RIGHTS-BOLIVIA: Guaraní Families in Forced Servitude

[nosmokes]

And here you thought slavery and plantations ANAT was a nice quaint notion that died w/ R.E.Lee and Dixie.Well, it's been resurrected, waaay down south by some really beautiful people aided and abetted by friends of Dick and Monsanto and the like.Evo is making progress but he has a long row to hoe and many hurdles in front of him yet..
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original-ispnews

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.

The situation has aggravated the tension between the leftist government of indigenous President Evo Morales and landowners in Santa Cruz, ahead of a controversial May 4 referendum organised by the provincial government and the pro-business Santa Cruz Civic Committee, in which local residents will vote on autonomy for the province.

A special commission set up by the Chamber of Deputies last week has until Jun. 17 to carry out a fact-finding mission in Alto Parapetí to investigate the reports of forced labour and servitude, lawmaker Bernabé Paredes of the governing Movement to Socialism (MAS) told IPS.

The commission is made up of representatives of MAS and the main opposition parties.

"There is no doubt that (servitude) exists, I can tell you. I lived for 14 years in the Santa Cruz Chaco working with the Guaraní, and I became very familiar with that master-slave relationship," Javier Guillaumet, head of Teko Guaraní, a non-governmental organisation that works with indigenous people on education issues, told IPS.

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complete article here