RIGHTS-BOLIVIA: Guaraní Families in Forced Servitude

RIGHTS-BOLIVIA: Guaraní Families in Forced Servitude
By Bernarda Claure

LA PAZ, May 2 (IPS) - Efforts by Bolivia’s land reform authorities to free 167 Guaraní families living in servitude in Alto Parapetí, a rural area in the eastern Bolivian lowlands province of Santa Cruz, have brought to light a phenomenon that had remained largely hidden and ignored until now in the country’s vast Chaco plains region.

The scandal broke out a few weeks ago in Bolivia as the media began to report on the indigenous families’ appalling living conditions.

In the Chaco grasslands region, which covers the eastern and southeastern part of the provinces of Santa Cruz, Tarija and Chuquisaca and where temperatures regularly climb above 40 degrees Celsius, there are also another 1,050 families living in a kind of modern-day slavery.

A study carried out in 2007 by the German Development Service’s (DED) Programme to Foment Intercultural Dialogue in the Bolivian Chaco identified the municipalities in which the enslaved families live.

The spotlight is now focused on the municipality of Alto Parapetí in the province of Cordillera, where the government’s National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) decided early this year to enforce the land reform law and recover the property of around 20 Guaraní communities, in response to a legal claim to community land presented by indigenous people in the area in 1996.

Twelve years after the Guaraní’s initial claim to their ancestral land was filed, a team of INRA inspectors is attempting to regularise land ownership and redistribute idle or fraudulently obtained land -- by means of expropriation with economic compensation -- in the Chaco region.

But the INRA agents have run into violent opposition from white and mestizo (mixed-race) medium and large landowners, farmers and ranchers in eastern Bolivia, which concentrates most of the country's natural gas production, industry and gross domestic product, as opposed to the western highlands, which are home to the country’s poor indigenous majority.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42210

Land reform to free Indians from servitude in Bolivia

25 April 08 - Alto Parapetí, a rural area in the eastern Bolivian province of Santa Cruz, is caught up in a dispute between large landowners and the government, which is trying to free more than 2,700 Guaraní Indians from a state of servitude.

Interview by Franz Chávez/IPS, La Paz - Forty inspectors from the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) are attempting to draw up a land registry in the area and restore the land rights of 19 indigenous communities in the area.

Alto Parapetí, in the province of Cordillera, is located 1,200 km southeast of the administrative capital, La Paz.

The inspectors’ access to the disputed land, where Guaraní families are living in a state of servitude and forced labour on remote estates, according to the ombudsman’s office and human rights groups, has been blocked by local landowners.

The medium and large landholders have the backing of the local government and the pro-business Santa Cruz Civic Committee, who are staunch opponents of the leftwing government of indigenous President Evo Morales.

The presence of government inspectors in the area has fanned the flames of a conflict with the Morales administration, which is attempting to regularise land ownership and redistribute idle or fraudulently obtained land (involving expropriation with economic compensation) in the extensive plains and forests of Bolivia’s Chaco region, which covers the eastern and southeastern portions of the provinces of Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca and Tarija.

More:
http://www.humanrights-geneva.info/Land-reform-to-free-Indians-from,3049

Landowners’ Rebellion: Slavery and Saneamiento in Bolivia
Written by Alexander van Schaick
Monday, 28 April 2008

In recent weeks, cattle ranchers and landowners in Bolivia’s Cordillera province, located in the south of the department of Santa Cruz, resorted to blockades and violence in order to halt the work of Bolivia’s National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA – Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria). As a referendum on Departmental Autonomy for Santa Cruz draws near, the conflict calls into question the central government’s ability to enforce the law in the Bolivian lowlands.

The dispute centers on the region of Alto Parapetí, south of the provincial capital of Camiri, where INRA is currently trying to carry out land reform and create an indigenous territory for the Guaraní indigenous people. Additionally, it claims various communities of Guaraní live and work on white or mestizo-owned ranches in conditions of semi-slavery.

For nine days landowners and their supporters blockaded major highways and virtually sealed off Alto Parapetí. The blockades continued until Bolivia’s Vice-minister of Land, Alejandro Almaráz, left the region on April 18. At the end of February, Ronald Larsen, a major landowner in Santa Cruz, and other ranchers took Almaráz hostage at gunpoint for several hours when he and other government officials tried to enter the region.

An Incomplete Land Reform

In the 1990s and up to the present, the Guaraní Nation and Bolivia’s other lowland indigenous peoples mobilized to force the national government to recognize their right to their ancestral territories. In 1996, the first administration of Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada passed a land reform law that gave Bolivia’s indigenous people the opportunity to claim their Communal Territory of Origin (Territorio Comunitario de Origen or TCO).

The 1996 law – Ley N°1715 – reorganized the country’s land law and agrarian reform institutions. It also established INRA to resolve land conflicts and issue titles through a process called saneamiento. In this process, INRA would establish property limits, to look into whether property owners had obtained land legally and to investigate whether they were putting their land to socially or economically productive use. (Latifundios, or huge tracks of idle land used to speculate on rising land prices or as liens to obtain loans, are banned by the Bolivian constitution.) Finally, INRA would resolve land conflicts through mediation and legal processes, title TCOs for indigenous people, and establish parcels of state-owned land for distribution. In the end, landowners would own land with clear title. INRA was to carry out saneamiento throughout all of Bolivia between 1996 and 2006.

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1254/31/

Bolivia: At the Bolivian Chaco 500 Guarani families are suffering suppression by landlords
Abril 11, 2008, 10:10 EDT

Camiri, Santa Cruz - Bolivia --
From Iviyeca to Alto Parapet and in the other side of the Hill Sararenda, there are 500 guarani families suffering suppression from landlords, this report was made by Assembly of Guarani People (APG Spanish initials).

The Guarani people reported that they will continue fighting to recover their land and rescue families in captivity, giving a pronouncement under the slogan "Basta de peones y patrones en el Chaco Boliviano" (Enough of being servant, enough of landlords in the Bolivian Chaco).

According to APG, until now, 80 families have moved away from the area, leaving their communities to escape from landlord abuses.

At El Alto Parapeti, 13 landlords have 167 guarani families under slavery conditions, from those families 12 families are in captivity at Ronald Larsen’s lands, a United States citizen.

Besides, there are 30 families working under slavery circumstances at Itacuatia which belongs to Rene Chavez; at Huaraca property of Mario Malpartida, 54 families; at Caritindi property of Rodolfo Corcuy, 3 families; at El Recreo property of Aniceto Corcuy, 8 families; at Yaiti property of Luis Chavez, 13 families; at Yapumbia property of David Chavez, 14 families; at Alto Carapari property of Alfredo Retamoso, 12 families and at Bajo Parapeti property of Mario Perez, 15 families.

http://www.redbolivia.com/noticias/News%20in%20English/Bolivia/62999.html

‘Guarani children malnourished due to lack of land’
4 April 2008

A Brazilian public prosecutor has told a Brazilian parliamentary enquiry that the government’s failure to demarcate and protect the land of the Guarani Indians is leading to widespread malnutrition among Guarani children.

Public prosecutor Deborah Duprat said last week, ‘There is not enough space for these groups… Which creates problems like malnutrition and other illnesses.’ Duprat’s comments come just before World Health Day on 7 April, which marks the founding of the World Health Organisation sixty years ago.

Between January and October last year, sixteen Guarani children under the age of one died in the community of Japorã in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Mato Grosso means ‘thick forest’, but the forests are being cleared for soya plantations, cattle ranching and sugar cane. The Guarani are squeezed together on tiny plots of land, and are unable to grow enough food.

The Guarani also have one of the world’s highest suicide rates: one percent of their population committed suicide between 1985 and 2000, including children as young as nine.

More:
http://www.survival-international.org/news/3197