Statement by CONAMURI in Paraguay

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From the Organization of Peasant and Indigenous Women (CONAMURI) we denounce and condemn the current wave of violent evictions that are being executed in different parts of the country.

In the last few weeks, the peasant community of San Miguel, in the district of Maracaná, Canindeyú, was brutally evicted, and the mayor who had supported the population is now the target of intimidation. The threat of an arrest warrant is hanging over him, as well as over the main community leaders. Meanwhile, the indigenous community of Hugua Po’i, in the district of Raúl Arsenio Oviedo, Caaguazú, faced an imminent threat of expulsion that was momentarily stopped thanks to the social, legal and community pressure organized from the territories.

We have no doubt that under the government of Santiago Peña a systematic plan of dispossession and extermination of our peasant and Indigenous communities is being developed. It is a State policy that favours agribusiness, drug trafficking and transnational capital, which needs uninhabited territories to expand its monoculture, clandestine airstrips and extractivist ventures.

In this model, our presence, our knowledge and our ways of life get in the way. That is why we are repressed, displaced and criminalized.

After eviction come arbitrary charges, arrest warrants, judicial harassment

Systematic criminalization is a mechanism to break the community fabric and weaken our forms of organization and resistance. Added to this is, the non-recognition of the legal status of peasant and Indigenous communities leaves hundreds of families, who have inhabited their territories for decades, defenseless. This legal invisibilization facilitates the dispossession and launders the irregular occupation of lands in favor of soy growers, cattle ranchers and businessmen allied to political power.

This model did not begin with Peña. The Curuguaty case¹exposed state violence in defense of agribusiness. During the government of Horacio Cartes, a first stage of large-scale soybean farming was implemented, which was accompanied by massive evictions. Today a new wave is being reactivated, crossed with territorial disputes of organized crime, where communities are trapped between the narco, criminal gangs and state neglect.

Paraguay also faces serious land tenure insecurity

Land reform is stalled, and unregulated settlements are permanent targets for evictions. As if that were not enough, we are expelled from the countryside and pushed to be part of the 70% of informal workers in the country, with no labor rights or social security. We are condemned to structural poverty. Seventy percent of the Paraguayan population works informally and remains poor. There is no dignified way out of the territory.

This territorial extermination plan has a legal scaffolding that supports it. The Zavala-Riera Law (Law 6.630/20), allows express evictions without guarantees and criminalizes the struggle for land. Its application seeks to pave the way for the implementation of the National Unified Registry (RUN), a “whitening” tool that will allow the regularization of titles and properties in favor of businessmen, soy growers and power players. Thus, the State legalizes dispossession, while expelling those who historically inhabited and worked the land.

Added to this is a retrograde cultural policy.

While the State dispossesses us, deputies and senators continue to justify criadazgo² as part of Paraguayan culture. It is a clear sign of the structural disregard for the lives of poor children and adolescents. A culture of dispossession, servitude and silencing that is perpetuated by institutions.

In this sense, violence is multifaceted: we are not only evicted with guns and bulldozers. They also close our rural schools, preventing our sons and daughters from being educated close to the territory. The education offered to us as an alternative is increasingly impoverished and functional to the system: police training, SNPP technical courses. We are denied access to a critical, liberating education, with a territorial sense. They want us without land to produce, without basic rights, without our own thinking.

We remind the Paraguayan State of its responsibility to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which recognizes the right to land, to water, to a healthy environment, to self-determination, to live in peace and dignity. Mass evictions, persecutions and policies of abandonment violate all these rights and constitute crimes against our peoples.

As organized women, peasant and Indigenous women, we reaffirm our commitment to the defense of life, of the commons, of our seeds and knowledge. We resist from the roots, from the community, from history.

We demand:

• The immediate cessation of all evictions in the Paraguayan countryside.
• The effective legal recognition of peasant and indigenous communities.
• An end to the criminalization of the struggle for land.
• The urgent implementation of public policies with a territorial and human rights approach that guarantee access to and dignified permanence in our territories.
• The implementation of the Declaration of Peasant Rights (UNDROP) in Paraguay.
  

Enough repression! Our territories are not for sale, they are defended!

With land, with autonomy and with organization, we continue to fight!

Asuncion, June 10, 2025

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1. 
   The Curuguaty case refers to a violent land conflict and controversial legal case inParaguay that occurred onJune 15, 2012, inMarina Kue, near the town ofCuruguaty, in the department ofCanindeyú. It is one of the most significant and contentious events in recent Paraguayan political history, involving deep issues ofland ownership, peasant rights, and political manipulation.↩︎
2. Criadazgo is an exploitative child labor system in Paraguay (and to a lesser extent in some other parts of Latin America), in which poor children—usually from rural or Indigenous communities—are sent to live and work in the homes of wealthier families, often under the pretext of receiving food, shelter, and education in exchange for domestic labor.↩︎

This article is part of a series on the theme of agrarian reform, published in the lead-up to the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20). As ICARRD+20 draws nearer, it offers a much-needed multilateral space to assess progress in the responsible governance of land, fisheries, and forests, and to develop and coordinate effective public policies to address a range of pressing issues. These include land and resource grabbing, the growing concentration of land, climate change, land degradation and biodiversity loss, violence against land rights defenders, discrimination against women and girls, and the role of land in contexts of conflict and war.