The Paraguayan Department of Itapúa and the Argentine Province of Misiones are united a common geography, history and ethnicity. For this region, yerba mate has been an important common component since pre-Columbian times.
A yerba mate plantation. (Photo: Leandro Kibisz)
Apart from playing an important role in Guaraní culture, yerba mate was also an important economic resource and source of political power for the Jesuit Missions that were spread over this territory during colonial times. The product remained critical during the first decades of independence of both countries, Argentina and Paraguay, and it became central for the Alto Paraná region at the end of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century.
However, there is another side to the story of yerba mate production, the investigation of which remains an unfinished task for local historians and social researchers: The Mensú system or the regime of labour exploitation and modern slavery in the natural yerbales of the Alto Paraná zone.
Even though some authors like Rafael Barrett, Horacio Quiroga, Alfredo Varela, and Augusto Roa Bastos wrote about the Mensú, and there are a couple of very famous Argentine films such as Mario Soffici´s ‘Los Prisioneros de la Tierra’ (‘Prisoners of the Land’) in 1939, and ‘Las Aguas Bajan Turbias’ (‘The Waters Run Murky’), directed by Hugo Del Carril in 1952, there is still very little research on the issue.
The Meaning of Being a Mensú
The word Mensú refers to a person or a group of people hired to work in the natural yerbales of the Alto Paraná region, which comprises the current Departments of Itapúa, Alto Paraná and Canindeyú in Paraguay and the Province of Misiones in Argentina. Mensú is a Guaraní transformation of the Spanish term ‘mensualero’ meaning ‘a person who receives a monthly payment’.
Poster for ‘Prisioneros de la Tierra’.
Nevertheless, Mensú has another, darker, meaning, part of the dark history of the region. The Mensú regime was a system of labour exploitation based on a modern form of slavery, which was covered by a legal façade of labour contracts generally signed between the workers and middlemen acting on behalf of the yerbales owner.
These labour contracts established the conditions to set up a form of modern slavery: the Mensú recognised that the contractor, on behalf of the patron, had given him a salary advance and committed himself to pay that debt by working in the yerbales. In addition, the Mensú was unable to leave the settlement until this debt was paid off.
The cities of Posadas and Encarnación, in Argentina and Paraguay respectively, were the main sources of Mensú workers and the epicentre of middlemen activities. In many cases, the middlemen (who received a commission for every signed contract) were also the owners of general stores and brothels where the Mensú generally spent (or wasted) their salary advance in alcohol, tobacco, and women before they were put aboard boats that sailed up the Paraná River in order to be settled in the forests where natural yerbales grew. From this point on, hardship and violence, either implicit or explicit, were every day occurrences.
Once in the yerbales, the Mensú, either alone or with their families, stood at the mercy of the armed foremen (the capangas) and their henchmen, whose main task was to guarantee that the workers did not escape from the settlements and that they produced the quota of yerba mate they had been committed to. The capangas were willing to resort to every kind of measure to ensure the patron’s orders were obeyed; they became the owners of life and death in a cruel and well-hidden underworld.
A scene from ‘Las Aguas Bajan Turbias’.
In this context, the ongoing coercion on the Mensú was considered an essential way to keep the workforce under control. The word coercion implied a wide range of options: psychological coercion, threats, physical punishments, sanctions, sexual abuse, and even the killing of those who dared to escape.
Life in the yerbales was miserable. The Mensú and their families (when they had gone with them or did not have the option to avoid going to the yerbales) were forced to work long hours, performing tasks which implied great physical effort. They were poorly fed and housed in extremely precarious settlements, where overcrowding was common.
The living conditions of women and children were even harder than those of the Mensú. The children in the settlements were not given any opportunity for schooling and in most of the cases had to work with the adults. On the other hand, if the women were not busy taking care of the children and the household, they also usually helped their husbands with the work at the yerbales. In many cases they were subjected to sexual abuse by the patron, the capangas and the henchmen.
Taking account of this hard reality, the spread of diseases and high mortality rates were common in the settlements. In many cases the Mensú who got sick were not allowed to go to Posadas or to the nearest town to receive medical attention and every day of work lost to health problems was added to the debt.
A Vicious Circle
This infamous form of modern slavery was in fact a vicious circle as many of the Mensú were trapped in a never-ending process of indebtedness. After enduring the tough work and life at the yerbales, they returned to the ‘recruitment centres’ of Posadas and Encarnación with almost no money, forcing them to seek a new salary advance and sign another debt contract. There were few other options to leave poverty.
The main reasons this system to function were the legal façade provided by the abusive contract the complicity of the local authorities who were aware of the system and allowed the owners of the plantations to implement it.
A scene from ‘Prisioneros de la Tierra’.
The payment of the salary not in legal currency but in vales (payment notes) was another key component of the labour exploitation. These vales could be spent only at the settlement´s general stores which offered bad quality goods at extortionate prices. In this way, the Mensú, often living below the poverty line, took a long period to pay off his debt with the latifundista (the owner of the settlement).
A not so uncommon form of modern slavery
This system was not unique to the yerbales of Itapúa and Misiones. Indeed, it was also used in the Quebracho exploitations, mainly in the north of Santa Fe Province and the Paraguayan Chaco, as well as in the sugar factories of Tucumán Province and in the Paraguayan region of Guairá.
This infamous form of slavery, based on the exploitation of the Mensú´s workforce started in the Alto Paraná region in the 1870s, mainly due to two important factors: the expansion of companies, many of them of Argentine and under foreign ownership, that bought large estates on both sides of the Paraná River, and the relative availability of workforce after the end of the Triple Alianza War (1864 – 1870).
The system began to crumble in the 1940s and it was the consequence of many simultaneous reasons. First, the exploitation of natural yerbales was substituted by cultivated ones. Due to an increasing European immigration to the zone, a vast sector of the countryside was populated by newcomers who subsequently started to grow yerba mate in small and medium sized farms. Hence, the Mensú workforce was no longer so necessary.
Also at that time Argentina witnessed the rise of Peronismo and in consequence, a new wave of policies aimed at social welfare and labour protection.
Across the border in Paraguay, the decline of the Mensú exploitation system was slower; it was not until the 1960s that it entered to its final stage. Some important reasons were the increasing colonisation of the lands, the clearance of the subtropical forests to grow crops, and the substitution, as in Argentina, of natural yerbales with cultivated ones.
The tragedy of the Mensú is just a chapter of the unfinished history of Itapúa, Misiones, and the entire Alto Paraná region on both sides of the frontier. This region still has a long way to rediscover itself as a common matrix that traverses the national border. And a great effort is still required to put an end to another chapter of its history which began even before the Mensú, one of endemic social inequality, corruption, and injustice.
