Paraguay farmers' leader gets 35 years for massacre
Paraguay farmers' leader gets 35 years for massacre
By AFP 3 hours ago .
The man behind the 2012 massacre of 17 police and farmers in Paraguay, in a crisis that helped bring down a president, was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Farmers' leader Ruben Villalba was on Monday handed the stiffest possible sentence for the killings in Curuguaty, 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of the capital.
The violence broke out when authorities ordered police in to remove landless farmers who were squatting on ranch land they did not own there. It helped lead to leftist then president Fernando Lugo's impeachment.
Three other suspects convicted along with Villalba were sentenced to terms between 18 and 20 years. Hundreds of Lugo supporters rallied outside the Justice Ministry against the sentences.
More:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/paraguay-farmers-leader-gets-35-years-for-massacre/article/469788#ixzz4EAQbQGiQ
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Rural Paraguayans Fight for Land Amid Corruption, Poverty and Violence
Written by Toby Hill
Monday, 16 May 2016 12:08
The closing down of a community-run radio in eastern rural Paraguay is the last example of repression in a country where 1,6% of its population controls 80% of its agricultural land.
For 14 years, Juan Aveiro broadcast Radio Mandu’arã to a cluster of communities in a remote corner of eastern Paraguay. He and his team of volunteer journalists worked from a makeshift studio painted pink. On one wall, a mural depicts Paraguayan peasant farmers or campesinos with their fists in the air, behind a banner proclaiming “peace and justice!”
Like many other community-run radios across Paraguay, Mandu’arã’s output reflected the quotidian ups and downs of local campesino life. Then, in November 2015, eight policemen and six public officials raided Mandu’arã’s studio. “They took everything,” Aveiro says. His experience is part of a pattern of suppression playing out across Paraguay, according to Francisco Benitez from CODEHUPY, an umbrella organisation of human rights groups. “This government is driving a process aimed at eradicating alternative voices of protest,” he says.
. . .
The most unequal land distribution in Latin America
This fight centres on land ownership. According to a 2008 census, 1.6% of Paraguay’s population controls 80% of its agricultural land. At the same time, 300,000 family ‘farmers’ live without access to any land at all. This shapes a situation in which a third of the rural population lives in extreme poverty. Such inequity is a legacy of the country’s long years of dictatorship. During his 35-year rule, General Stroessner tortured his opponents in bathtubs, threw them out of planes, or parcelled them in barbed wire before dumping their bodies in the River Paraguay. As part of the clientilist networks through which he maintained power, Stroessner divided public land among the country’s military and political elite. 10 million hectares – 25% of all the land in Paraguay – were given away or sold at negligible prices.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/5632-rural-paraguayans-fight-for-land-amid-corruption-poverty-and-violence
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