Green Going Gone: The Tragic Deforestation of the Chaco

[Judi Lynn]

1. At least he said out loud what so many other greedy, dirtball conservative officials have always don

An opinion poll published in May, reported three-quarters of Paraguayans disapprove of the government's performance. No doubt much of this has to do with the rampant corruption that landed Paraguay at 150 of 177 countries on Transparency Internationals' Corruption Perceptions Index. But the country's shifting economy is clearly also to blame, as its agriculture-without-people boom is stoking social tensions. A fledgling revolutionary group, the Paraguayan People's Army, made headlines last spring after kidnapping the 16-year-old son of a prominent landowner in the north of the country. Peasants in the eastern agricultural belt, meanwhile, have protested the proliferating foreign-owned factory farms and the frequent fumigations that they say are forcing them to abandon the countryside, leaving it to the genetically modified soybeans that now cover more than 7.9 million acres of Paraguay's most fertile land.

Perhaps most troublingly, President Cartes during a speech welcoming the Brazilian National Industrial Confederation earlier this year urged visitors to [font size=6]"use and abuse Paraguay."[/font]