Left-leaning president's election gives hope to landless Paraguayans

On the edge of a farm here, Rogelio Silva, a peasant organizer, looked out over the half-dozen tents where his Paraguayan compatriots were cooking soup over a campfire. Near the roadside, two banners tied between trees expressed a common sentiment in Paraguay's agricultural heartland these days. Peasant farmers, emboldened by the election of Fernando Lugo as president in April, have been invading dozens of farms in the countryside. They say that Paraguayan land is being occupied illegally by Brazilian farmers, and that corrupt officials have allowed these outsiders to acquire land for decades. Just days after Mr. Lugo, a left-leaning former Roman Catholic bishop, was inaugurated in August, the local police forcibly removed more than 500 peasants squatting on farmland here. Within a few more days, the peasants were back with more tents. "The Brazilian owners tried to throw us out, but we are not leaving," Mr. Silva said. "We need to fight for what is rightfully ours, for what was stolen from us." Paraguay's landless peasants' movement has become a violent armed struggle that continues to flare up dangerously. In a clash this month between peasants and the police, one peasant died and three officers were wounded after the authorities evicted peasants from a farm they were occupying. In the aftermath of that confrontation, Mr. Lugo's government said last week that it would enforce a longstanding law against foreigners' buying agricultural land from citizens. The landless peasants see Mr. Lugo, who lived and worked as a priest here in San Pedro for 11 years, as their best chance in decades to help them win back land for small-scale cultivation. His election as the candidate of the Patriotic Alliance for Change broke the 61-year grip of the Colorado Party, and he has promised broad agrarian reform in a country that has failed even to keep a reliable registry of land titles. The land conflicts not only are explosive in Paraguay, but also are creating tensions between the country's new government and Brazil, whose officials say they are closely monitoring the clashes. "The anti-Brazilian sentiment is not at all something the majority of the Paraguayans share," said António Francisco Da Costa e Silva, an adviser in Brazil's embassy in Asunción. "But it is a concern." The immigrant Brazilian farmers are practicing large-scale mechanized agriculture, mostly growing soybeans; that offers little work for the peasants and is leading their communities to shrink in numbers. The peasants say soybean farming is also contaminating water supplies, a charge that farm organizations deny. The peasants demand that the government, at a minimum, comply with a law that requires landowners to preserve 25 percent of forested areas. Mr. Lugo has urged the landless peasants to cease their farm takeovers and give him more time to enact a comprehensive agrarian reform. His interior minister, Rafael Filizzola, has vowed that the government will continue to carry out evictions, while also warning growers not to take the law into their own hands. Days before the encounter this month in which a peasant was killed, Claudia Ruser, the head of the Soy Growers Association, warned that the situation could turn lethal. "I believe the president of the republic and his cabinet will wake up one day and see fatalities," she told the local Paraguayan news media. "They will see lives ended." Mr. Lugo has shown sympathy for the peasants, who accuse soy growers–many of them Brazilian–of reckless deforestation and indiscriminate use of toxic pesticides. "Terrorism should be wiped from the face of the earth," the president said at the United Nations last month. That includes "the terrorism that affects the children in my country who die as a result of agricultural toxins," he said. Believing that Mr. Lugo is on their side, the peasants are becoming increasingly radicalized. "The Brazilians invaded our country," said Elvio Benítez, a peasant leader here. He added that the Brazilians "almost killed all of us" in the 1865-70 War of the Triple Alliance, a conflict that devastated Paraguay and led to years of Brazilian military occupation. The current clashes are threatening to escalate to levels seen in Bolivia, where the government's push to redistribute land has generated a violent reaction and created a major political challenge for President Evo Morales, said Riordan Roett, the director of the Latin American Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. "The fear is this could spin out of control and you could have real violence in the countryside for the first time in Paraguayan history," Dr. Roett said. In San Pedro, peasant organizers and local politicians say Brazilian farmers have hired armed militias to protect their farmland. "They are killing people," José Ledesma, San Pedro's governor, said of the Brazilian farmers' militias. "People get killed sometimes simply because the militias think they are stealing cows." Mr. Da Costa e Silva, from the Brazilian Embassy, did not deny that some Brazilian farmers had taken up arms, but he said that "the vast majority" had not. The divisions between the peasants and the Brazilian farmers run deep. Many Brazilians have refused to assimilate, continuing to speak only Portuguese and to live within their own communities. And most Paraguayan peasants do not speak Spanish or Portuguese, only Guaraní, the local Indian language. There are 300,000 Brazilians and their descendants living in Paraguay, according to several estimates, out of a population of 6.8 million. Many came to farm soybeans, seeking cheaper land and lower agricultural taxes. Brazilian farmers began arriving in the 1970s, invited by the dictator Alfredo Stroessner during a program to boost agricultural production. Mr. Ledesma said that effort was to blame for the current problems. About two-thirds of the 46,000 square miles of land distributed by the Paraguayan government from 1954 to 2004 was awarded irregularly, according to Mr. Lugo's government. That is not likely to be undone soon. The law the Lugo government has sent to Congress to enforce the prohibition against foreigners' buying Paraguayan land would not apply to properties sold or acquired with the help of the government before 2003. Today, much of Paraguay's farmland is in the hands of Brazilians, who account for more than half of the soybean production in Paraguay, the world's fourth-largest exporter of the crop. "The Brazilian contribution to Paraguayan agriculture has been huge," Mr. Da Costa e Silva said. But Governor Ledesma, who is himself a banana grower, decried the environmental effects of large-scale soy production. "We are cutting down our forests; we are contaminating our waters and putting our ecosystem in danger," he said. "Fernando Lugo needs to apply a heavy hand here."