Struggles over Representation
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“Unleashing the Fury”: The Cultural Discourse of Rural Violence and Land Rights in Paraguay
BEVERLY Y. NAGEL a1
a1 Carleton College
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AbstractIn February 1989, General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay's
longtime dictator, was deposed in a coup led by one of his top
generals. During the first days after the coup, hundreds of rural
Paraguayans swept onto unused lands claimed by the state, the
Stroessner family and its cronies, and foreign investors, to set up
ramshackle huts and clear plots to grow manioc and corn. They were
soon followed by thousands more. By mid-1990, observers and
representatives of the occupants estimated that roughly 19,000
families had claimed lands totaling over 360,000 hectares. 1 Most of the occupations occurred in
the eastern and northern border departments, a frontier zone that had
been rapidly developed for commercial agriculture during the preceding
decades. But small farmers and rural workers throughout the nation
mobilized to demand direct participation in their new government, more
favorable agricultural policies, and restitution for past abuses. For
Paraguay, then a nation of only 4.1 million persons, 2.06 million of
them rural, this mobilization represented a considerable proportion of
the population. Although land occupations were not new to Paraguay,
his wave of rural activism was exceptional. Coinciding with
Paraguay's first hesitant steps toward democracy, the
occupations expressed the hopes of the rural poor for a more
democratic rural society and for their own voice in the new
political system.
Footnotes1 These figures are derived from information provided by
several organizations involved with the occupants and from data
collected by the Centro de Documentación y Estudios and
published in its monthly Informativo
Campesino.
For more
information, see note 4.
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