AP PHOTOS: A river route for food and crime: The dual nature of a major South American waterway

VILLA GOBERNADOR GALVEZ, Argentina (AP) — From its headwaters in Brazil, the Paraguay River flows hundreds of miles (kilometers) south to where it joins the Parana River to form a single 2,100-mile (3,400-kilometer) waterway that carries much of the agricultural and mineral wealth of South America to the Atlantic.

The riverine waterway connects Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay and carries much of the world’s soybeans, ore and minerals.

While the Amazon River is longer and bigger, the Parana-Paraguay waterway carries almost as much freight. In a sense, it is the Mississippi River for the nations of South America’s southern cone.

Given the nature of the freight — bulk cargos — most of the thousands of ships that ply this waterway are huge, hulking transports carrying loads for international food conglomerates like Cargill. They tower above the low-lying port towns that dot the length of the Paraguay-Parana.

Into the bowels of the ships are fed unimaginably large quantities of soy beans from warehouses holding equally gargantuan piles of soy, the basic foodstuff for millions of farm animals around the globe.

But like the Mississippi, the waterway known locally as the “hidrovía” also conserves traces of its past.

Fisherman Dante Andino rises at dawn, around 5 a.m. His son Pablo, 14, accompanies him, learning the trade.

The elder Andino puts on his rubber boots and once on the water carefully uncoils the net he will cast by hand four or five times in a day from the prow of his tiny row boat.

On average, that will earn him around $20 per day. His net is the most valuable tool he owns, and the one that is most at risk from the huge freighters. “If we are not careful, they run over our nets and cut them.”

“This waterway has made it very difficult for us fisherman, because for these big ships to pass, they have to dredge out (the river bottom) very deep,” said Andino, as he prepared his net. “They tell us that the river is for agricultural exports, not for fishermen.”

“But we have families, daily expenses, we can't stop,” he said. “I am 35 years old, and stopping fishing now and looking for other work would be difficult.”

Gustavo Idígoras, the head of Argentina's oil and seed business chamber, said the freight traffic on the waterway cannot stop. It's a question of “world food security,” he says.

“It is truly a highway that connects our country with 120 overseas markets,” said Idígoras.

But the waterway also carries violence and drug trafficking. And the drug cartels, among them, Brazil’s First Capital Command, have found devious and complex ways to use the waterway to ship cocaine as far away as Belgium and Holland.

In the last two years, more than 50 tons of cocaine that traveled this route through South America were seized from the European ports of Antwerp, Belgium and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Much of it was controlled by the First Capital Command.

The trafficking is so large-scale that it can sometimes be downright brazen.

In July, authorities at a river port on the outskirts of Asuncion, Paraguay seized four tons of cocaine that had been packed into sugar sacks in a container bound for Antwerp, Belgium. The traffickers apparently hoped that one sack of white crystals would look much like any other.

According to a 2019 investigation by Paraguay’s anti-drug agency, Senad, huge loads of cocaine were produced in Bolivia. From there, traffickers loaded it aboard small airplanes and landed in Paraguay’s Chaco region, which borders Bolivia.

It’s the perfect geography for drug trafficking, said Francisco Ayala, a spokesman for Senad.

“It is an ideal terrain for trafficking all kinds of products, it is ideal,” said Ayala. “It is a sparsely populated area with rough terrain, directly on the border with Bolivia.”

“Paraguay’s Chaco (region) has, and lends itself to, setting up clandestine airstrips” for drug flights mainly from Bolivia, he said.

Once in Paraguay, the drugs in the 2019 case were taken by land to Seguro de Villeta, a shipping port on the upper Paraguay River. There, the cocaine was hidden in freight containers bound for Belgium and Holland.

Farther down the river is Rosario, Argentina, the picturesque hometown of soccer star Lionel Messi and revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. It lies just 180 miles (300 kilometers) from where the vast river enters the sea. Here, the trafficking and violence intensifies as the shipments get closer to the sea and drug gangs vie to protect their shipments. Homicide numbers in Rosario are five times the national average for Argentina.

Rosario’s link to soccer goes beyond Messi; in November, authorities said they were investigating the killings of two leaders of the fan club for the city’s soccer team, Rosario Central, as a possible hit by rivals or drug gangs.

Things got so bad that President Javier Milei instituted a crackdown on crime. Known as “Plan Bandera (the Flag Plan)," police were sent into the city’s roughest neighborhoods and tightened control on gang leaders running their operations from inside prisons.