Brazil & Southern Cone - 26 October 2004

The land reform agreement feted by President Nicanor Duarte on 25 September appears to be unravelling. Landless peasants claimed on 12 October that Duarte had not come up with the goods: some 13,000 hectares of land in six departments in the west of Paraguay. They are mooting further land invasions.

The secretary-general of the Mesa Coordinadora Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas (MCNOC), Luis Aguayo, claims that the government is already stalling on the distribution of land and he has promised to launch land invasions in conjunction with the MCNOC's sister movement, the Federación Nacional Campesina (FNC). Between them, the MCNOC and the FNC are demanding 610,000 hectares of land.

Speaking on 11 October, Aguayo said that the MCNOC was only considering taking action because the government had broken the agreement reached with the Frente Nacional en Defensa de la Soberaní­a y la Vida on 18 September. For its part, the Frente held a national assembly on 23 October to discuss a national strike which it is planning to stage on 18 November in response to the breakdown of talks with the government. Talks collapsed in mid October after armed civilians attacked peasants at the settlements of José Domingo Ocampos, Limoy, and General Resquin.

Crime
Thousands of people took to the streets of Asunción to demonstrate against the rise in violent crime in Paraguay. They also raised the issues of the earlier abductions of Cecilia Cubas, daughter of former President Raúl Cubas, and of businesswoman Gilda Vargas (in August of last year) - both of whom are still missing. Nelson Mora was drafted in to replace Fiorotto; Núñez was replaced by his deputy, Carlos Zelaya.

Mora immediately ordered a purge of the police in an attempt to address the public suspicion that many of the crimes in Paraguay are committed by criminals in collusion with the security forces. He also ordered the police to start to clamp down hard on unlicensed arms: 'The monopoly of security belongs exclusively to the Paraguayan state. We will not allow any individual or collective arming of the population - and even less that groups of men, in a sort of paramilitarism, should seek to assume that obligation,' Mora said.