The Village Under Siege
A wave of violent evictions is rocking rural Paraguay.
Around 7am on January 14, members of Edilson Mercado – a community of campesinos, landless farmers, in eastern Paraguay – gathered to watch as the dirt track to their village was sealed off by riot vans and hundreds of police officers.
“They came with a helicopter, with horses, firing tear gas in the middle of the kids, women and old people,” recalls resident Aldo Solís, 43, in an exchange of audio messages with The Paraguay Post. “They weren’t interested in talking.”
According to a report by the Mecanismo Nacional de Prevención de la Tortura (MNP) – a state human-rights body that visited Edilson Mercado a week later – live ammunition was fired from the helicopter. Children interviewed by the MNP said they had been tear-gassed.
Solís – a father of six who grows manioc, corn and bananas – says that pregnant women fainted from the effects of the chemicals. A video shared with the Post – whose provenance could not be independently verified – shows a toddler being carried away from a cloud of smoke, rubbing her eyes and crying as an adult splashed water on her face. Another clip shows barefoot children running through a tangle of undergrowth.
“We hid in the forest all day,” says Solís. “We ran out of water, and the temperature was almost forty degrees.” By the time they crept out from cover, little remained of their homes but smoking ruins. “We were heartbroken, because this was the fifth time we’ve been evicted.”
A history of violence
In 2019, a group of landless farmers occupied 2,000 hectares of formerly state-owned land near the district of Yasy Cañy in the department of Canindeyú. Other documents suggest that the area has been settled by campesinos as far back as 2003.
Yet the property was also claimed by Gerónimo Sanabria Abente, a relative of the powerful Colorado Party congresswoman and former departmental governor (2008-13) Cristina Villalba de Abente.
Bloodshed soon followed. The nascent community was named after one of its members, Edilson Mercado, who was killed by a shotgun blast that June. A second, Arnaldo Solís – Aldo’s younger brother – died in January 2021 after being shot a month earlier. Their alleged killers were described in press reports as private security guards hired by Sanabria.
And in late January, residents’ lives were turned upside down once more. “We had houses and everything,” Solís continues, “and now we’re living in tents.”
Even more than the eviction itself, what followed stunned locals and human-rights experts.
Police officers and unidentified men in hoods reportedly slaughtered animals, used diggers to tear down homes, stole appliances, pigs, cows and chickens, and ripped up crops with tractors. Then, they set fire to the piles of rubble, possessions, and three tonnes of harvested tobacco worth 30m guaraníes ($3,800), says Solís.
One child told the MNP that the interlopers had shot their dog and thrown it down a well. A pig’s guts were reportedly dumped in a stream that supplied the community with fresh water.
Despite such scorched-earth tactics, residents reoccupied a fraction of the property in the following days, erecting rudimentary shelters from sticks and scraps of canvas. It was the beginning of a de facto armed siege.
According to Solís and the accounts of visitors, diggers operated by armed civilians have excavated trenches and piled a mound of earth atop the track that provides vehicle access to the community, which is three miles from the nearest store, school and paved road.
Smaller tracks passable only on foot or motorcycle are being patrolled by around 20 trigger-happy “thugs” with rifles, says Solís. He claims they have been hired by a Brazilian soybean firm that rents the land from Sanabria’s widow, Estela López.
According to testimony gathered by the MNP, the gunmen fired shots in the air as a group of neighbours tried to approach with food and medicine in the days after the eviction.
Walter Isasi is a lawyer who visited Edilson Mercado with the MNP in January, and again with non-profit research centre BASE-IS and human-rights umbrella organisation Codehupy in late February. “They’re surrounded,” he tells the Post, explaining how the most recent delegation had to sneak in via a manioc plantation. “People are in a state of shock.”
“The kids don’t want to go out to school,” says Solís. “They’re still afraid.” Some are so traumatised, he says, that they panic whenever helicopters or light aircraft pass overhead.
“We still can’t rebuild our homes,” he adds. “We need metal sheets, nails and other materials, but we can’t get them because our road is still closed to trucks.” Their power has also been cut off.
The district police chief told the MNP that the eviction had been triggered after residents of Edilson Mercado opened fire on police officers. He and López have accused the occupation’s leaders of using women and children as human shields.
Solís denied this, telling the Post that the local prosecutor and police had staged a shootout and posted a video online in order to frame the community. “We’ve never shot at anyone,” he adds. “We don’t even have any guns.”
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
The scramble for land heats up
For many campesino and native communities, land is synonymous with life and worth fighting and even dying for.
The most infamous recent eviction unfolded in 2012 at Curuguaty, 29 miles from Edilson Mercado. An armed confrontation with security forces — high-powered rifles against rusty hunting pieces — claimed the lives of six police and 11 campesinos.
The bloodbath was used as a pretext to impeach Fernando Lugo, the only left-wing president in modern Paraguayan history. Eleven survivors of the Curuguaty massacre were jailed on trumped-up charges until the Supreme Court absolved them in 2018.
The roots of Paraguay’s simmering rural conflict lie in a country-size land grab perpetrated by the 1954-89 dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner.
Under the cover of a notional agrarian reform, the regime parcelled out some eight million hectares of state land — an area the size of Ireland — to relatives, business associates, and cronies. Even the exiled Nicaraguan autocrat Anastasio Somoza got a slice of the Chaco.
In the decades since, many campesinos have erected their homes atop these tierras malhabidas (ill-gotten lands) in an attempt to force the state to adjudicate them in their favour. Such occupations, says Lis García, a researcher with BASE-IS, “are the only method that allow campesinos to secure land in this country.”
Yet in recent months, Paraguayan authorities have launched a wave of forcible evictions against Indigenous and campesino villages like Edilson Mercado. Some are occupations. Others have property titles, but have still been kicked out.
According to a new report by BASE-IS, at least four settlements have been subject to evictions since mid-December, affecting at least five hundred households. A further five, home to some 900 families, have been threatened with removal. Upwards of sixty people have been slapped with charges.
A combination of factors are behind the crackdown, experts say.
One is the Registro Unificado Nacional (RUN). The Peña administration signed the new landholding registry into law this January, combining three land-titling agencies into one. The stated objective was to simplify Paraguay’s notorious property wrangles and reassure investors that they won’t face expensive lawsuits or campesino occupations.
But the upshot, says García, is that landowners are now scrambling to reassert control over disputed land before the RUN is implemented. It’s a struggle to be the one left holding the parcel when the music stops.
“You can sense a real urgency on the part of the state and the agribusiness sector,” agrees Isasi, the lawyer with Codehupy. “These evictions may be taking place to whitewash certain land title cases.”
The free trade agreement signed in December between South American trade bloc Mercosur and the European Union also means Paraguayan farming barons are kicking out alleged squatters before the deal is ratified by European member states and its environmental and human-rights requirements come into force.
Above all, there’s a powerful economic motive. “Soybean production has reached its limit in the Región Oriental,” says García. The crop now covers fully 21.7 percent of Paraguay’s eastern region, rising to 70 percent in the border department of Alto Paraná.
But big agro constantly demands fresh soils, whether in the Chaco — where soybean production is rocketing — or the fertile fragments of campesino land on the edges of farming estates. “It’s a race to conquer these last territories that are resisting,” the researcher concludes.
No title, no peace
The recent evictions — mostly confined to the northeastern departments of San Pedro and Canindeyú — have barely registered elsewhere.
This might change this week, when Paraguay’s National Campesino Federation (FNC) stages its 31st annual march through the historic centre of Asunción on March 27. Civil-society groups and opposition parties have also convened parallel demonstrations.
In its February report, the MNP recommended that the police adopt a specific eviction protocol in line with international human rights standards, including eliminating the use of firearms against civilians.
But it noted that inequality in access to land is the fundamental driver of the conflict. It’s a reality encapsulated by the FNC’s slogan: “without land reform, there will be no peace.”
The evictions have implications for inflation and food sovereignty, too. According to president Santiago Peña, Paraguay provides sustenance for up to 100 million people worldwide. Yet the country depends on imported goods to feed its own people. Prices for eggs and vegetables have shot up in recent months.
Small-scale family agriculture could help put healthy, affordable food on Paraguayan tables. But the crackdowns are undercutting such efforts.
Before the latest eviction, says Solís, Edilson Mercado helped feed at least four nearby towns. Its manioc, peanuts, watermelons and pumpkins could be found in the Mercado de Abasto in Asunción, 150 miles distant. “Now, we can’t sell anything.”
Peña’s administration says it has awarded over 9,000 deeds worth $500m to campesinos in 18 months, far outstripping previous governments. “We’re paying off a historic debt to the countryside,” he announced on Monday, delivering the latest batch of 450 titles.
Solís says that his community will keep petitioning the authorities to recognise their territory.
“We’re recovering bit by bit,” he adds. “All we can do is keep resisting here, because we don’t have anywhere else to live.”
