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Tension Over Presence of 'Brasiguayos'
Alejandro Sciscioli
ASUNCION, (Tierramérica) -
Brazilian landowners in Paraguay are
accused of gobbling up land and using
unsustainable, polluting farming
techniques, and some Paraguayans also
complain of the heavy cultural influence
along the border.
Today, the ''Brasiguayos''
(Brazilian-Paraguayans) -- as the
Brazilian farmers and their descendants
are known in this landlocked Southern
Cone country of six million people --
own 1.2 million hectares of land, or 40
percent of the total surface area in the
border departments of Canindeyú and Alto
Paraná.
According to private sector estimates,
of the 1.5 million hectares of soybeans
currently planted in Paraguay, 1.2
million hectares are owned by ''Brasiguayos''.
Brazilians began to buy up land in the
southeastern Paraguayan departments of
Canindeyú and Alto Paraná, on the border
with the Brazilian states of Paraná and
Mato Grosso do Sul, in the early 1960s.
Today, small farmers in the region and
organisations of landless peasants
accuse them of a range of ills, from
pollution caused by toxic agrochemicals
to deforestation and ''imposing''
Brazilian culture and the Portuguese
language on a vast part of Paraguayan
territory.
''It all began in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, at the height of the
Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) regime,''
agronomist and business consultant
Carlos Tallone told Tierramérica.
During that period, the Institute of
Rural Welfare (IBR) acquired vast
extensions of land in Canindeyú and Alto
Paraná.
''The idea was to attract Brazilians by
selling them the property, because a
need for land was detected'' on the
other side of the border, said Tallone.
Most of the 37,000 Brazilians living in
the rural areas of Canindeyú and Alto
Paraná are medium-sized landholders
owning around 500 hectares, which makes
them ''roughly equivalent to the urban
middle class,'' said Tallone.
The only luxury they allow themselves is
to buy modern agricultural machinery.
And they do not have a strong political
influence, he said.
Some 295,000 Paraguayans also live in
the same area, a number that includes
the descendants of Brazilian immigrants
with legal residency status.
''There is no way to know how many of
these inhabitants are the sons and
daughters of Brazilians,'' the press
coordinator in the General Statistics
Office, Angie Agüero, told Tierramérica.
''In some border areas, you can see that
more than 90 percent of the people are
Brazilians and their descendants, and in
those areas Portuguese is the language
that is spoken and read, and the
language in which children are taught in
school,'' said Tallone.
Due to the Paraguayan state's lack of
presence in the rural areas along the
border, the Brazilian immigrants who
settled there built their own schools,
hired teachers, and organised their
communities in health and public
security.
''Even today there is not a single
Paraguayan official in those areas,''
said Tallone.
To encourage Paraguayans to move into
the area, the state began in 1963 to
distribute 10-hectare parcels of land to
poor families for subsistence
agriculture.
By 1999, 10,000 families had been
settled on small farms through the land
distribution programme.
But few benefited from the initiative,
said Tallone. ''These people were just
dumped in the countryside, with no roads
and no culture, and no idea what they
had to do,'' said the agronomist. ''They
did not come with a productive spirit.
Where there were forests, they sold the
wood. When the lumber was gone, they
didn't do anything.''
IBR official Julio Brun said that
''Besides the fact that the state has
been absent in various parts of the
country,'' the country's laws are overly
lax.
''The laws allow anyone, even people
without legal residency status, to buy
up land,'' said Brun. ''There are
undocumented Brazilians who are
landowners.''
In 2002, South America's Mercosur trade
bloc, made up of Argentina, Brazil,
Paraguay and Uruguay, along with
associate members Bolivia and Chile,
reached an agreement to grant legal
residency in any of the member countries
to all citizens of Mercosur nations, in
order to legalise the status of hundreds
of thousands of undocumented immigrants.
But the agreement is pending
ratification by the respective national
parliaments.
There are an estimated 380,000
undocumented Brazilian immigrants in
Paraguay.
''The Brazilians come in and continue to
buy land today without any problem, even
if there are people on that land. Then
they go to the public prosecutor and ask
for the people to be evicted,'' Adolfo
Grantze, secretary-general of the
National Campesino (Peasant)
Organisation, said in an interview with
Tierramérica.
According to Grantze, when the police
come and throw people off the property
to enforce a legal order, ''our fellow
farmers sometimes pay with their life to
defend a little parcel of land.''
The rural activist was referring to the
irregular settlements of landless
peasants demanding that the state grant
them property rights over fallow land
that they have occupied and have begun
to farm. However, Grantze said his group
recognises that landowners have the
right to sell their property to whoever
they want.
Minister of Agriculture and Livestock
Antonio Ibáñez described the phenomenon
as an emerging problem ''with economic
and social facets.''
''People have the right to sell their
land to anyone they want,'' but ''we
have seen that basic food production by
family farms has significantly
diminished in the past 10 years, as
extensive agriculture has expanded,'' he
added.
The trend has discouraged local farmers,
many of whom have sold their land to
soybean-growers, most of whom are ''Brasiguayos''.
''The government is caught in the
middle, because we have the social
obligation to support production on
family farms, but we must also sustain
the levels of mechanised production,''
said Ibáñez.
The minister denied that the criticism
of the ''Brasiguayos'' is motivated by
xenophobic sentiments, as Brazilian
immigrants frequently complain.
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