Paraguay wanted bodies in the Chaco. The vast, undeveloped scrubland was claimed but barely held, and the government was willing to make extraordinary promises to fill it with industrious settlers. The concessions it granted the Mennonites read like a charter for a country within a country: exemption from military service, the right to run their own German schools, religious freedom, an open door for more immigrants, and a guarantee that they could govern their own affairs without interference. In exchange, the newcomers bought their land at an inflated price from the Argentine firm Casado, one of the largest landholders in the region. They had won the right to live as they wished. What they had not understood was the price the land itself would demand.

Nothing in the printed brochures prepared them for the Chaco. The settlers arrived with almost no experience farming under tropical conditions, and the reality was far more extreme than the promoters had promised. Summers seared, winters parched, and the long droughts broke only in torrential rains that turned the flat earth to mud. Markets were impossibly distant. Many of these conservative families also refused, on principle, to use modern agricultural machinery, which made every furrow harder. For decades, life in Menno was defined by deprivation, and most of what they grew they simply ate. In the 1950s, worn down by hardship and chafing against the colony's strict conservatism, a wave of families gave up and sailed back to Canada.

The Mennonites did not arrive in an empty land, whatever the word "undeveloped" implied. The central Chaco was the homeland of the Enlhet, whom the settlers called the Lengua, a people of the Maskoy language family who had hunted, fished, and gathered across these forests long before any ship left Manitoba. Roughly 600 lived in the immediate area at the founding. Over the decades, more indigenous people came, drawn by work, medicine, and schools, and in 1961 the Mennonites founded a cooperative, ASCIM, to support them. Today indigenous residents number around 25,000, outnumbering the Mennonites themselves. The relationship has been close but never equal: the two cultures have rarely intermarried, and labor in the colonies has often fallen hardest, and paid least, on indigenous hands.

The turning point came from grass and cattle. The introduction of drought-resistant buffalo grass from North America in 1955 laid the foundation for a cattle industry, and the completion of the Trans-Chaco Highway to Asunción in 1965 finally connected the colony to a market. In the 1980s, the agricultural cooperative borrowed against World Bank credit and bet heavily on dairy, and the bet paid off. The town of Loma Plata, home to roughly 3,500 people, became the prosperous administrative heart of a colony that now sprawls across some 7,500 square kilometers. The same isolation that once nearly broke Menno had, in the end, forged one of Paraguay's most productive agricultural regions, and the descendants of those who fled in the 1950s began to return.