Feeling that God had indeed sent them to the Chaco, the Mennonites used all the faith and energy they could muster to subjugate their new home. With shovels, axes and oxen -- and later tractors and bulldozers, they cleared thousands of acres of thorny bush and created huge farms--raising cattle, dairy cows, sorghum, cotton, peanuts, wheat and whatever else the semi-arid land and human ingenuity would support. They developed a large network of shallow pools, or "tajamares," to store rainwater. Today, the central Chaco region produces 65 percent of the country's milk.

At the end of World War II, Ratzlaff's parents arrived with a group of several hundred Mennonite refugees, who had barely escaped the Soviet Union under cover of night. Ratzlaff's father was an administrator and his mother a nurse. They were among the first to work with the region's Lengua Indians, providing health care, education and settlement assistance. The young Ratzlaff, growing up with seven brothers and sisters, counted Indian children among his friends, learning their language and exploring the Chaco's vast wilderness with them.

Growing up in a region so rich in nature and indigenous culture sparked Ratzlaff's strong interest in conservation. "As a boy, I had always loved animals and I had dreamed of having my own farm and to be surrounded by nature," he said. The boy grew up, went to Bible college, became a minister and practiced for six years. During this time, Ratzlaff got married and had three children. Realizing that there was an acute need in his community for psychologists, Ratzlaff decided to study psychology in Asuncion, and, later, in California. He returned to the Chaco and eventually became the director of a clinic for the mentally ill, serving there for 12 years. His income eventually allowed him to fulfill his childhood dream and buy a small ranch, where he maintains cattle and a nature preserve.

Later, Ratzlaff was recruited to serve as a consultant to the country's Department of Mental Health in Asuncion. By this time, great changes had occurred in the Paraguayan government. The stalwart regime that had ruled the country with an iron fist since 1954 had come to a grinding halt with the overthrow of General Alfredo Stroessner in 1989. With the fall of the authoritarian regime, a new constitution was drafted and suddenly the Chaco, which was formerly a militarized zone, could be represented in congress.

In 1991, the Mennonite candidate for governor of Ratzlaff's native state, Boqueron, was putting together a list of candidates for his ticket. He had little success in a religious community that shunned political involvement. "Knowing that I lived in Asuncion, he asked me if I could think of someone there who could represent us," said Ratzlaff. Eventually, the gubernatorial candidate convinced the reluctant psychologist to run.

The exposure to politics was a major eye-opening experience for Ratzlaff. "I became aware of the great struggle to protect our natural areas," he said. He was alarmed by the sharp decline in eastern Paraguay's forest cover, from 60 percent to less than 10 percent. The construction of the world's largest dam, Itaipu, in far eastern Paraguay, had also sunk thousands of acres of forest and eliminated a spectacular series of waterfalls. Closer to home, Ratzlaff grew increasingly concerned about the impacts of deforestation and development, which were causing soil erosion, making the surface water saltier and starting to turn parts of the Chaco to desert.

Ratzlaff was also worried by the rampant hunting that was going on in the Chaco. "Every weekend you would see people returning to Asuncion with trucks full of dead animals...they would come to shoot anything that moved." While driving home along the highway one Friday night, Ratzlaff witnessed the shooting of a beautiful maned wolf, one of the world's most threatened species. "There was nothing I could do, there was no Paraguayan law against such an act," he said. The experience motivated the congressman to join the environmental committee in the Paraguayan congress and push for passage of laws that outlawed hunting of wild animals.

To add to these challenges, pressures began to increase to increase to develop the Chaco. Plans were made to finish paving the Ruta Trans Chaco to the Bolivian border. This would create a new route for agricultural products from southwestern Brazil to the sea, greatly increasing the amount of truck traffic. With the neighboring states of Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia and Argentina, the country launched the Hydrovia project, a massive dredging and channelization effort on the Paraguay River that would bring barge traffic upriver and further encourage agricultural development of the ecologically delicate Chaco. In addition, plans were announced to divert water from the Pilcomayo River, located on the Chaco's western border, potentially cutting off part of the region from its water supply. At the same time, land-hungry ranchers, many from Brazil, were starting to move into the northeastern Chaco and clear away land at an alarming pace, without realizing the dangers of water salinization and desertification.

Ratzlaff and like-minded colleagues did what they could to try to stem the tide, making speeches in Congress and pushing for the passage of environmental laws in a country noticeably absent of such legislation, and even worse, implementation. But their speeches were falling on deaf ears. "The government has so many preoccupations that it can't even worry about the environment," says Ratzlaff.

In early 1993, Ratzlaff approached the Fundacion Moises Bertoni (FMB), Paraguay's leading conservation group, established in 1988 with the help of The Nature Conservancy. While FMB, headquartered in Asuncion, had begun to do some work in the Chaco, director Raul Gauto felt they needed homegrown representation. "We were glad to help a group of people who were from the Chaco that were concerned about the depletion of natural resources of their area and wanted to do something about it," says Gauto.

Gauto introduced Ratzlaff to Gregory Miller, a regional director of the Conservancy's Latin America program, which works to support like-minded organizations throughout the continent. During a multi-day trek across the Chaco, Miller and Gauto encouraged Ratzlaff to establish a private group to protect the Chaco's wildlife and habitat, and provided advice on management, fundraising and administration.

The Conservancy and FMB helped Ratzlaff land his first grant, which allowed Ratzlaff to recruit Wilfried Geibrecht, a fellow Mennonite and professor of natural sciences from the Chaco, as the group's director. He also recruited 30 members, many of them community leaders, including the central Chaco's largest land owner, Peter Durksen.

"I told him, you did so much deforestation for pasture, now you have an obligation to protect what needs to be protected," said Ratzlaff. Durksen soon acquired two properties totalling 25,000 acres, choosing to leave them in their natural state.

After two years of planning, and in a quiet ceremony held at a restaurant owned by Werner Gerber, a transplanted Swiss agronomist and one of the organization's new members, the Foundation for the Sustainable Development of the Chaco was born in March of 1995.

"This is exactly the kind of community-based conservation needed to save the Chaco," says Miller. "To have the stakeholders involved like this and to have the Conservancy's brand of land-based conservation -- well, this is an exciting mix."