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Hundreds of Paraguayan campesinos, workers, students, Indigenous activists, and other demonstrators took to the streets in the capital city of Asuncion Monday morning to protest the deeply unpopular conservative President Horacio Cartes and demand his resignation as he marks three years in office.
Protesters from communities across the country gathered in front of the Supreme Court in the capital at 7:00 a.m. local time with plans to then march to the government palace. Calls for Cartes to resign dominated the march as demonstrators criticized the government’s neoliberal policies.
The march also demanded justice for the Curuguaty massacre and freedom for the 11 campesinos sentenced to a total of 120 years in the controversial 2012 case that right-wing lawmakers used as a pretext for the parliamentary coup that ousted the populist President Fernando Lugo and paved the way to Cartes’ election.
“Three years of Cartes in power represent abandonment, injustice, lack of health (care), precarious education, lack of work and of land,” National Campesino Federation leader Teodolina Villaba told Paraguay’s Ultima Hora. “We demand his resignation and the acquittal of the political prisoners in the Curuguaty case that unjustly condemned campesinos.”
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Calls for participation in Monday’s march placed the slogan “out with Cartes and his whole line of succession” at the top of the protest agenda. The president represents the right-wing Colorado Party of former Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner.
The high disapproval ratings that have long plagued Cartes’ administration since his 2013 election following the ouster of President Lugo continue to soar as he enters his fourth year of his five-year term. According to a poll published in Ultima Hora, Cartes faces 77 percent disapproval in Greater Asuncion, home to about one third of the country’s seven million people. The survey found the president’s approval has dropped 13 percent compared to 2015, and 23 percent compared to the year before.
Cartes came to power on the heels of the widely-condemned parliamentary coup against Lugo in 2013 on promises of tackling systemic corruption and poverty and attracting foreign investment. Among the president’s controversial neoliberal policies have been moves to further open up the country to agribusiness corporations, including Monsanto, and promote public-private partnerships and other privatization schemes.
Campesinos in particular have repeatedly protested the Cartes government, continuing to voice long unanswered demands for comprehensive agrarian reform to address the country’s extremely unequal distribution of land.
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Conflicts over land distribution also underlie the incendiary Curuguaty massacre, which killed 17 people during a violent standoff between police and landless campesinos occupying disputed farmlands. The right-wing quickly manipulated the massacre and pegged the blame on Lugo to justify his 2012 ouster. Despite the huge political significance of the event, the case — and particularly the role of the police in the massacre — has never been fully investigated. Social movements maintain that the 11 campesinos sentenced to 120 years over the massacre are political prisoners, and continue to demand their immediate release.
Ousted former President Lugo is set to run for the country's top office in the next election in 2018.
Paraguay is a small, landlocked South American country, where almost half of the population lives in rural areas and more than one-third still lives in poverty. The vast majority of Paraguayans, about 95 percent, speak Guarani, which is an official language along with Spanish.
Although Paraguay’s 35-year U.S.-backed military rule officially came to an end in 1989, longstanding structural problems have left Paraguay struggling to ensure stability and democracy. Lugo’s parliamentary ousting and the politicization of the Curuguaty massacre to advance a right-wing agenda, as well as lasting unmet demands for agrarian reform and land redistribution the case represents, are key example of Paraguay’s enduring political challenges.
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