[News] Paraguay - A Coup Over Land

[Anti-Imperialist News]

July 17, 2012
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/17/a-coup-over-land/

The Resource War Behind Paraguay's Crisis


  A Coup Over Land

by BENJAMIN DANGL

Each bullet hole on the downtown Asunción, Paraguay light posts tells a 
story. Some of them are from civil wars decades ago, some from 
successful and unsuccessful coups, others from police crackdowns. The 
size of the hole, the angle of the ricochet, all tell of an escape, a 
death, another dictator in the palace by the river.

On June 22 of this year, a new tyrant entered the government palace. The 
right-wing Federico Franco became president in what has been deemed a 
parliamentary coup against democratically-elected, left-leaning 
President Fernando Lugo.

What lies behind today's headlines, political fights and struggles for 
justice in Paraguay is a conflict over access to land; land is power and 
money for the elites, survival and dignity for the poor, and has been at 
the center of major political and social battles in Paraguay for 
decades. In order to understand the crisis in post-coup Paraguay, it's 
necessary to grasp the political weight of the nation's soil. Here, a 
look at the history of Paraguay's resource war for land, the events 
leading up to the coup, and the story of one farming community's 
resistance places land at the heart of nation's current crisis.

*The Coup and the Land*

Hope surrounded the electoral victory of Fernando Lugo in 2008, a 
victory which ended the right wing Colorado Party's 61 year dominance of 
Paraguayan politics. It was a victory against the injustice and 
nightmare of the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989), and a new 
addition to the region's left-leaning governments. The election of Lugo, 
a former bishop and adherent to liberation theology, was due in large 
part to grassroots support from the campesino (small farmer) sector and 
Lugo's promise of long-overdue land reform.

Yet Lugo was isolated politically from the very beginning. He needed to 
ally with the right to win the election; his Vice President Federico 
Franco is a leader in the right wing Liberal Party and was a vocal 
opponent of Lugo since shortly after Lugo came to power. Throughout 
Lugo's time in office the Colorado Party maintained a majority in 
Congress and there were various right wing attempts to impeach the "Red 
Bishop." Such challenges have impeded Lugo's progress and created a 
political and media environment dominated by near-constant attacks and 
criticism toward Lugo.

At the same time, Lugo was no friend of the campesino sector that helped 
bring him into power. His administration regularly called for the severe 
repression and criminalization of the country's campesino movements. He 
was therefore isolated from above at the political level, and lacked a 
strong political base below due to his stance toward social movements 
and the slow pace of land reform. None the less, many leftist and 
campesino sectors still saw Lugo as a relative ally and source of hope 
in the face of the right wing alternative.

The issue that finally tipped the scales toward the June 22 
Parliamentary coup against Lugo was a conflict over land. In April of 
this year, 60 landless campesinos occupied land in Curuguaty, in 
northeastern Paraguay. This land is owned by former Colorado Senator 
Blas N. Riquelme, one of the richest people and largest landowners in 
the country.  In 1969, the Stroessner administration illegally gave 
Riquelme 50,000 hectares of land that was supposed to be destined to 
poor farmers as a part of land reform. Since the return to democracy in 
1989, campesinos have been struggling to gain access to this land. The 
April occupation of land was one such attempt. On June 15, security 
forces arrived in Curuguaty to evict the landless settlement. The 
subsequent confrontation during the eviction (the specific details of 
which are still shrouded in confusion) led to the death of 17 people, 
including 11 campesinos and 6 police officers. Eighty people were wounded.

While certainly the bloodiest confrontation of this kind since the 
dictatorship, it was but one of dozens of such conflicts that had taken 
place in recent years in a nation with enormous inequality in land 
distribution. The right's response to such conflicts typically involved 
siding with the land owners and business leaders, and criminalizing 
campesino activists. With the tragedy of Curuguaty, the right saw yet 
another opportunity to move against Lugo.

The right blamed Lugo for the bloody events at Curuguaty, an accusation 
which was unfounded, but served as fodder for the ongoing political 
attacks against the president. In response to critics, Lugo replaced his 
Interior Minister with Colorado Party member Candia Amarilla, a former 
State Prosecutor known for his criminalization of leftist social and 
campesino groups, and who was trained in Colombia to export Plan 
Colombia-style policies to Paraguay. Lugo also made the Police 
Commissioner Moran Arnaldo Sanabria (who was in charge of the Curuguaty 
operation) the National Director of Police.

In this way, Lugo handed over the state's main security and repressive 
powers to the Colorado Party. The move was an an effort to avoid 
impeachment from the right, but it backfired; the Liberal Party opposed 
Lugo's replacements and, empowered by the criticisms leveled against 
Lugo's handling of Curuguaty, collaborated with the Colorado Party and 
other right wing parties in Congress to move forward with the impeachment.

The process began on June 21, and within 24 hours the Senate gathered 
and officially initiated the trial, granting Lugo only two hours to 
defend himself. The next day, Lugo was removed from office in a 39-4 
vote. He was accused of encouraging landless farmers' occupations, poor 
performance as president, and failing to bring about social harmony in 
the country. Lugo stepped down and Vice President and Liberal Party 
leader Federico Franco took his place. New elections are now scheduled 
to take place in April of 2013.

This Parliamentary coup was condemned as undemocratic and illegal by 
many Latin American leaders who refused to recognize Franco as the 
legitimate president. In response to the coup, Latin American trade and 
political blocs such as Unasur and Mercosur have suspended Paraguay's 
participation in their organizations until next year's elections. 
Unsurprisingly, the Organization of American States decided to not 
suspend Paraguay's membership in the group because, according to OAS 
secretary general Jose Miguel Insulza, doing so would create further 
problems in the country and isolate it regionally. This is the second 
such coup in the region in recent years; in June 2009, Honduran 
President Manuel Zelaya was ousted under similar circumstances.

The backdrop to this political fight is a struggle over how to control, 
use and distribute Paraguay's vast land. Approximately 2% of landowners 
control 80% of Paraguay's land, and some 87,000 farming families are 
landless. While Lugo failed to meet many of his campaign promises to the 
campesino sector, he did in fact work to block many of the right's 
policies that would worsen the crisis in the countryside. For example, 
Lugo and his cabinet resisted the use of Monsanto's transgenic cotton 
seeds in Paraguay, a move that likely contributed to his ouster. Yet 
even before Lugo was elected, political alliances and victories were 
shaped by the question of land. Multinational agro-industrial 
corporations are fully entrenched in Paraguayan politics, and their 
fundamental enemies in this resource war have always been the Paraguayan 
campesino.

*A Sea of Soy*

For decades small farmers in Paraguay have been tormented by a tidal 
wave of GMO soy crops and pesticides expanding across the countryside. 
Paraguay is the fourth largest producer of soy in the world, and soy 
makes up 40 percent of Paraguayan exports and 10 percent of the 
country's GDP.  An estimated twenty million liters of agrochemicals are 
sprayed across Paraguay each year, poisoning the people, water, farmland 
and livestock that come in its path.

Managing the gargantuan agro-industry are transnational seed, 
agricultural and agro-chemical companies including Monsanto, Pioneer, 
Syngenta, Dupont, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Bunge. 
International financial institutions and development banks have promoted 
and bankrolled the agro-export business of monoculture crops---much of 
Paraguayan soy goes to feed animals in Europe. The profits have united 
political and corporate entities from Brazil, the US, and Paraguay, and 
increased the importance of Paraguay's cooperation with international 
businesses.

Since the 1980s, national military and paramilitary groups connected to 
large agribusinesses and landowners have evicted almost 100,000 small 
farmers from their homes and fields and forced the relocation of 
countless indigenous communities in favor of soy fields. While more than 
a hundred campesino leaders have been assassinated in this time, only 
one of the cases was investigated with results leading to the conviction 
of the killer. In the same period, more than two thousand other 
campesinos have faced trumped-up charges for their resistance to the soy 
industry. The vast majority of Paraguayan farmers have been poisoned off 
their land either intentionally or as a side effect of the hazardous 
pesticides dumped by soy cultivation in Paraguay every year. Beginning 
in the 1990s, as farmers saw their animals dying, crops withering, 
families sickening, and wells contaminated, most packed up and moved to 
the city.

The havoc wreaked by agro-industries has created some of the most grave 
human rights violations since Stroessner's reign. A report produced by 
the Committee of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights of the United 
Nations stated that "the expansion of the cultivation of soy has brought 
with it the indiscriminate use of toxic pesticides, provoking death and 
sickness in children and adults, contamination of water, disappearance 
of ecosystems, and damage to the traditional nutritional resources of 
the communities."

The expansion of the soy industry has occurred in tandem with violent 
oppression of small farmers and indigenous communities who occupy the 
vast land holdings of the wealthy. Most rural Paraguayans cultivate 
diverse subsistence crops on small plots of ten to twenty hectares, but 
do not have titles to their land nor do they typically receive 
assistance from the state. The Paraguayan government has historically 
represented the soy growers in this conflict by using the police and 
judicial system to punish campesino leaders.

The small farming community of Tekojoja has been on the front line of 
this struggle for years. Its history and struggle is representative of 
countless other farming communities in the Paraguayan countryside.

*Tekojoja's Resistance*

The first of several buses we would take from Asunción toward Tekojoja 
in April of 2009 heated up like a sauna as polka played on the radio. 
Hawkers came on the bus selling sunglasses, radios, and pirated DVDs. 
Particularly dedicated salesmen gave impassioned speeches about the 
superior characteristics of their product, pushing samples onto the 
unwilling and bored passengers. One sales pitch promised that garlic 
pills could cure insomnia and cancer.

We passed countless fields of soy and Cargill silos, but also vegetable 
stands from small farmers and simple roadside restaurants where people 
could escape into the shade with a cold beer. The dirt road from 
Caaguazú toward Tekojoja was a rutted expanse of churning red sand; it 
took us three hours to travel 50 kilometers. The bus fought its way over 
the deep potholes, the engine reaching a fevered pitch, and every one of 
its metal bones rattling along with those of its passengers.

That same night, we arrived in Tekojoja and went to Gilda Roa's house, a 
government-made structure without running water (though the government 
built the buildings, it never completed the plumbing). A land and farmer 
rights activist, Roa's shirt portrayed plants breaking through a bar 
code. Inside her house, the walls were covered with anti-soy and 
anti-GMO posters. She pulled up plastic chairs for us in front of the 
garden with bright stars as a backdrop, and began talking. Roa spent 
2000--2002 in Asunción studying to be a nurse, and had worked as one in 
a nearby town. At the time of our visit, in April of 2009, she was 
dedicated exclusively to activism in her community. As Paraguayan folk 
music played on the radio, and moths bounced around the lights, Roa told 
us the story of her community and its fight against GMO soy.

The community of Tekojoja is home of the Popular Agrarian Movement (MAP) 
of Paraguay. It is a place that has faced enormous repression from the 
soy farmers and their thugs, and led a legendary resistance against 
them, producing many campesino leaders.

Tekojoja stands on land given to campesinos as part of a Public Land 
Reform Program. In the 1990s, Brazilian soy farmers---with armed thugs, 
lawyers, and political connections to protect them---gradually expanded 
onto the community's land, forcing a series of violent evictions of the 
farming families. In 2003, the MAP began to recover the lands taken from 
them by Brazilians, but corrupt judges and the mercenaries hired by soy 
producers kept pushing the farmers off their land.

On December 2, 2004, Brazilian land owners accompanied by police burned 
down numerous houses and farmland in Tekojoja as part of an eviction 
process. A statement from the MAP described this brutal act:

    [A]fter the tractors destroyed our crops, they came with their big
    machines and started immediately to sow soy while smoke was still
    rising from the ashes of our houses. The next day we came back with
    oxen and replanted all the fields over the prepared land. When the
    police came, we faced them with our tools and machetes. There were
    around seventy of us and we were ready to confront them. In the end
    they left.

The campesinos' houses and crops were destroyed and they had no 
assurances that the Brazilians would not orchestrate another eviction. 
Still, as most had no place to go, the community members decided to 
persevere, staying on the land and fighting for legal recognition as the 
owners. Roa explained, "We planted seeds with fear as we didn't know if 
our crops would be destroyed. And we began to reconstruct the houses." 
But again at 4 a.m. on June 24, 2005, the Brazilians and police attacked 
the community. "They arrested children, blind people, old men, and 
pregnant women, everyone, throwing them all in a truck." Roa said. "They 
threw gas and oil on the houses, burning them all down as the arrests 
went on."

In this standoff between the thugs, police, and unarmed campesinos, two 
farmers, who the Brazilians mistakenly identified as MAP leaders and 
brothers Jorge and Antonio Galeano, were killed by gunfire. One of the 
victims was Angel Cristaldo Rotela, a 23 year old who was about to be 
married, and had just finished building his own home the day before the 
police burned it to the ground. The wife of Leoncio Torres, the other 
victim, was left a widow with eight children. A memorial stands in the 
center of the community in memory of the fallen campesinos.

After the murders, campesinos and activists from around the country 
rallied in support of Tekojoja, supplying the besieged community members 
with tarps and food. Finally, the Supreme Court ruled that the land 
should go to the local farmers, and as part of the reparations for the 
violence the community suffered, President Nicanor Frutos commissioned 
the building of forty-eight homes. The plight of Tekojoja sheds light on 
the situation many farming communities are finding themselves in across 
Paraguay. While the residents of Tekojoja remain on their land, many 
others are forced to flee to slums in the city as soy producers push 
them off their land.

Roa explained this cycle of displacement:

    When the small farmers are desperate, and the pesticides are hurting
    them, there is no money, and so they sell their land for a little
    money, which is more than they've ever had, thinking that life in
    the city will be better, easy---but it's not so easy. A lot of
    people who end up gathering garbage in the city are from the
    countryside. They don't know how to manage their money, so for
    example, they'll spend all their money on a used, broken-down car
    first, and then end up in the city broke, without any jobs or place
    to stay.

The victory of Tekojoja was due to the tenacity of the farmers who 
refused to leave their land for the false promise of rich city life. But 
their fight is far from over. Though they tore the soy plants out of 
their land, residents live sandwiched between seemingly limitless 
expanses of soy, and they, their animals, and their crops continue to 
suffer from exposure to toxic pesticides.

By dawn the next day, most of Roa's neighbors were already up, getting 
to work before the sun made labor unbearable. Chickens milled about 
houses, the red dirt yards were still damp from the night's dew, and 
radios tuned in to a community radio station mixing music with political 
commentary in Guaraní. A neighboring community activist invited us to 
his house to start the day with Paraguayans' essential beverage, yerba 
maté served hot in the morning and specially prepared with coconut and 
rosemary. We sat in his kitchen as the sun streamed through the cracks 
between the boards in the wall, illuminating ribbons of smoke from the 
fire, while his children and pigs played on the dirt floor.

An ominous presence loomed over this bucolic scene. The neighboring 
Brazilian soy farmers had already shown up with their tractors, spraying 
pesticides on nearby crops. I could smell the chemicals in the air 
already. We walked toward the fields until the sweet, toxic odor grew 
stronger. We passed one tractor very closely as clouds of the pesticides 
drifted toward us. I began to feel a disorienting sensation of dizziness 
and nausea. My eyes, throat and lungs burned and my head ached, 
something the locals go through on a daily basis. The physical illness 
caused by the pesticides contributes to breaking down the campesino 
resistance.

I am reminded that this is a besieged community, not just because of the 
soy crops that circle these islands of humanity, or the pesticides that 
seep into every water source, crop, and conversation, but also because 
the Brazilian soy farmers live next to and drive through these 
impoverished communities with total impunity, and with the windows of 
their shiny new trucks rolled up tightly. Mounted somewhat precariously 
on the back of a few mopeds, we bounced along the dirt roads, which 
petered out into paths to another cluster of homes. On our way there, we 
passed one Brazilian who glared at us until we were out of sight. Roa 
knew him: he had participated in the razing and burning of their homes. 
The fact that he was still free added insult to injury. And if the 
locals were to accuse him, said Roa, or even yell at the Brazilian 
murderers, police would show up and haul them off to jail. "This is the 
hardest part," she explained. "That we see them and can't do anything."

The moped rolled to a stop in front of Virginia Barrientos' home, a few 
miles from Roa's, directly bordering a soy field. The land Barrientos 
lived on for the past four years is a peninsula jutting into the sea of 
soy. She occupied her land, which used to be covered with soy, in 
February of 2005 and won legal ownership to it. But life since gaining 
the land has been far from easy; pesticides have terrorized her family 
since they moved there.

"Just before we harvest our food the Brazilians will spray very powerful 
pesticides," Barrientos explained. "This spraying causes the headaches, 
nausea, diarrhea we all suffer." Her thin children were gathered with 
her on the porch of the home. "There are a lot of problems with the 
water," she continued. "When it rains, the pesticides affect our only 
water source."

Barrientos said the pesticides affected her plants and animals as well, 
making some of the crops that do actually grow taste too bitter to eat. 
Her pigs' newborn babies died, and the chickens were ill. Part of the 
problem, she pointed out, is that the Brazilian soy farmers 
intentionally choose to fumigate during strong winds which blow the 
poison onto her land. We passed dead corn stalks on the way to her well, 
which she insisted on showing us. It was located at the end of a long 
field of soy, so that the runoff from the field dripped into the well, 
concentrating the pesticides in her only water source. The family lives 
in a poisoned misery, while the soy producer responsible for it lives in 
comparative luxury away from his fields.

Isabel Rivas, a neighbor of Barrientos' with a big smile and loud laugh 
in spite of her grim living situation, told us, "When we drink the water 
we can smell the chemicals. It turns out they were washing the chemical 
sprayers in our source of water, in a little stream nearby." Barrientos 
stood in front of her house while breastfeeding her baby as chickens 
pecked at peanuts in the yard. Her children stared at us with wide eyes. 
"We can't go anywhere else."

While Lugo's inability and unwillingness to sufficiently address such 
hardships was a betrayal of this grassroots sector, the recent coup 
against Lugo was also a coup against hope, a coup against Barrientos and 
her children, Roas and her neighbors, and the hundreds of thousands of 
farmers struggling the countryside. Behind this coup lies the vast land, 
some of it poisoned, some still fertile, and much of it tear and 
blood-soaked. Until the demand of land justice is realized, there will 
be no peace in Paraguay, regardless of who sleeps in the presidential 
palace.

/*Benjamin Dangl's* latest book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements 
and States in Latin America 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849350159/counterpunchmaga> (AK 
Press) is on contemporary Latin American social movements and their 
relationships with the region's new leftist governments. He is editor of 
TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and 
UpsideDownWorld.org, a website on activism and politics in Latin 
America. Email BenDangl(at)gmail(dot)com./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863-9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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