs, said Gaspar. They brutally beat the foreman and terrorized his family. Since then, access to both locals and foreigners has been blocked, and fear has set in, even among familiar faces.

There are no official records of that incident, not even a complaint. No one informed the authorities.

"People here aren’t used to reporting anything, especially when in recent years we’ve learned that it’s better not to talk about these things," Gaspar said.