Trucks and tractors were parked at intervals along highways around a number of major cities. Taxi drivers tied up the streets of the capital Asunción and the eastern city of Ciudad del Este with go-slow protests..

With a population of 6 million Paraguay has over 1 million unemployed or underemployed. This figure has continued to rise as the shockwaves from the economic crisis in neighboring Brazil and Argentina have hit the country. Peasants, who account for more than a third of the workforce and whose labor produces 95 percent of Paraguay’s exports, have been mobilizing in these protests to demand land. The depression has driven a growing number of peasants off the land.

As the fight by workers and farmers intensifies, the government is stepping up its assault on the rights of working people. On September 19 Juan Arrom, leader of the Free Homeland Movement (Movimiento Patria Libre--MPL) was jailed on frame-up charges in connection with the alleged kidnapping of María Edith Debernardi, a member of a prominent bourgeois family.

Initially, Arrom was kidnapped and tortured by the police. Following demonstrations and a national campaign he was released on parole, but government prosecutors have continued to try to build a frame-up case against him.

The MPL and other political organizations in Paraguay have issued a joint statement demanding Arrom’s release. "We oppose the political persecution of MPL leaders who were kidnapped and tortured last January by the government under the pretext of going after ‘subversive and terrorist’ actions by left and popular organizations and seeking to tie them to an alleged kidnapping and extortion case," the organizations said in the statement. They accused the government of practicing "state terrorism" in its continuing persecution of MPL leaders.

The statement was also signed by the April 19 Indigenous Movement, Revolutionary Socialist Nucleus, Paraguayan Communist Party, Workers Party, and Paraguayan Socialist Party.  
 
 
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