Local heroes: a protest that made a difference. If the Hidrovia Paraguay-Parana navigation project had gone ahead, 3,400 km of river would have been turned into a shipping channel.
In the process the world’s largest wetland, The Pantanel, would have been destroyed. In 1996, a grassroots activist group in Paraguay called Sobrevivencia filed a complaint with the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, the joint-funders of the project. They then put together a huge coalition comprising 300 local organisations and sent boats down the Paraguay river as “floating seminars” to warn local communities of what was being planned. The banks were eventually persuaded to pull out and the project collapsed.
