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CIA in Paraguay, or How to Get Rid of a President - Magda Hassan - 26-06-2012 A googlish translation from Spanish Quote: CIA in Paraguay, or How to Get Rid of a President - Magda Hassan - 26-06-2012 More Googlish Quote: The Wikileaks cable Quote:[TABLE="width: 706"] CIA in Paraguay, or How to Get Rid of a President - Magda Hassan - 30-06-2012 The Paraguay Coup: Carefully Organized, Assisted by Unidentified Snipers[TABLE="width: 100%"][TR] [TD="class: sh10"]Nil NIKANDROV | 27.06.2012 | 00:00[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: left"] [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD="align: left"]The operation launched by the US Department of State and the CIA with the aim of displacing Paraguay's first leftist president Fernando Lugo entered the final phase on June 16, when police forces were dispatched to evict squatters from the Morumbà farm in the Curuguaty district, near the Brazilian border. The land holding is known to be owned by Paraguayan businessman and politician Blas Riquelme. Upon arriving to the site, the police unexpectedly came under professional gunfire from rifles with the caliber high enough to drill bulletproof waists. The chief of a special operations police unit (GEO) and his deputy were shot dead, and the police to which instructions had been issued to avoid using force was left with no choice but to return fire. Eleven civilians were mowed down and dozens wounded as a result.The bloody incident in Curuguaty immediately drew response from the Paraguayan legislature, with the parliamentarians and senators, mostly representatives of right-centrist parties, charging that president Lugo had lost his grip on the situation and was unable to run the country. Even the Liberal Party which upheld Lugo's candidacy in the 2008 elections distanced itself from its former protégé. Overall, Lugo faced an impeachment which he described as the parliament's "express coup". Lugo's legal counselors were given practically no time to prepare for his defense vis-a-vis the parliament, but, in fact, it was clear that the critics of the president had no intention to dive into details and the senate's verdict was a forgone conclusion. The whole operation which led to the displacement of Lugo was carefully planned so as to rule out an unbiased parliamentary inquiry and was implemented as a snap offensive. No doubt, part of the motivation behind the rush was to have Lugo ousted before Paraguay's UNASUR peers could convene for consultations and decide on a set of measures in his support. The victory must have been easy for the coordinators of the plot from the US embassy in Asunción. It is true that Lugo's presidency was fairly nominal as the parliament, the police, and the army in Paraguay were on the side of the opposition. Having thrived on USAID funding for decades a cohort of NGOs were prepared to orchestrate mass protests if the anti-Lugo plan stalled but did not have to, and - apart from the death toll in Curuguaty the overthrowing of the legitimate president in Paraguay deserves to be listed as an exemplary case on the record of the US intelligence community. A team of UNASUR envoys headed by the organization's secretary general, Venezuelan Alà RodrÃguez Araque, toured Paraguay, met with Lugo and with a parliamentary delegation, and witnessed the impeachment procedure, but were unable to redirect the developments. The Paraguayan Senators showed little regard for the visitors, not to say that they were openly hostile. Lugo, it must be noted, showed a complete lack of will to par the challenge contrary to his initial pledge to defend himself at the parliamentary hearings, he simply watched them on TV from his residence. Citing his commitment to law, the president being lawlessly ejected accepted the impeachment ruling (to which only four senators said No). Lugo's inaction can be largely attributed to his having no leverage under the circumstances: over the three years of his presidency, he failed to build a popular support base and, when the pressure peaked, still had no party of his own or a populist movement to back him. Street protests demonstrating support for Lugo erupted incoherently on the impeachment day but were dispersed by the police which used water machines, tear gas, and rubber bullets against the crowds. Paraguayan vice president Federico Franco who was sworn in without delay as Lugo was out is to stay in office until the ousted president's term expires in August, 2013. The elections are due the same month, and Washington openly favors Colorado party leader Horacio Cartes, a businessmen whom, according to ABC Color, US DEA briefly suspected of money laundering and complicity with drug cartels. The twist in Cartes' reputation is reflected in some of the cables put on display by WikiLeaks, and chances are US agencies have assembled such a stockpile of reports implicating Cartes that Washington should have no difficulty keeping him like quite a few Latin American presidents - under tight control. While Lugo's unfinished term was marked with Paraguay's sluggish drift towards Latin American populist regimes, the right-conservative takeover promises that the country will fully submit to the US dictate. The agenda looming on the horizon likely includes efforts to destabilize UNASUR by forming within the alliance a dissenting bloc to balance the influences of Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador. It can be expected as well that new life will be breathed into Washington's other project the bracketing within some sort of a new union of Chili, Peru, Columbia, and Mexico in order to weaken Brazil internationally.UNAUR secretary general Alà RodrÃguez Araque said the dismissal of Lugo was unconstitutional and was tantamount to a disguised coup, and further stressed that many of Latin American governments would deny recognition to Franco. Brazilian president Dilma Rouseff cited the charters of UNASUR and MECOSUR to suggest expelling Paraguay from the groups over the violation of democratic norms. Argentine's Cristina Kirchner also opined that sanctions against Paraguay would be appropriate. She described the developments in the country as a coup and mentioned in the context the coup attempts against R. Correa and E. Morales and the putsch in which M. Zelaya had been deposed in Honduras. The Argentinian leader stated firmly that such undemocratic phenomena are unacceptable for the region and said action would be taken in line with the decisions to be made by MECOSUR. Ecuadoran president R. Correa expressed support for D. Rousseff's call to put to work the provisions of the UNASUR charter which warrant various forms of pressure non-recognition of the corresponding governments, exclusion of countries guilty of undemocratic conduct from the alliance, and the closure of borders as punishment for putschists. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega contributed similar statements on the issue. Prospects for a serious investigation into the shooting incident in Paraguay are bleak. The bloodshed helped the opponents of F. Lugo by adding credibility to their grievances list, while the majority of Latin America watchers discern parallels between the recent Paraguayan drama and the April, 2002 shooting at the Llaguno Bridge in Caracas. In the latter case, snipers randomly fired on anti-Chavez protesters, Chavez's supporters, and whoever happened to pass by. The incident was blamed on the forces under Chavez's command, but curious circumstances surfaced later: for example, a CNN correspondent managed to record an interview with the army officers opposing Chavez who, as it transpired, were aware of the planned sniper attack and the imminent fatalities. Several versions of the Curuguaty shooting incident are found on the web. One potential explanation is that the responsibility lay with Blas Riquelme who hired the snipers via his army connections but then, however, it remains unclear why the snipers fired on the police. An alternative version is that the episode was a provocation staged by the Paraguayan People's Army, a shadow group supposedly forged by the police to fight extremists. This hypothetic origin may be the reason why the army lives on despite the intense work being done in Paraguay by invited US and Colombian anti-terrorism experts. Alvarado Godoy wrote on the site titled Descubriendo Verdades (Disclosing the Truth) that the whole episode had been "montaje fabricado", essentially a show following a certain blueprint. He claims to have information that the operation involved US Navy Seals who stayed in Paraguay to train the country's marines (Fusna). The storyline does not sound exotic considering how often US citizens get caught with sniper rifles across Latin America, as recently in Argentine and Bolivia. The CIA, DEA, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency routinely hire contractors to pull off covert operations with firearms being used. The straightforward forecast is that the pattern successfully tested by the US in Honduras and Paraguay the pseudo-constitutional displacement of defiant leaders will be extensively replicated in Latin America over the coming years. Yet, Washington would be naïve to believe that the accompanying violence can be contained. In Honduras, the puppet government of P. Lobo clings to power at the cost of waging a terror campaign which already took hundreds of lives of progressive politicians, journalists, trade union activists, student and Indian leaders, and that almost surely is what the future holds for Paraguay. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2012/06/27/paraguay-coup-carefully-organized-assisted-unidentified-snipers.html [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] CIA in Paraguay, or How to Get Rid of a President - Magda Hassan - 08-07-2013 A Coup Over Land: The Resource War Behind Paraguay's Crisis What lies behind today's headlines, political fights and struggles for justice in Paraguay is a conflict over access to land. Police evict landless farmers from settlement in San Marcos, Paraguay, 2008. Photo Credit: Evan Abramson July 18, 2012 | 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. [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]The Coup and the Land[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]A Sea of Soy[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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 cropsmuch 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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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."[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]Tekojoja's Resistance[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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 20002002 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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]Tekojoja stands on land given to campesinos as part of a Public Land Reform Program. In the 1990s, Brazilian soy farmerswith armed thugs, lawyers, and political connections to protect themgradually 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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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:[/FONT] [FONT=&][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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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."[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]Roa explained this cycle of displacement:[/FONT] [FONT=&]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, easybut 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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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 GuaranÃ. 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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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."[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]"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."[/FONT] [FONT=&]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.[/FONT] [FONT=&]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."[/FONT] [FONT=&]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. [/FONT]http://www.alternet.org/story/156372/a_coup_over_land%3A_the_resource_war_behind_paraguay%E2%80%99s_crisis?paging=off CIA in Paraguay, or How to Get Rid of a President - Magda Hassan - 08-07-2013 Paraguay's Bitter Harvest: Multinational Corporations Reap Benefits from Coup GovernmentThursday, 26 July 2012 10:03 Benjamin Dangl[/url] Paraguayan officials negotiating with Rio Tinto on July 17. Photo: ABC Color In a July 22nd speech marking the one month anniversary of the [url=http://www.towardfreedom.com/americas/2898-a-coup-over-land-the-resource-war-behind-paraguays-crisis]parliamentary coup that overthrow left-leaning Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, the former leader denounced that a motivating interest among the coup-plotters was a sought-after deal between Paraguay and the Montreal-based mining company, Rio Tinto Alcan."Those who pushed for the coup are those who want to solidify the negotiations with the multinational Rio Tinto Alcan, betraying the energetic sovereignty and interests of our country," Lugo told supporters. Such an accusation represents the widespread discontent among Paraguayan people toward current negotiations between Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) and the government of Federico Franco, Lugo's right wing replacement. It also points toward the Franco administration's larger strategy to open up Paraguay to multinational corporate exploitation, from Rio Tinto Alcan to Monsanto. The RTA deal for a $4 billion dollar aluminum plant on the shores of the Paraná River had been stalled by the Lugo administration due to concerns over the plant's environmental impact, as well as how much the company would pay for electricity from Paraguay's Itaipú and Yacyretá hydroelectric power plants. Yet shortly after taking office, Franco fast-tracked the RTA negotiations, pressuring his new Minister of Industry and Commerce to swiftly move forward with the deal. Civil society protests ensued and, as Lugo's comments about the RTA deal suggest, the issue has become a rallying point for justice amidst post-coup Paraguay's political and social crisis. The views of Paraguayan engineer Ricardo Canese reflect the main concerns of citizens opposing the deal. In an article from the Paraguayan social research institute BASE-IS, Canese explained that the proposed deal with RTA would disproportionately benefit the company in that the government through the taxation of the Paraguayan people would be subsidizing a massive amount of RTA's energy over a period of 30 years. Canese further criticized the fact that the taxpayers would be spending $700 million dollars in infrastructure to allow the company to install their operations in the country. And while RTA pledges to create 1,250 jobs, the company would annually use the same amount of electricity that 9.6 million people use during the same period. Because of the controversial terms that Franco is pushing for with RTA, Lugo believes that the contract will be discontinued once a democratic government returns to power; new elections are slated to take place in April of next year. In one interview, Lugo said, "I strongly doubt that the Paraguayan people will be respecting such a license that gives a single company the right to the electricity for a price as low as they have been talking about. This whole deal is very questionable." In addition to Franco's work with RTA, his administration has also allowed Monsanto an expanded presence in Paraguay. Such a move will worsen the existing crisis in the countryside, an area ravaged by soy plantations and pesticides, and where just 2% of landowners control 80% of the land. In the lead-up to the coup, Lugo and his administration resisted the use of Monsanto's GMO cotton seeds in the country. Yet just after taking power, the Franco administration threw government critics of the plan out of office, and moved ahead to approve the use of the controversial seeds in the country. These two relationships with multinational corporations clearly show where the interests of the Franco administration lie. They also demonstrate that, while the Lugo administration failed to fully implement its plans for land reform, justice and expanded rights in Paraguay, the Franco administration, in just one month in office, has already proven to be closer ally of corporate globalization. As Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano said in an interview regarding the coup in Paraguay, the Lugo government tried "to bring about changes that were aimed at making the country more independent and just, but this was an unpardonable sin for the power brokers." http://www.towardfreedom.com/americas/2909-paraguays-bitter-harvest-multinational-corporations-reap-benefits-from-coup-government CIA in Paraguay, or How to Get Rid of a President - Jan Klimkowski - 08-07-2013 United Fruit Company capitalism, exploitation of the campesinos & shock therapy in the interests of foreign multinationals, is alive and kicking. CIA in Paraguay, or How to Get Rid of a President - Magda Hassan - 07-12-2014 Paraguay: Legislators Accused of Narcopolitics Won't Be RemovedThe three legislators allegedly held phone conversations with drug-traffickers. (Photo: Twitter)Published 1 December 2014 We Recommend Paraguayan representatives refused to remove their three fellow legislators, despite the evidence presented by the National Anti-Drug Office and the senate. Three legislators from the governing party Colorado (conservative), accused of being directly linked to criminal groups by the Senate, will still maintain their positions as national representatives, authorities from the Chamber of Deputies informed on Monday. Despite evidence presented by the National Anti-Drug Office (Senad), legislators ruled that until the Attorney General's Office makes a formal request, they could not be dismissed and investigated. Newspaper Ultima Hora first revealed allegedly suspicious relationships that Bernardo Villalba, Marcial Lezcano and Freddy D'Ecclesiis had with drug-traffickers. Then the Senate held a public presentation in the Chamber of Deputies, and presented a denunciation before the Public Prosecutor against the three legislators cited in the Senad report. The evidence essentially consisted in wiretapped conversations with drug-traffickers from the northern part of the country, the Tri-Border Area between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, known for being a transnational hub of cocaine. A journalist investigating these groups was recently assassinated in the region, shortly before the country discovered how much its elites were involved in narcopolitics. So far the three legislators have denied the accusations, although Villalba admitted that he did defend alleged drug-traffickers as a lawyer. During an international congress organized by the progressive party Frente Guasu, Juan Pozo Alvarez, a Cuban official from the International Relations Department of the Communist Party, warned that "at all levels, there are people linked with drug-trafficking in the region." He explained that although "we all convert ourselves into victims" of this plague, political parties are often tempted to take part in it and obtain indirect advantages from drug-trafficking, in an "opportunistic fashion." See more: Social Movements March Against Impunity in Paraguay Paraguayan Mayor Linked to Murder of Journalist [URL="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Paraguayan-Guerrilla-and-Land-Conflict-The-Next-Colombia-20141008-0073.html"]Paraguayan Guerrilla and Land Conflict: The Next Colombia? http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Paraguay-Legislators-Accused-of-Narcopolitics-Wont-Be-Removed-20141201-0057.html [/URL] |