By Alejandra Garcia on April 10, 2023
Maria Luisa Duarte, photo: Wikicommons
On April 30, Paraguay will go to the polls to elect the country’s new president in a process marked by a lack of debate and the absence of urgent proposals such as free access to education, more rights for Indigenous people, and the right to their land for example.
Little is expected to change in Paraguay with this election. The right wing Colorado Party candidate is former finance minister Santiago Peña who is in a narrow race with coalition candidate Efraín Alegre of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA) whose program is without much distinction and will continue to steer Paraguay in a neo liberal direction away from the real issues. This is the situation even though a June 2022 poll had 70% of the population said that the country needed profound changes including the inclusion of indigenous rights.
“The interests of Indigenous peoples do not usually appear in the election campaigns, nor are their claims and demands ever heard,” Aché indigenous leader Maria Luisa Duarte, a mother of six children, told the local press in a recent interview for the local news agency Presentes.
In the upcoming elections, the country will elect its presidential, parliamentary, and local government officials to serve for the next five years. But this has been a distressing process, according to Duarte. Paraguay urgently needs to rebuild itself, develop in a balanced way, be inclusive, to become a fairer country. However, these issues were absent from this election campaign. Paraguayans are questioning the future of the country.
Daniela Benitez a leader of the the Nivaclé People, who is also a mother of six and was a candidate for senator in 2018, added, “We cannot talk about future development without talking about the right to access to land. That is our main demand.
According to official data, Paraguay has 7 million inhabitants; of them, 122,000 are Indigenous people, who belong to 19 Indigenous groups distributed in more than 600 communities. However, 85 percent of the country’s lands belong to just two percent of Paraguay’s total population.
On October 12, 2022, for the second time, the country’s Indigenous movements presented to the Paraguayan State institutions a work plan with 34 points demanding a dignified life for the 19 indigenous groups.
These included the cessation of forced evictions, respect for ancestral lands, and an increase in the budget for land purchases. However, although almost six months have passed, the current government has not had the political will to continue with the working group to which it had committed itself.
“The land sustains us; it is our priority and our strength. For us, it is fundamental to sow, to eat healthy food harvested on our farms. That is how we feel good and fulfilled,” Benítez emphasized.
Both women leaders agree that public policies in education and the creation of a market and a fair price for healthy food are other urgent demands of the country’s native communities.
“We also need greater access to job opportunities and decent housing. Education, vocational training, and access to university studies are also human rights. We all have the right to study the career we like, even if we are poor peasants or Indigenous people,” Duarte stressed.
“We demand that we be guaranteed the quality of life we desire and deserve as the National Constitution of the Republic supports,” she concluded.
Regarding rights for Paraguayan women, especially Indigenous women, both commented that “there is a lot of struggles ahead.”
“We women leaders continue believing, proposing, and fighting. We believe that we can reverse this lack of rights and the marginalization we face. We, women, can wake up. Indigenous women in Paraguay are fighters, and we have hope for tomorrow. Women are the ones who will be the catalyst for real change. We will restore our people’s dignity, always by doing good,” they concluded.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – US