Paraguay protests highlight small farmer's concerns.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
Campesinos (agrarian workers), indigenous groups, small-scale rural producers, students, teachers, doctors, and stakeholders in cooperative-owned businesses--each sector with its own demands, and without any unifying leadership--managed, nevertheless, to form an unprecedented alliance in Paraguay, occupying the streets of Asuncion, the capital, and forcing President Horacio Cartes to the negotiating table.
For five weeks starting in March, the city was immersed from dawn to dusk in a mounting wave of anti-government outrage that President Cartes initially treated with indifference but was ultimately forced to address. "Cartes thought he could just wait it out, that the protestors, given what a disparate group they are, would run out of steam. But when he saw that the situation risked unfolding into a general strike, he had to acknowledge the power that this movement--unlike anything Paraguay has seen in the past 15 years--has acquired," an analyst for the German news agency DPA explained in an April 13 article.
The first to make their presence felt were rural workers organized by the Federacion Nacional Campesina (FNC). Bearing flags and traditional "foisas" (the Guarani name for the machetes used by farm laborers), they descended on Asuncion from across the country and explained to the city's initially dismissive and unreceptive public their four basic reasons for protesting: to denounce the repression they constantly suffer at the hands of state police and private security forces employed by landowners, to reject the overuse by large-scale soy planters of toxic agrochemicals, to protest rampant public-sector corruption, and to reclaim farmland so as to avoid the exodus of 300,000 small-scale producers to urban areas.
Two more organizations--the Coordinadora Nacional de Mujeres Trabajadoras Rurales e Indigenas (CONAMURI), an indigenous and rural women's group, and the Organizacion de Lucha por la Tierra (OLT), a land rights group--joined the protests soon after.
Rural repression and roundup
Updated figures released late last year by the Comision Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CONADEH), a civil society organization, suggest that between 1989--when the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989) finally ended--and 2015, at least 157 campesino leaders were killed in Paraguay (NotiSur, May 20, 2016). Many people suspect the number of violent deaths is far higher given that hardly a week goes by without stories surfacing about another worker...
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