Paraguay-Agribusiness vs. Peasants
Gutierrez, Jonas
Shortly after midnight, on March 8, a group of twelve to eighteen peasants from Colonia Nueva Esperanza in the Caaguazu region captured a public bus and ordered the driver to take them to...
...Organized on a strictly capitalist basis, the Brazilian farmers produced export crops such as soybeans, mint and, to a lesser extent, cotton...
...On the other hand, the presence of 200,000 Brazilians in eastern Paraguay reverses this process, creating an additional source of pressure on the Paraguayan rural masses...
...Even peasants with legal titles to Jheir lands suffer the consequences of land speculation...
...General Stroessner's aging, obsolete and corrupt regime, after 26 years in power, is confronting an organized peasant class which holds in its hands the production of those items which practically sustain the country's economy...
...The proletarianization of the mass of poor Paraguayan peasants and, consequently, the end of the latifundia-minifundia system characteristic of the Paraguayan economy for a century, is advancing rapidly in the regions mentioned...
...In accordance with the maximum profit provision in Paraguay's investment law, the firm will be able to repatriate all profits...
...Their growth had several consequences...
...The group, lightly armed and led by Victoriano Centurion, of the Agrarian Leagues, was quickly intercepted by a government patrol...
...Nevertheless, these regions became major areas of peasant resettlement...
...see Latinamerica Press, 10 April, 1980) In the last two years, large foreign firms, especially transnationals, have been the vanguard of capitalist penetration into these rural areas...
...The land that they had cultivated for more than a decade, land which had been granted by the government, had recently been re-"granted" to a group of Generals and friends of the dictatorship...
...The Outsiders The expansion of peasant production in these regions was rapidly checked by the combined impact of the influx of Brazilian farmers, the growth in the forest industry, controlled primarily by Brazilian corporations, and the penetration of transnational corporations engaged in the production of export crops...
...For twenty years, around 400 peasants and their families have lived there...
...Giving them the alternative of leaving the area, the transnational now offered to sell each family a parcel of only four hectares at the going market price...
...Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 emigrants continue to live outside of Paraguay, mainly in Argentina, and almost all of them come from rural areas...
...Their presence goes back to a period when neither the Brazilians nor the transnationals coveted this land-nothing but virgin forest when the peasants arrived...
...To the agricultural colonists, low quality lands were distributed, far from communication channels and lacking the necessary technical and financial support...
...38 Several hours later, government forces isolated Colonia Nueva Esperanza...
...The stability of his regime and the profitability of the new economic ventures depend, in part, on the political subjugation of the peasantry...
...Peasants without legal titles to their land were rapidly expropriated...
...By the end of the week, the wave of repression had resulted in twenty one peasants' deaths, more than 200 arrests and the military occupation of the whole eastern part of the country, primarily Caaguazu and Alto Parana, regions on the Brazilian frontier...
...The more militant and powerful peasant organizations were found in the Caaguazu and Alto Parana regions...
...Different from previous situations, there are no more land reserves which could be used for the resettlement of the peasantry...
...Three nights later, nineteen peasants were killed by the Army...
...The growth of the latter two has been based on the expropriation of the peasants and their incorporation as wage laborers to the new economic ventures...
...The other valve, emigration, is almost impossible because of the limits imposed by neighboring countries...
...Shots were exchanged and two agents wounded...
...During the mid-sixties, the government dispersed potential or effective rebel peasant nuclei, sending them to less populated regions where public lands were distributed...
...It is now valued at $400...
...Organized in the early sixties, and promoted initially by the Catholic Church, the Leagues organized the peasantry into cooperatives for the production and distribution of agricultural goods...
...The peasants, after improvising speeches on the need to fight land expropriations, abandoned the bus and found refuge in the mountains...
...This has been recently documented by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO...
...The peasants were being expelled from their land to make way for these enterprises...
...update group of peasants who, lacking any other recourse, decided to go to the city to denounce the grave injustice committed against them...
...Those with titles found it impossible to compete with the farmers, and the dramatic increase in land values not only precluded the expansion of subsistence production but also heightened the pressure on poor tenant farmers to abandon their land...
...Shortly after midnight, on March 8, a group of twelve to eighteen peasants from Colonia Nueva Esperanza in the Caaguazu region captured a public bus and ordered the driver to take them to the capital, Asunci6n...
...The largest land reserves owned by the government were in the Caaguazu and Alto Parana regions...
...The Gulf and Western project presented officially last year and declared a "necessity" by the government, provides for the cultivation of 60,000 hectares of wheat and soybeans at a cost of some $40 million...
...It is also an increasingly visible tendency in the other agricultural regions of the country...
...Thirty-seven peasant members of the peasant settlement were immediately arrested...
...And, finally, a National Peasant Roundtable, composed of the MaylJune 1980 leaders of Leagues and other independent agrarian organizations throughout the country, was effectively coordinating the work among the peasantry in several regions...
...By 1978 there were signs of recovery...
...Peasant leaders had established contacts and entered into agreements with progressive urban trade unionists...
...In Caaguazu, campesinos who have bought land with IBR (Instituto Bienestar Rural) credits are at a point of being evicted by the new influential "proprietors" to whom the government agency-the same one responsible for the Agrarian Reform-resold the property...
...The main target of the repression was the Agrarian Leagues in the Caaguazu and Alto Parana regions...
...The investments in these regions have been concentrated on construction (Itaipu dam), timber industry and agriculture...
...The Paraguayan government's attitude has been very clear in this instance...
...Nearing the Limits During the past decades the Alto Parana and Caaguazu regions have been one of the poles of economic growth in Paraguay...
...Communities were destroyed, houses and crops burned, leaders imprisoned or murdered and progressive priests linked to the Leagues expelled from the country...
...The Stroessner dictatorship recognizes the volatile nature of the situation of the peasantry in Alto Parana and Caaguazu...
...Origins of Militancy Twenty years ago the Paraguayan government, interested in avoiding peasant rebellions and in compliance with some of the programs of the Alliance for Progress, began a colonization program which, according to their claims, distributed four million hectares of land (one hectare equals 2.4 acres...
...The case of the Paranambu colony is typical...
...Between 1971 and 1978 the rate of economic growth of these regions was 2.4 times higher than the national rate, particularly significant in view of the fact that Paraguay had the highest rate of economic growth among all Latin American countries in the last five years...
...Finally, with the shrinkage in peasant production, the volume of agricultural goods for the internal 39uadaIte *ud~I * - ---- ~ ~ tpw_ - - market has declined, fueling the steep inflationary spiral which affects Paraguayan society...
...Another aspect of the government strategy toward the peasantry contributed to the resurgence of the organizations...
...Some decades ago the peasants bought the land at $1.50 per hectare...
...In this light, the disproportionately repressive reaction to the incidents in the Nueva Esperanza NACLA Report i d t o mr . 4tis=_update * update * update * update colony last March becomes understandable as the irrational reaction of a system of power which is slowly but surely losing control of the growing revolutionary social forces...
...The Leagues grew rapidly and with them the peasants' capacity for political action...
...Not only were large colonies established, peasants expropriated in other parts of the country would also migrate to these regions, clear part of the immense forest areas and settle...
...The government managed to virtually liquidate the Leagues...
...For the peasants living off their subsistence production, such a sum was unobtainable...
...Gulf and Western proceeded to expel the peasants from the land...
...Up to a short while ago, the dominant tone of rural expansion in the Eastern regions of Paraguay had been set up by the Brazilian farmers who could not survive alongside the large agricultural corporations in their own country but had enough capital to acquire medium-sized parcels of land in Paraguay...
...In 1973, Gulf and Western bought 52,000 hectares, including the property of these squatters...
...Not only did it sell the land to the North American transnational through the IBR, it 40 also granted all possible exemptions from taxes and other obligations to convince the corporation to invest in the country...
...Experiments in popular education and forms of democratic community management were begun...
...The peasant organizations were immediately weakened by this policy of desegregation but, in the long run, their message and experiences spread through these Eastern regions...
...These entrepreneurs had organized a commercial venture to sell sand for the construction of Itaipu dam, the largest hydroelectric work in the world...
...The program was a failure...
...Five thousand soldiers had been mobilized to capture the NACLA Reportupdate * update . update...
...Almost two thirds of the lands distributed were granted to members of the government and the armed forces to set up stock farms...
...The number of Leagues had increased...
Vol. 14 • May 1980 • No. 3
