As has been well documented on this website, peasants in eastern Paraguay have been confronted in the last few years with an unprecedented transformation of their livelihoods and environment. Faced with the rapid and uncontrolled expansion of genetically modified soybeans into their lands and villages, Paraguayan campesinos have seen whole towns disappear under fields of beans. This usually follows a period in which towns are surrounded by mechanized fields, trees are stripped from the landscape, and indiscriminate fumigation is allowed to waft into people’s houses, churches and schools. Forced evictions, arson and occasionally armed attacks are the extreme, but by no means the exceptional tactics used to clear peasants off their land.

Several movements have sprung up to try and confront this process. In a population scarred by years of dictatorship and repression of political dissent, organization in the countryside is not easy, and small victories are the most that people can expect. But such victories do occur: communities like Tekojoja, Ka’iho, Toro Kangue, Malvinas, Jakarekai and Mil Palos, to name only a few, have all managed to control the advance of soybeans into their midst, largely with the help of an organization called the Movimiento Agrario y Popular, or MAP.

The MAP is a small, regional organization with absolutely no funding, held together by the will and solidarity of its members, and by a huge amount of hard work and non-violent resistance. A few leaders cut their teeth on the complicated legal case of Tekojoja, in which they were able to fight back aggressive land speculation by armed Brazilian bands. Since then, they have been sought out by other communities with equally complicated problems. As they expand, they increase the number of leaders with the experience and ability to confront the political and legal traps that have been laid for peasants all along the soy frontier.

Last spring, MAP leaders contacted me and humbly asked if I could raise one thousand dollars to help with their organizing efforts. With the help of Act for the Earth, and a great talk by Percy Schmeiser, we were able to get almost this amount in a single night at the Bloor Street United Church in Toronto on March 31st, just days before I returned to Paraguay to continue my work with small farmers in the area of MAP influence. And this time I learned something quite amazing. This tiny donation, by Canadian standards, can have dramatic impacts in an organization like the one I have been describing: in a network of dynamic and hard-working activists used to collecting dimes for bus fare, a thousand dollars can activate a lot of human resources, and can strongly demonstrate the solidarity of people living thousands of kilometers away. In making people feel just a little more connected to wider struggles and political concerns, it helps to inject the struggle with a new sense of purpose and hope.

Alongside its daily political activities, the MAP was able to use the money for three specific goals, which were agreed upon in a meeting of the national leadership in May. One was educational, another political, and another provided long-overdue closure to an injustice committed at the center of the fight. This brief summary of those three actions might help give people a sense of the state of the struggle, and what campesino politics looks like in a country like Paraguay.

1) During one of its analyses of the current conjuncture in Paraguay, peasant leaders had begun to fear a new legislative threat looming on the horizon of Paraguayan land politics. As part of its global tenure regularization schemes, the World Bank and the Interamerican Development Bank have been pressuring the Paraguayan congress to pass a rapid land-titling bill for peasants in Paraguay. Without getting into details, people fear that such a bill would facilitate the concentration of land in the hands of soy farmers in the region. But it is a threat that comes somewhat out of left-field; in fact, peasant groups have long advocated similar titling bills, and it is only the introduction of GM soy crops that suddenly make such a bill dangerous (and make the government suddenly interested in supporting it). Fighting it would require a widespread conversation among the grassroots, to help the organizations’ bases understand the hidden dangers of these laws, and to try to come up with alternative suggestions.

Using some of the money collected in Toronto, we were able to gather a wide range of peasant leaders from various organizations to two workshops, hosted by the MAP, that helped people to read the new land legislation in all of its historical ambiguities. The meeting, held in early July, also took advantage of the occasion to get different leaders who had been to international conferences in Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina, to disseminate what they had learned as widely as possible, and we invited Javiera Ruli, from Buenos Aires, to give a rousing presentation on the Multinational Corporations involved in local agriculture. The meetings were a huge success, and created a model of workshop which people could bring back to their communities. It was simply amazing the speed with which these quite complex ideas spread throughout the base communities that I am familiar with, and I expect the base has been laid for some spirited opposition to future legislative moves on this front.

2) One of the upshots of this meeting of minds from different peasant organizations (many of whom had split off from each other in the past over political disagreements) was the decision to regroup as a national front. Military repression and political manipulation by the Frutos administration had decimated the peasant movement in the past two years, destroying the strongest tool that it had: a unified front of peasant and labour organizations committed to saving social programs, halting privatizations, and decreasing the influence of powerful private agrarian interests. Within two weeks of this first meeting, leaders from the different organizations had met at a second round table and had planned two more. Using the funds from Toronto to facilitate transportation to the city of Caaguazu helped to keep these meetings well-attended, and started the process of reactivating a unified struggle that’s been pretty much dead for over a year.

3) The last of the three projects which the money facilitated had fewer direct beneficiaries, but was no less important in the larger project of keeping up morale and holding the organization together. In June 2005, as police were raiding the town of Tekojoja with Brazilian mercenaries, burning down over fifty houses and killing two men, they loaded up a truck with all the stolen belongings of the victims of the raid. The raid was later deemed illegal (although no-one was prosecuted), and two people were charged with murder (although one escaped and is now suspected of being in Brazil). With a lot of hard work and help from neighbours, people were eventually able to reconstruct their houses. But the topic of the furniture, clothes and tools that had been stolen that day remained a sticking point.

For a year, all that stuff sat in a police warehouse behind the regional jailhouse. The police agreed that it had all been brought there illegally, but didn’t offer to do anything about it. Eventually the minister of the interior made public promises to return the stuff, but then simply didn’t deliver. For some, still sleeping on the bare earth and walking to school while their beds and bicycles grew moldy in the warehouse, this was a topic of great frustration, and had become something of a symbol of the organization’s impotence before the authorities. On August 1st, with the help of a local trucker and money from the Toronto meeting, we were able to go and pick up what was left of these belongings and return them to their rightful owners. It was a small gesture, but an important moment of closure and restitution, and the occasion was used to remember those who had died on that fateful day.

My experiences in Paraguay this summer, if nothing else, confirmed one important lesson. While millions of dollars in aid money get funneled into countries like Paraguay every year, gobbled up by bureaucracies, slight-of-handed away in legally sanctioned international kickbacks, and skimmed off by professionals who make their living dreaming up solutions for the poor, small bits of money given to well-organized locals with vision and will can go a long way to helping people stand up to the systems that oppress them. The varied and exciting career of a thousand dollars made me realize the almost infinite potential of ten or twenty thousand dollars used in this way.

P.S. - On behalf of the MAP, and especially those who participated in the land law workshop, I’d like to thank all of those who gave small donations last spring. Pending another fundraising campaign, I will be periodically sending more money to Paraguay to help in this struggle, and to follow up on projects already underway. If anyone is interested in making a donation, please click here to reach me by email.