Paraguay's Land Struggle

The Sawhoyamaxa indigenous community in Paraguay have spent over 20 years fighting to get back their land, which they were pushed off by cattle ranchers. The Sawhoyamaxa community is fighting for 14,404 hectares of land. The Sawhoyamaxa case is one of three in which the Inter-American Court has handed down rulings against the Paraguayan state in defence of the country’s native people. None of the resolutions has been fully complied with. In March, the native community began to “recover” their land, setting up small camps on the property to which they are waiting to be awarded a collective title.

The Sawhoyamaxa, who had no title deeds to the land where they had always lived, were displaced from their land, which was taken over by large cattle ranchers. Cattle ranchers have steadily advanced on Paraguay’s Chaco region, where in November 549 hectares a day were deforested, according to the local environmental organisation Guyra Paraguay. The Chaco scrub forest and savannah grassland, which covers 60 percent of Paraguay but accounts for just eight percent of the population, makes for good cattle pasture.

“They don’t want us to progress in our way of life,” the leader of the community, Carlos Cantero, told IPS. “We want the land to dedicate ourselves to our ancestral activities, like hunting and gathering in the forest.”

The Sawhoyamaxa form part of the Enxet linguistic family. There are 19 indigenous groups belonging to five language families in Paraguay, spread out in 762 communities mainly in the east of the country and the Chaco region, a vast dry forest area.

According to the 2012 census, 116,000 of Paraguay’s 6.7 million people – or 1.7 percent of the population – are indigenous, with over half of that group belonging to the Guaraní people. However, the overwhelming majority of the population is “mestizo” – people of mixed European (principally Spanish) and native (mainly Guaraní) descent.

Since the 19th century, the worst dispossession of indigenous people of their lands in this landlocked South American country occurred in the Chaco, especially after the 1932-1935 Chaco War with Bolivia, when the government sold off huge tracts of public land to private owners.

Today, less than three percent of the population owns 85 percent of Paraguay’s arable land, making this the Latin American country with the greatest concentration of land ownership.