The guerrillas of the Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo (EPP) have resurfaced after the appointment of Federico Franco as successor to Fernando Lugo (2008-2012) in the presidency with two minor raids (in one of which a life was claimed) and a series of communiqués in which they call for ‘struggle’ against the new government and promise to avenge the peasants killed last June in Curuguaty. While dismissing the official version of that event as a fabrication, the EPP avoids any mention of its purported direct or indirect involvement in that incident.
On 28 June armed men raided the Brazilian-owned Terrado farm in Azote’y, Concepción, killing a Brazilian employee and setting alight three tractors. On 1 July police found in a nearby farm a handwritten letter from the EPP claiming responsibility for the attack, which they justified by saying: ‘On repeated occasions we have warned tractor drivers found cutting down the forest that they will be sentenced to the maximum penalty for the crime they are committing.’ The letter also says, ‘The Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo will avenge the death of the brave peasants who in a display of courage and heroism engaged the forces of repression in an unequal confrontation.’
In another letter, sent to Radio Ñanduti on 2 July, the EPP issued a call to ‘struggle against the present ultra-right-wing de-facto government’. The letter alluded to ‘the murder of 11 heroic peasants in Curuguaty’ — the 15 June episode that triggered the impeachment and removal from office of President Lugo — and said, ‘We have always maintained that the ousted government acted as a shield to protect the interests of the rich, deceiving the people with its socialist discourse [...] The people well know that the Lugo government’s tale about the existence of infiltrators [in the Curuguaty event] is a fiction thought up by the ousted government to cover up its crimes.’
On 9 July three armed persons wearing fatigues and bulletproof vests with the initials EPP turned up at the La Mami farm in the western department of Boquerón, set fire to the caretakers’ house and left behind a letter demanding that the proprietor should slaughter 20 head of cattle and distribute them to poor communities in the area. The farm is owned by a relative of Juan Néstor Núñez, former president of the umbrella farmers’ body, the Asociación Rural del Paraguay (ARP). Boquerón is not within the usual area of operations of the EPP.
The new government is following in Lugo’s footsteps by announcing a new major operation against the EPP. On 6 July, just before the latest EPP raid, Interior Minister Carmelo Caballero, accompanied by the top brass of the national police, turned up at Hugua Ñandu, Concepción, to distribute arms, ammunition and new vehicles to the police unit charged with operations against the EPP. Hugua Ñandu has been the target of several EPP attacks.
Caballero said that this force, based at the premises of the Agrupación Táctica Especializada Hugua Ñandu, which includes 150 officers of the Cuerpo de Operaciones Rurales (COR), trained to operate in the bush, ‘will enjoy the unrestricted support of the President, the interior ministry and all agencies of the state [... All those social and peasant organisations that resort to the institutional path will progressively obtain the things they are justly demanding, but the violent ones, who attempt to gain them by resorting to crime, will encounter the firmest possible response from the Paraguayan state.
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