Note to readers: EL PAÍS offers the Future Planet section for its daily and global information contribution on the 2030 Agenda. If you want to support our journalism,
subscribe here.
A Paraguayan agricultural settlement called Rosarino, near the border with Brazil, woke up a few months ago with the roar of shots in the air.
The lands where some 100 families have lived since 2008 were being invaded by armed civilians disguised as policemen.
All the people ran for shelter in a small nearby forest.
They managed to get to the Maracaná police station, Canindeyú department, also on the border with Brazil, and file a complaint.
More information
The indigenous sculptor from Paraguay who brought his art to an Andalusian town
Time of hope for the struggle for land in Paraguay
"Paraguay is very discriminatory, it does not recognize native peoples"
Four days later, a group of farmers leaving the community by car was attacked by the same armed civilians who fired into the air. This time they aimed directly at the vehicle. One man was seriously injured and others slightly injured.
"It is not the first time, private guards always come to do their crazy things," said the commissioner of the area, Roberto Romero, the same day. The lands have been a peasant settlement for 13 years, but a German investor now intends to occupy it, according to Celino Salinas, leader of the Organization for the Struggle for Land (OLT). Salinas also denounced that the police do not pursue the assailants because "the authorities in the area act in complicity with the local mafia." The peasant leader Arnaldo Solís, 33, was shot to death by a thug "in the service of the Colorado leader Gerónimo Sanabria, who is one of the many landowners who appropriated land by falsifying titles and taking advantage of political influence," according to the Party denounced Paraguayan Communist.
The Paraguayan Human Rights Coordinator (Codehupy) affirmed that this event is similar to other recent ones, with murders included, "of Paraguayans, who seek to access the right to land, a means that allows them food and a dignified life." At least 124 peasant leaders have been assassinated from 1989 to today. The NGO urged the authorities to investigate complaints about armed civilians, an increasingly frequent figure to subjugate peasants and their families. Although 150 years have passed since the Guasú War (large in Guaraní) in which Argentina and Brazil invaded, looted and occupied Paraguay, 15% of Paraguayan territory is currently occupied by Brazilian landowners, a figure that reaches 35% in the departments bordering Brazil.
Farmers and indigenous people protest against the Government for not complying with the previous Administration's agreement to buy their overdue bank loans related to agriculture in Asunción, Paraguay, on Tuesday, July 6, 2021. Jorge Saenz / AP
There are half a million hectares dedicated entirely to agribusiness, an area like the one that burned in 2020 in the California fires, according to an investigation by the Paraguayan organization Base-Is. Once these lands were tropical forests, ancestral lands of indigenous peoples, with abundant rivers and springs, valleys and hills, of numerous small farmers in a mostly rural country. But now they are giant silos, smoking trucks and ultra modern tractors amid an immense green sea of monoculture of transgenic soybeans and pastures for cows that have replaced trees, birds or jaguars, and most of the native and Creole agricultural communities.
At least one million Paraguayan farmers have left the countryside in the direction of the capital, Asunción, and also towards Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Madrid, according to the National Peasant Federation (FNC), due to the chronic lack of work and land.
This landlocked country, located in the heart of South America, is one of the ten largest grain and meat exporters in the world, but that immense wealth is concentrated in less than 2.5% of the population that owns more than 85% of arable land.
It is one of the countries with the most unequal distribution of land in America and the world, according to United Nations data.
The summer sun was burning at three in the afternoon when some 35 men with shotguns and electric batons appeared by surprise in another rural settlement of wood and canvas houses called Loma Piro'y. They beat men, women and children, several have broken arms. They burned their houses, their little church and their school. They stole their phones and their food. Also their animals. Those attacked are a hundred people from the Mbya Guaraní people who live in their ancestral lands. It happened on December 16, 2020 and the attackers have not been arrested.
"It is ancestral land, it is our land, it belonged to us thousands of years ago," says Mario Rivarola, a member of the National Organization of Independent Aboriginals (ONAI), after the eviction.
The Mby'a Guaraní are one of the five Guaraní peoples, of the 19 different indigenous peoples or nations that have lived in Paraguay since before European colonization.
According to the census, 75% of them are in a situation of extreme poverty, and the few lands they have left are being taken away by businessmen and landowners.
According to the census, 75% of Mby'a Guaraní are in a situation of extreme poverty, and the few lands they have left are being taken away by businessmen and landowners
"We are the true owners, we are the living titles," Rivarola points out.
The community leader Elida Prieto claims that they were absolutely helpless and that the authorities do nothing to protect them and guarantee their territory, even though it is recognized by the government's own Institute of Earth (Indert).
Three days before the expulsion of the Mbya Guaraní, another 300 people were evicted from a peasant community not far from there, also with violence in between, but, this time, caused by the police.
It happened in the 3 de Mayo district of the department of Caazapá.
There were at least 35 detainees, including women, children and the elderly who were tortured, according to their families.
The stalking of peasant agriculture does not stop.
In June, a police helicopter, shooting peasants and other clashes with the police, went viral on the networks.
But how did all this start?
The origin of inequality
The peasants were occupying "ill-gotten" lands, the term used in Paraguay for the eight million hectares of public territory, the size of Panama, which should be for agrarian reform and ended up in the hands of the families, companies and partners of the responsible for the longest dictatorship in Latin America.
That of Paraguay.
Between 1954 and 1989, General Alfredo Stroessner, in addition to exiling, torturing and murdering thousands, distributed lands to his relatives and allies;
In democracy, these families have expanded their properties, companies and concessions with the State exponentially.
Increasing the concentration of land that came from the Guasu War.
At the expense of those who had them before, the farmers, who have had to emigrate, and at the cost of six million hectares of forests destroyed in half a century.
Many of the owners - politicians linked to the dictatorship, businessmen and the military - have so much land that they neither visit nor use it
Many of these owners - politicians linked to the dictatorship, businessmen and the military - have so much land that they neither visit nor use it, they abandon it for decades;
It is then that the neighboring peasants organize themselves and occupy them to work them.
Paraguayan law allows to reclaim abandoned agricultural land if it is cared for and used, and thus, peasant associations have saved thousands of hectares that were going to be deforested or continue to be abandoned.
But the Government, the Judiciary and most of the legislators, as well as the main Paraguayan media, criminalize the occupations and peasant movements, even though they are peaceful.
And there are more and more violent clashes.
One of the families benefiting from "ill-gotten" lands is precisely that of the country's current president, Mario Abdo Benítez, son of the dictator's former private secretary.
His father received at least 2,906 hectares of land, which at today's price would cost more than a million dollars if only they were rural, according to the final report of the Truth and Justice Commission carried out at the end of the regime.
The annual march called by the National Peasant Federation passing through the center of Asunción Santi Carneri
Another is the previous president, Horacio Cartes (2013-2018), today the owner of an emporium of more than 20 companies: from tobacco, banking, advertising, pharmacies, football, the media and, of course, endless hectares dedicated to the agribusiness. His uncle, Rubén Viveros Cartes, received 6,457 hectares from the dictatorship that were destined for state agrarian reform, according to the Truth and Justice Commission, today valued at at least 2.5 million dollars.
Cartes has been investigated nationally and internationally for crimes of currency evasion, money laundering from drug trafficking, tobacco smuggling and irregular appropriation of State lands.
It even appeared in the diplomatic papers leaked from Wikileaks by his company Banco Amambay, now converted into Banco Basa, and in the leak of HSBC bank accounts.
Today he is considered the second landowner in the country, according to the annual report
The owners of the land in Paraguay
, by the economists Arantxa Guereña and Luis Rojas Villagra.
The unpunished heirs
Also on the list of the Truth and Justice Commission are the former Foreign Minister, Eladio Loizaga (16,000 hectares), accused of financially supporting the Condor Plan, the former Minister of Public Works, José Alberto Planás, who received at least 4,000, and even Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, with 8,000, who was assassinated by a bazooka precisely in Asunción, the Paraguayan capital.
Also appears Blas N. Riquelme (4,000 hectares), a deceased ex-senator of the ruling Colorado Party, who disputed with thousands of peasants the lands of Marina Kue, a public land that should be destined for agrarian reform but that he occupied with his agribusiness company Campos Morombí and that became the tomb of 17 lives and the first progressive government of Paraguay (2008-2012).
A farmer speaks on the phone during the protest of farmers and indigenous people against the Government in Asunción, Paraguay, on July 6, 2021. Jorge Saenz / AP
In Marina Kue (Marine Lands in Guaraní), what was known in Paraguay as the “Curuguaty massacre” took place in 2012, where 11 peasants and six policemen were killed in an irregular eviction, like many of those that continue to occur today.
The event was used a week later by the Colorado Party as an excuse to initiate a political trial of the government of former president and former bishop Fernando Lugo and end his term in just 24 hours.
Today, Riquelme's descendants lobby to keep the lands under their ownership, while the families of the murdered peasants pray that they are part of the agrarian reform, as planned.
Impunity is total: no one has ever been prosecuted in Paraguay for "ill-gotten" lands, nor have they had to return a single one of those hectares.
His heirs enjoy stays, companies and luxury homes at home and abroad.
They present themselves as artists, entrepreneurs, or public officials.
They travel on vacation to Brazil, Paris, Dubai and Miami, and show it on their social networks, without embarrassment, while 60% of the country earn less than the current minimum wage of about $ 340.
Impunity is total: no one has ever been prosecuted in Paraguay for "ill-gotten" lands, nor have they had to return a single one of those hectares
There is little hope of justice thanks to a draft law presented on December 10, 2020, coinciding with the anniversary of the universal declaration of Human Rights, which aims to create a Commission to study mechanisms for the recovery of “bad” lands. habidas ”, identified in the Final Report of the Truth and Justice Commission of the year 2008.
The initiative, promoted by the Social Platform for Human Rights, Memory and Democracy, once again places a recurring theme on the political scene, but all the times eluded by the authorities.
An essential measure, according to its promoters, to "close the debts of democracy with the majority population of the country and offer the possibility of a different advance in peasant family agriculture, food sovereignty and the autonomy of diversified production."
FUTURE PLANET can follow on
,
and
, and subscribe
here
to our 'newsletter'
.