III. The victims and their struggles

The criminal attempts and attacks were directed principally against men and young adults that were poor peasants and rural workers linked to peasant organisations or involved with struggles for access to land, in the context of the agrarian reform. Those attacked belong to the linguistic group made up of monolingual speakers of Guaraní. Ninety-five per cent of the victims spoke Guarani as their mother tongue, and 80 per cent of these people only spoke the Guarani language. Cases of bilingualism, involving knowledge of Guarani and a European language (especially Spanish and Portuguese) were scarcely to be found, and even rarer were the cases of victims that spoke three languages.

Forty-five per cent of the victims were linked to a peasant organisation. In turn, of the seventeen victims that were only rural settlers, with no organic bond to any established peasant organisation, eleven of such colonists were settled on lands that had been obtained through the expropriation of unproductive latifundios and lands that had been acquired unlawfully4 and which had been recuperated by virtue of the struggle of peasant organisations after 1989.

Sixty-six per cent of the victims were concentrated at the base levels of the peasant organisations, whether as associates, militants, or collaborators, or else they formed part of the leadership within each base. This situation shows that the most vulnerable group is that found at the base level of a peasant organisation, particularly the presidents and other leaders of the committees of landless peasants or of the neighbourhood commissions established in new settlements that are characterised by conflicts.

Eighty-five per cent of the cases were concentrated in the Northern axis (Departments of Concepción and San Pedro) and Eastern axis (Departments of Caaguazú, Alto Paraná and Canindeyú) of Paraguay’s Oriental region, including the colonies of Regina Mareco, Guido Almada I and Guido Almada II, thus pointing out the coincidence of the arbitrary executions with the zones of greatest conflict as regards the involvement of peasants struggling for access to land.

In like manner, during the last three Presidential terms since the beginning of the current democracy, an arbitrary execution has occurred systematically every two months somewhere in the country. It should be noted that external political factors, changes of government and electoral campaign periods have had no bearing nor exerted a major influence as regards the variation of this frequency.