In a remote lowland forest in northern Argentina, giant anteaters snuffle around termite mounds, and jaguars stalk prey along the muddy banks of the Bermejo River. Parque Nacional El Impenetrable, which opened in 2017, is one of the South American country’s newest and most diverse wildlife sanctuaries—and a growing site for ecotourism. Yet, these 320,000 acres of pristine wilderness were nearly lost to development following a brutal murder that gripped the nation.

El Impenetrable is carved out of the former territory of Manuel Roseo, a reclusive Italian immigrant rancher and one of Argentina’s largest landowners. In January 2011, Roseo was asleep in his modest home in the northern Chaco Province when three men with machetes broke in, murdering him and staging the homicide as a robbery gone wrong. The killers were the same men who’d spent the previous six months attempting to cheat Roseo out of his estate.

Roseo lived in the middle of the Gran Chaco, a hot and semiarid lowland forest that fans out from northern Argentina into Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil. South America’s second largest forest after the Amazon, the Gran Chaco is also one of the planet’s most threatened biomes… (continue reading at National Geographic).