The third chapter provides an account of the Argentine Iguazú National Park’s first forty years. Initially conceived as an instrument to foster border colonization, the park included urban settlements inside its protected area, which set Argentine national parks apart internationally. Park directors attracted settlers from other regions of Argentina with promises of cheap lots and jobs in infrastructure projects and sought to transform them into a model border population. Throughout the years, life scientists at the Argentine national park agency criticized this policy of settlements inside national parks. At the same time, members of international bodies such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) proposed a redefinition of the idea of national park, one which excluded the presence of humans. This debate ultimately informed changes in conservation policy in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s. Scientists and park officials began advocating abroad for a more restrictive definition to influence policymakers at home. By the 1970s, the conservationists in the agency prevailed, adopting the international discourse of strict nature conservation, retracing park boundaries, and evicting settlers.

The second chapter traces the Brazilian reaction to the developments across the border in Argentina, which led federal politicians and local park boosters to establish a protected area of their own, the Iguaçu National Park in 1939. The Brazilian government created Iguaçu in the context of the “March to the West,” the 1940s federal campaign to occupy Brazil’s hinterland as a solution for an underdeveloped frontier. But the park’s creation also reveals the crucial role of local politicians and other intermediary agents in pushing for policies of territorial development. Park proponents, including state governors and local politicians, were aware of the national park being established in Argentina and used it as leverage for pushing for a national park on the Brazilian side of the Iguazu Falls. Their activism proved decisive in the establishment of the park in Brazil. The dialogue between local actors and the seat of power in Rio de Janeiro shows how territorial control is never exclusively a top-down process.

Iguazú and Iguaçu National Parks, 2020. In the 1980s, UNESCO listed Iguazú and Iguaçu National Parks, separately, as World Heritage Site. This epilogue argues that ideas about national sovereignty and transboundary antagonism continued guiding the way park officials in the two countries framed the parks. That explains why Brazilians and Argentines ignored calls for co-management and greater integration by UNESCO officials. All in all, the two Iguazu parks were never “peace parks” as integrated adjacent transboundary parks are called.

This chapter addresses how the enforcement of park boundaries shaped the society and environment across a porous international border. It offers an extensive examination of the movements of hunters, loggers, and park rangers in and out national parks. The chapter combines primary sources with geographic information science (GIS) to explore how hunters, heart-of-palm harvesters, and rangers negotiated the two parks’ spaces. By mapping three decades of surveillance and poaching activities, this chapter shows how the boundaries dividing park and non-park territories, as well as Argentina and Brazil, became the frontline of the clash between national park officials and the local settler population engaged in extractive activities.

This section first introduces the Iguazu Falls, the binational cataracts shared between Brazil and Argentina and a major tourist destination in the two countries. It also presents the two national parks each country established in the 1930s at the falls: Iguazú National Park (Argentina, 1934) and Iguaçu National Park (Brazil, 1939). The introduction discusses the uniqueness of the two national parks, conceived since their inception as tools for the incorporation and nationalization of borderland areas, and compares them to other national park examples throughout the Americas. The section also situates the case of the two parks within recent literature on borders to understand the process of border creation that constituted the parks as spaces of nature. Finally, it proposes moving the geographical center of the history of the destruction of the Atlantic forest, the biome that played a central role in Brazil's history. This book shifts the historian's gaze from Brazil's coast to the borderland, arguing the forest is also part of the history of Argentina and Paraguay.

This chapter sets out a roadmap to understand the new politics of participation in Latin America by exploring the intersection between two important transformations in society and the state. First, we highlight new actors in state and society who are pressing for policy reform. Whereas the existing literature focuses on interests organized around social class and indigenous identity, we reveal a rainbow of societal actors that span class lines, as well as the emergence of activist bureaucrats, who work together to demand greater social inclusion and policy change. Second, while prior studies emphasize representative institutions as the main site to advance policy change, we analyze the importance of new institutions for participation in the executive and the judicial branches of government. These sites have been central for activism in a range of underexplored policy areas, including the environment; the rights of women, people with disabilities, and sexual minorities; and crime. Together, we argue, these new actors and institutions are redefining the politics of participation today in Latin America.