Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay

2. Ill-Gotten Land

2 Ill-Gotten Land In May 2006, a public forum organized by the Paraguayan Comisi—n de Verdad y Justicia (Truth and Justice Commission ) was the site of a confrontation between one of the country’s best-known campesino leaders and a representative of the Colorado Party. The forum was called “Campesinos y tierra malhabida,”1 which roughly translates as “peasants and ill-gotten land.” The forum was one of the few gatherings to which campesinos were invited by a consortium of new democratic ngos and government sponsors to give their own narrative accounts of the dictatorship. Highly mediated though it was, the invitation was quite unusual, for it encouraged campesinos to address their concerns about land in the publicly recognized idiom of torture survival . However, that address was tightly regulated. The figure of “tierra malhabida” condensed arguments about the relationship between authoritarianism and land, and in certain contexts could express a deep campesino sense of injustice. But in the official public forum of the Comisi—n de Verdad y Justicia, its use showcased above all the degree to which campesino politics remained constrained in public discourse. Held in Caaguazœ, the capital of the combative interior department of the same name, the public forum was one of a series of events in which survivors were invited to tell their stories to that public that had been built around the archivo Ill-Gotten Land 67 del terror.2 On this occasion, no one’s testimony was more eagerly anticipated than that of Victoriano Centuri—n. A passionate and poetic Guaran’ speaker, Centuri—n recounted harrowing episodes from his already well-known story of imprisonment and torture, and of the strange circumstances that ultimately allowed him to escape into exile in Panama, in 1980. Centœ, as he is affectionately known in the campo, had commandeered a passenger bus outside of Caaguazœ, in 1980, with twenty other armed campesinos. In the campesino version of the story, they had not planned to take the bus by force, but had found no other way of getting to Coronel Oviedo for a meeting with the governor. The ill-fated decision to draw arms had made Centœ easily one of the best-known characters of campesino political lore. After leaving the bus, the group was hunted into the forest by Stroessner’s police, where nine of the twenty were shot. Ten were imprisoned and tortured for years. Only Centœ managed to escape, evading several encounters with police cordons and party informants, and earning a quiet reputation for witchcraft among detractors. He returned to Paraguay, in 1990, to exoneration, compensation, and a life of telling his story to all those who would listen.3 At the forum in Caaguazœ, Centœ added a new chapter to this story. He had recently visited the area where nine of his friends had been killed, a field not far from the city of Repatriaci—n. To add insult to a history of injustice, the land, he discovered, had been bought up by Brazilian farmers and covered over with transgenic soybeans. If the comisi—n were to live up to its name, he said, that land needed to be returned to campesinos, so they could build a community and commemorative monument—it was tierra malhabida and needed to be reverted to campesino hands. The story combined three elements that are key to understanding what campesinos mean when they use the words tierra malhabida. With the story, Centœ linked the arbitrary violence of the dictatorship with the current takeover of the landscape by soybeans, and he opposed both to a continuous campesino struggle for land. Tierra malhabida in his usage expressed campesinos’ sense of rural injustice, which downplayed the transition to democracy as a dramatic historical rupture. In other words, Centœ’s story built a specifically campesino version of history which overlaps with the new democratic narrative, but unsettles it by removing its central historical moment. It was at this point in his story that Centœ was interrupted by a member of the otherwise unobtrusive comisi—n seated behind the podium where he was standing. Miguel çngel Aquino was the only member of the comisi—n from the 68 Chapter Two Colorado Party, a position which he proudly displayed by wearing the party’s traditional bright red shirt. Aquino had originally been part of a a dissident wing of the party that had been exiled by Stroessner. Returning after the coup, he...