On June 15, 2012, a massacre in northeast Paraguay left 17 people — 11 landless farmers and six police officers — dead. Seven days later, in a lightning-quick trial, the Paraguayan Chamber of Deputies voted 76-1 to impeach Fernando Lugo, Paraguay’s left-leaning, democratically-elected president.
Lugo’s political opponents cited the president’s poor performance, negligence, and nepotism as the rationale for his removal. Yet as the trial drew to a close, that fatal clash far from the capital city overshadowed the proceedings, a simmering reminder of the land disputes and socioeconomic divides that plagued Lugo’s presidency until the bitter end.
The deadly entanglement in northeast Paraguay one week before Lugo’s fall is only a sliver of the story. His rise and fall is the culmination of centuries of tangled Paraguayan politics, a story nestled within the legacies of colonialism, democratic fragility, and persistent strife over land distribution — all bound together by an industry at the core of the Paraguayan economy: soy.
The opening chapter begins in the sprawling soybean fields of Curuguaty — an agricultural region in the northeast. There, waves of genetically-modified soy stretch for miles on end, punctuated only by the occasional truck transporting harvested soy to a nearby industrial plant to be processed into soymeal or oil.
Northeast Paraguay was not always a hub for industrial soy cultivation. The rise of large-scale monoculture agriculture is a twenty-first-century phenomenon. During the latter half of the twentieth century, Paraguay’s economy depended on exports of tannin, cotton, tobacco, and meat products. Today, the soybean industry comprises 40 percent of Paraguayan exports and over ten percent of the country’s GDP.
The “soybeanization” of Paraguay has transformed an export economy rooted in small-scale agriculture into a mechanized industrial powerhouse dominated by American agribusiness corporations and upheld by a government representing the interests of the right-wing political elite.
The colonial roots of this transformation are strong. In 2003, an advertisement in Latin American newspapers by the North American agricultural giant Syngenta coined a neologism for the soybean dependency of Latin America, mapping out the Southern Cone of Latin America into a nation-state called “The United Republic of Soy”. The expression captures the sentiment underlying the growth of the soybean industry today — economic development and soybeans are inseparable, no matter the cost to Paraguayan communities, ecosystems, and democratic processes. The sentiment eerily channels the Banana Republics of the late twentieth century, when monoculture and export-based production jumpstarted Latin American economic stagnation. Since then, disillusioned peasant farmers hopeful for representation in politics and substantive policy change have advocated for land reform and soy regulation. Still, the relentless Paraguayan soybean machine has continued to churn.
This was the political context fueling Fernando Lugo’s extraordinary ascent to the highest tier of Paraguayan government in 2008. A former Catholic bishop inspired by the intersections between the Christian theology of liberation and social reform, Lugo crafted a political platform centered around responding to the plight of landless peasants disappointed by decades of empty promises. His sweeping reforms tackled deeply-entrenched poverty and corruption, illuminating a pathway toward a new dawn of Paraguayan political equality.
Lugo pledged to impose a five percent tax on soy exports to curtail the power of the soy industry, aimed to limit the use of chemical pesticides in soy production, and proposed a massive land redistribution program to return landless campesinos land owned by a fraction of the country’s powerful politicians and business moguls.
But Lugo’s ambitious campaign promises were mired in political disagreement and parliamentary ineptitude from the very start. To resonate with a more diverse political base, Lugo selected right-wing political leader Federico Franco as his vice-president, and the conservative Colorado Party maintained a majority in Congress throughout Lugo’s presidency. Attempts to pass land reform were shot down at every turn, and the president’s zealous message slowly evaporated into a presidential term that did not deliver on many of its initial promises.
Were Lugo’s soy reforms doomed to fail from the start? Or is democratic progress in Paraguay still within the realm of possibility, despite Lugo’s cataclysmic fall from power in 2012?
To look for answers, one must delve further into the past. The origins of Paraguay’s soybean transformation are embedded in a brutal dictatorship that defined the nation’s political landscape for much of the late twentieth century. In 1954, General Alfredo Stroessner assumed the presidency, inaugurating a 35-year reign of repressive authoritarian rule. Stroessner tightened his grip over Paraguayan politics by fostering alliances with Paraguay’s landowning elites, masquerading his transfer of land to political allies as policies ostensibly designed to promote peasant land ownership. Rural farmers began to refer to the land redistributed by Stroessner as las tierras malhabidas — the ill-gotten lands.
The agrarian disparities spawned by the Stroessner regime manifest in the pervasive land inequalities of the present. In Paraguay, 21 percent of landowners control 85 percent of farmland — making Paraguayan land ownership one of the most disproportionate examples of agrarian inequality in the modern world. Every year, approximately 9,000 rural families are displaced as soybean production expands, a process that has resulted in the relocation of hundreds of thousands of campesino families to impoverished urban areas over the past decade.
Even campesino families that avoid forced relocation are not spared from the effects of soybean production. The proliferation of agricultural chemicals and genetically-modified soybean strains practically has spawned environmental degradation.
Beginning in the 1990s, farmers witnessing their crops and livestock perish at alarming rates frequently opted to relocate to cities. Yearly soy cultivation in Paraguay utilizes over six million gallons of pesticides and herbicides, a volume classified by the World Health Organization as extremely hazardous. The elevated rates of respiratory infection, cancer, birth defects, and miscarriage documented in communities adjacent to commercial soybean farms substantiate the claim that the toxic implications of soybean cultivation transcend the political sphere. The wounds created by commercial soy cut deep in local communities.
Tensions erupted on June 15, 2012. The deadly confrontation between campesinos and police forces in the northeast soybean district of Curuguaty catapulted simmering political apprehension into sudden momentum. Seventy landless peasants believed it was their right to inhabit land owned by a wealthy Paraguayan politician with connections to the Stroessner regime. When armed police forces confronted the peasants, the bloody conflict that catalyzed Lugo’s collapse took shape.
Lugo’s political opponents acted swiftly to reconstruct the entanglement as a pretext for his removal from power. When Lugo was ousted, his former vice president Federico Franco was promptly installed, enabling the soybean industry to further intensify its economic domination.
The conflict in Curuguaty has continued to influence political discussions into the present. The Paraguayan justice system held the peasants responsible for the tragedy. The deaths of the eleven campesinos killed were never investigated. Families of the murdered peasants and policemen alike continue to wonder what really happened that fateful day. Blas Riquelme, the wealthy owner of the land, maneuvered stealthily through the courts to reinforce his legal proprietorship of the terrain as the affected peasants advocated for justice.
In 2016, five years after the massacre, families of the victims illegally remained on the property in Curuguaty. The peasants participated in subsistence farming, growing cassava, corn, beans, and mamón. Alberto Castro Benítez, one of the peasant farmers jailed after the 2012 massacre in Curuguaty, commented in Ultima Hora on the fuel the massacre provided for the peasant cause: “We were harmed, but it doesn’t weaken us, the fight just started.When I was released, the first thing I did was come to Marina Cué and continue my fight to conquer. They offer us poor people jail and death only later.”
Though the soy industry continues its reign a decade after the Curuguaty massacre, unrest amongst the landless poor offers a glimmer of hope for an era of real change. Amidst the golden sea of soy stretching miles across the Paraguayan countryside, the seeds of resistance against the industry have taken root, though progress is slow and exhausting.