The Yacyretá Dam: Argentina's Ecological and Political Disaster

In this episode, we trace the construction of the Yacyretá Dam on the Paraná River, a project that began in earnest during the military dictatorship of the late 1970s and ballooned into one of Latin America’s most costly infrastructure failures. We examine how the Corriente del Viento power station was built to generate electricity for Buenos Aires while flooding the Mbigua island ecosystem and displacing thousands of Guarani communities. Lucas walks us through the bureaucratic entanglement between the binational agency ABAA and the Argentine government, detailing how corruption scandals in the 1990s turned a public utility into a black hole for billions of dollars. Luna probes the environmental aftermath, asking about the lasting impact on the river’s biodiversity and the social unrest that followed the privatization attempts under Carlos Menem. Together, they uncover how a symbol of modern progress became a monument to mismanagement, leaving behind a legacy of debt, ecological strain, and unresolved community grievances that still echo along the Paraná today.

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