Paraguay's Curuguaty Massacre: A Pretext for a Coup
Paraguay's Curuguaty Massacre: A Pretext for a Coup
Published 14 June 2017 (4 hours 13 minutes ago)
Five years ago, a violent land conflict was used to unseat a leftist president who shook up the country's political status quo.
In 2012, Paraguay's largely right-wing congress exploited a violent confrontation between police forces and landless campesinos that resulted in 17 deaths in order to oust the first progressive president in the country's modern history, and immediately implement measures that favored the agribusiness industry that had long-ruled the South American nation.
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Five years ago, 300 heavily-armed police officers stormed into Marina Kue in the Curuguaty district of Paraguay in an attempt to evict 70 rural farmworkers who had occupied the land. The landless workers asserted that the land belonged to the state before former dictator Alfredo Stroessner passed it to its new owner, Blas Riquelme.
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President Fernando Lugo, a former bishop influenced by the Marxist interpretation of christianity known as liberation theology became the first progressive head of state in a country that had been ruled by the right-wing Colorado Party 60 years prior to his 2008 election. Lugo was blamed for the massacre, which was subsequently used as a pretext to oust him a week later through an expedited, and widely criticized “impeachment.”
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Paraguays-Curuguaty-Massacre-A-Pretext-for-a-Coup--20160614-0036.html
