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Presentation short abstract

In the Argentine Chaco, jaguar reintroduction collides with an older pastoral regime. Drawing on the Patchy Anthropocene, we trace how competing multispecies histories produce friction and argue that coexistence requires negotiating within the patch, not overwriting it.

Presentation long abstract

The reintroduction of jaguars (Panthera onca) into the Argentine Chaco has sharpened tensions between transnational conservation agendas and local modes of relating to nature. We argue these tensions are not simply human–wildlife issues but are shaped by socioecological ruptures between two distinct multispecies land-use regimes with competing histories, infrastructures, and claims to legitimacy. Drawing on the Patchy Anthropocene framework and the concept of land-use regimes, we analyse how overlapping regimes produce enduring patches and frictions in a frontier landscape, while foregrounding the agency of nonhuman actors in shaping how regimes hold. First, we reconstruct a Criollo–cattle regime in which semi-feral livestock were fundamental to settlement and remain inextricably linked to livelihoods, culture, and historically embedded relations with carnivores. We then contrast this with an emergent rewilding–jaguar regime that reframes the jaguar as a flagship for a conservation economy organised around wilderness imaginaries, protected areas, and ecotourism. We show how this rewilding project privileges particular pasts and futures while rendering residual the long history of the Criollo–cattle regime, alongside Indigenous regimes that persist and precede both. Based on qualitative research in the Impenetrable region—combining oral histories with Criollo pastoralists and content analysis of public materials produced by key conservation actors—we characterise the contemporary Chaco as a patchy mosaic constituted through overlapping and competing histories. We conclude that coexistence requires conservation practice that engages these competing multispecies histories rather than overwriting them.