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By Tracy L. Barnett

My interview with Magui was so packed with passion and pathos that I had to share it all. The story behind it is here:

Magui Balbuena: Campesina leader takes on Monsanto

Now for the interview. It’s long but it’s worth every minute.

Tracy: Can you tell me a bit about the current environmental situation in Paraguay?

Magui: Ten years ago we formed CONAMURI and we began to organize for the rights of women, and one of the principal rights of women is food sovereignty, the right to a clean environment, agrarian reform, working in alliance with other groups.

In terms of the environment, it’s pretty complicated because of this model that was applied in Paraguay about 40 years ago from a group of foreigners who at first cultivated conventional soy. Several years ago, five or six varieties of transgenic soy from Monsanto were approved for cultivation, and international companies mainly from Brazil have already been planting these seed to test the Paraguayan soil. The government historically does not represent the rights of the rural people, and it easily accepts proposals that come from outside the country. So the parliament approved the cultivation of transgenics, and these companies have been planting many other varieties, and neither the state nor the organizations responsible know how many varieties of transgenic soy are really being planted here.

Paraguay has a good climate, which is why it is unfortunately one of the victims of transgenic soy. They have destroyed an immense quantity of forest. The soil doesn’t rest, because in between crops they plant “interlude seeds” so the soil is always being used, and they employ a whole technological package that uses ultramodern equipment, and they come with the seeds and the agrotoxics that are then applied throughout the countryside. This destroys everything. These machines that are bigger than a building sometimes, in a few days an area what was forest is nothing but red soil, everything devastated, and the plantings begin. They have destroyed entire communities. We don’t have exact data or statistics but they have eliminated more than 200 communities through this model in various ways.

One way is buying the land from campesinos, these families who have been completely abandoned by the state; they leave and go to the city. These lands that are bought by the companies, regardless of whether it’s 10 or 20 hectares, the next day it’s completely devastated and within a week they are cultivating soy.

Then they begin to fumigate the other families that didn’t want to sell their land or plant soy. Then they begin fumigating, and everything begins to die. They start poisoning the domestic animals, the chickens, the corn, the manioc, the fruit trees, and the family gets desperate and everything is destroyed by the pesticide. The campesino begins to get desperate, people get sick, the women miscarry their babies.

It begins with pulmonary effects and skin diseases; then they end up selling their land. So if they don’t want to sell, another thing they do is they rent their land. They rent eight hectares and keep two for their home and their animals and with this money supposedly they can survive. But what happens is that they’ve opened the door for the transgenic soy and once they’ve begun they can’t get rid of the poison. There’s no way to undo it. The campesinos who rent their lands have soy up to their front doors of their houses, so they can’t plant anything more, and they are stuck with this situation for three or four years because everything is made by contract, and the soil after fumigation becomes useless.

Another thing that happens is that they accept the technological package that the company gives to them on credit, and then they’re in debt. The companies prepare the land, they sell them the seeds, the equipment and the pesticides, then they are in debt and they end up selling the soy to the company that sold them the seeds to pay their debts. These are the ways they take over the campesino’s land. More than 15,000 families each year abandon the countryside for this situation, and it keeps increasing. There are communities that have been completely abandoned. I’m from Caaguazú, and in my department, entire communities have disappeared. Sometimes all that’s left is the cemetery, in the middle of the soy field.

Where there were streams, chapels, schools, now there is nothing but soy; everything has been razed. In some communities they had to close the schools because so many campesinos had left for the city, and they had to let teachers go. The impact in the countryside is grave.

Our rivers and streams that cross the communities and the soy fields, they throw everything on top of them, they bury them, and what was a week ago a beautiful stream is now nothing but a soy field.

The wetlands, too, they are using canals to drain the wetlands. In the bigger rivers that remain, where the fish were food for the campesino families, have all been exterminated; there’s not a single fish in the rivers.

Some of the bigger rivers they’ve dammed, like Itaipu, to make these enormous lakes, and the soy growers wash their equipment and the chemical containers in the lake. Now this lake, too, displaced many campesino communities when they built it. But a contract was signed with Brazil, and great extensions of land were covered with the waters that were flooded with the dam. But now the campesinos who live along the lake depend on it for their living. It used to be full of fish, thousands and thousands of fish, and many people lived from the fish.

But nature suffered a huge impact from the creation of these enormous artificial lakes. Until a little while ago I lived in Arsenio Baez, named for our compañero martyr who was assassinated in the struggle for the land in this settlement, by assassins, and our community ended up in Lake Itaipu.

Many communities in that way were destroyed by Itaipu. Our house was about 700 meters from the Itaipu dam. This lake has suffered so many fish kills because they take the big tanks they use to fumigate with poisons and wash them in the lake and their wastes spill out in the water so the fish die. There is a struggle now in my community that has organized to pass a municipal ordinance that they are trying to pass in many communities to make them free of transgenic soy. But we were persecuted so severely, they almost killed my brother in law.
So we moved because the situation had become so unsustainable because of the assassins that were paid by the soy growers, and we found a place 400 kilometers to the north toward San Pedro.

So it had been two months since we had moved to the new community; it was a really small and beautiful community, and we’d gotten this land with a lot of struggle and a compañero was assassinated for this cause. But it was impossible to resist the attacks of the soy growers. They have their defenders in the community, the politicians who do their work and provide financial resources, surely, it’s all very dirty business. Well, to lose a family member in this struggle was too much, so we decided to leave the threat behind.

So, well, these are some of the experiences that have been very painful for us. We thought that our community with 362 hectares, with 150 houses and small farms, that we could live without this contamination, but it was impossible because there were people who had five or six hectares who wanted to rent or sell their land, so we were working to try to get an ordinance but the government is Colorado (the conservative party which was allied with the dictatorship), which is also with the soy growers, and cultivates with the Brazilians.

So we opted to leave and continue our struggle in another community far away.

There were so many experiences – there was the child who was fumigated by a German Brazilian in Itapúa when he crossed the edge of the soy field so as not to walk in the street. This child was carrying meat and other food for the family. They cooked it and by the afternoon everyone in the house was poisoned. This was Jan. 3, 2003. On January 6 they fumigated again because 15 meters away there was another piece of land with transgenic soy and so they began another fumigation and so the child received a third impact.

He had already crossed along the field on his bicycle, then eaten the poisoned food, then another fumigation after three days of convalescence, so they took all the children to the hospital but Silvino died on the 7th of January, he died of extreme chemical intoxication. His little brothers and sisters were taken to the toxicology center of the hospital in Itapúa. They took their blood samples and the analysis showed high levels of glyphosate (Round Up). There were three poisons that they found; these people mix the agrotoxics, which is prohibited, because there’s no way to control the strength of these poisons, and it had a phenomenal effect.

After the children were taken to Asuncion they were treated for several months. The mother was pregnant and lost the baby; she almost died from the problem, and all the children were sick and couldn’t go to school; the whole family was impacted tremendously.

CONAMURI filed a lawsuit; during this process we felt it was obligatory to take the case it to court. There were two trials and we won both of them because the impact was so great. There were 49 witnesses, and each trial lasted a week in the tribunal of Itapúa.

I remember when Monsanto brought glyfosate to the market, they had a festival in the community where they had a video that said you could drink glyfosate, that it was safe and couldn’t kill anyone. But this trial was very powerful.

These soy growers use the technological package that Monsanto and other transnational companies bring to Paraguay because it’s a very profitable, secure business because they dedicate themselves not just to cultivation but to the sale of the equipment and chemicals, which is what really makes a lot of money.

In the second trial, the big soy growers’ cooperative, an organization with real economic power, threatened us and CONAMURI. People said it was like the ant against the elephant, and with the monster that is Monsanto that represents the exportation model of Paraguay – a model so damaging and predatory, that is causing effects so disastrous to our land, that is creating damage at every step, but the Silvino case was the first case of death from agrotoxics, and that’s why it was so important because it has stayed in our Paraguayan justice system. It showed that yes, agrotoxics kill. We don’t know how many thousands of cases there really are because they have the justice system in their favor, the police in their favor, the investigators in their favor, the parliament, the executive branch – they have absolute power here, so that’s why this unequal struggle with Silvino is so important, because it shows that we can win with courage and valor in the face of these powerful interests we are fighting with our lives.

We want to live, we struggle to live in harmony with nature but others from outside invade our territory and threaten and expel us and maintain us in these conditions. The system makes us live under this extreme poverty and people are afraid to speak out or we will lose our health care and our crop assistance or help for our living quarters. In this country that is so rich, there should not be a poor person in the country with all the fresh water, the forests, the climate that is so favorable; they say now that we have mines of petroleum other natural riches and these are the people’s patrimony but they are exploited completely by foreign dark interests who are in favor of death, and they are taking the power in our country.

The destruction is so great, and the effects in the countryside. I want a serious institution to come to Paraguay and see how many children of the countryside have cancer, how many women and young people have cancer, and how much it’s increased. The majority of cases come from those parts of the country where they’re using these agrotoxics.

This is the situation, nobody makes a sound or asks, Why there are so many cancer cases? Where do these people come from?

There’s a threat that’s growing stronger by the day; we now have 2.5 million hectares in soy, with production coming to 10 mill tons. Every year they take more of the campesinos’ land, more forests are destroyed, more wetlands and more waterways destroyed. We think it’s closer to 5 million hectares but the state doesn’t want to see it, and doesn’t want to see how many dead are resulting… people come to the hospital and ask the doctor, why is he sick? He can’t say in the documentation that it’s because of the agrotoxics; doctors say it’s prohibited to report that. They say it’s diabetes, a fever, a headache, any other diagnosis besides poisoning from agricultural chemicals. And it’s so expensive to do a study and the consequences are so serious, here the people just die. They’ll say, “Oh, he died of a cancer or a stomach problem or a headache or whatever.” This is the fruit of the exposure to agrotoxics.

In places where one goes crossing from my department, Caaguazú, all the way to the border with Brazil, up north to Conception and over to San Pedro, it’s all full of soy fields. Thousands of people crossing this area are being intoxicated on a regular basis because they are fumigating there.

Tracy: How do you know when you’re being exposed to agricultural chemicals?

Magui: I feel a headache, then my chest feels like it’s opening, and my lips feel thick. I just feel bad, my stomach hurts. Many children have a cough and say they feel bad on the bus, but they don’t make the connection with the fact that two meters away they are fumigating 200 hectares of soy. It’s terrible the violation of the laws that is occurring – because here there are environmental laws to protect the community, which say there have to be barriers of protection, and there’s a law that says on the borders of communities and highways you’re not supposed to fumigate, but the Brazilians don’t care, they don’t respect the law.

Tracy: How is the spread of soy affecting the indigenous people of Paraguay?

Magui: Last year we had a community in a very remote area in the center of the country, where in three months more than 12 indigenous people died from intoxication. What does the media say? That’s another huge problem, the media defends the soy growers because they are in favor of the industrial agriculture model. The press says the indigenous people died of malnutrition, not intoxication; they report that they died of worms or of parasites. In another case in Alto Parana, in an indigenous community, the Brazilians bought the land and said it was owned by the state.

They took over the indigenous ancestral community, they took the title and said, “This is ours, you have to leave. Here’s a bus.” The indigenous people said, “No, we are not going from here. We’re not leaving our community.” The Brazilians left, and within a few hours, an airplane flew over and fumigated. This day four indigenous people died.

When they went to take the sick ones to the hospital, they found they were being followed by the employees of the soy growers, who said to the tribal leader, “Take this money. Say you didn’t see an airplane. Say that nothing happened.”

There was a big contradiction because the tribal leader was saying there was no plane, and another one said there was a plane but they weren’t fumigating. Then another said there was a plane and they were fumigating us. Another said it was water they sprayed. Another said, no, it was poison.

So the soy growers made a disaster of the indigenous people. And this is what they do. That’s what they did, too, in the community where 12 died.

In the Alto Parana, the situation was so serious the minister of indigenous affairs and several investigators went to the community to investigate. The minister said, this is intoxication. Then the soy growers sued the minister and said you have to take it back; you have to say the indigenous people weren’t intoxicated.

The minister took refuge with the World Health Organization, and the case is still going on.

Here the industrial agriculture export model is terrible for our country. The people who live in the city don’t realize the gravity of the problem in our country. But the majority of our population continues to live in the countryside. Our life is the countryside, our way of eating, our way of living, and we want to continue to live in the countryside; our roots are in the countryside.

That’s why we’re organizing ourselves for food security, giving workshops and talks and community radio programs and organization of women in defense of the Mother Earth.

We work for the consciousness of our people so they will stop using these toxic chemicals and start cultivating in a way that’s organic so the food can once again be healthy and this will also affect the people who live in the city. We all depend on the food that’s grown here. But the soy is not for Paraguayans, it’s for the pigs and the cows and the birds that feed the people of the United States and Europe.

The impact keeps going; the propaganda the media writes, the radio, the television makes a big impact because we don’t have the ability to fight this propaganda, this orientation of the mass media that is distorting the information and orienting the minds of the people to consume junk food and cultivate products for export only. So our young people all go to Argentina or Spain or the big cities. Many people have left and are sending money back to the grandmother and the mother so these people don’t produce anymore. Sixty percent of the people who live in the countryside are people who are 40 years or older. The consequences are that in Paraguay we have 650,000 homeless people in the outskirts of the city, and they are all campesinos. They have no employment, no land for cultivation, and they fall into drug addiction and prostitution. Some young men end up being male prostitutes even though they’re not homosexuals, they take that lifestyle because there are no other opportunities, they see no future.

Tracy: What is the role of women in this struggle?

Magui: Most organizations now have a women’s section, which usually has a very low profile, don’t have much influence in the organization. It’s a big challenge for our compañeras in mixed organizations. But the women have reacted against this model. When they fumigate the soy, people make human barriers, they demonstrate at the headquarters of the soy producers, asking them to stop the fumigation. But this is against violent repression that women have suffered. Some who are pregnant have miscarried, some have been imprisoned and beaten, these women in defense of their habitat, their environment, the places where they live.

So after seeing this CONAMURI formed because of the inequalities that exist in every aspect – socially, economically, politically, the lack of women’s participation, their absence in positions of management. CONAMURI was born of this necessity. We also have focused our struggle in favor of agrarian reform for the campesinos and indigenous people, and this struggle for agrarian reform is primordial. Within this struggle for agrarian reform is the struggle for the environment, for the ability to produce healthy food, that is increasingly more organic instead of dependent on technology that comes from abroad – and to maintain our native seeds.

Tracy: What is the focus of your work right now?

Magui: The defense of our native seeds is primordial for CONAMURI. That’s why we founded Semilla Roga, house of the seeds, which we’ve begun with demonstration plots, because the House of the Seeds – in other words, a seed bank, but for us the word “bank” sounds bad so we call it a seed house. In Guarani it’s Semilla Roga. Roga is Casa, house. So we have a House of Seeds in my department which is Caaguazú, where we are beginning to rescue the natural medicines also, in a demonstration parcel, and in Semilla Roga we’re preparing silos, small and large, to preserve the seeds.

This has many objectives, and it has to be organically produced, without agrochemicals, and it’s been an intense work of awareness raising of the people at the grassroots, because we’ll be bringing seeds from six or seven departments to this Semilla Roga. And they’ll be able to take seeds as well, so the intention is to exchange seeds. For example if I have beans, and to the north on the department of Concepcion, which is about 300, 400 kilometers from Caaguazú, someone also has the same variety of bean, and they bring them and we mix them and improve the seed.

First we launched the campaign for the preservation of native seeds and plants. We’ve worked for three years now raising awareness in the community, through the media and whatever spaces they let us enter. We’ve printed posters such as this is one, which is for our seed campaign. It says “ñamombarete ñane ñemity el hagua tekokatu,” “Give strength to our crops so that we can have well-being,” is more or less what it means in Spanish.
After this, our poster for the Law of Corn… so we’re working on raising awareness of the need to care about our seeds, to mix the varieties and continue improving them, because many families have lost that diversity. They plant two or three types of beans or legumes, a grain or two, their corn, and everything else has been lost. So we’ve begun the rescue.

It’s really good because within this campaign we’ve organized various seed fairs at the departmental and national level, where we exchange seeds. And with Semilla Roga, that’s another idea, where we deposit as many different kind of seeds as possible, and people can take seeds from there. So they bring seeds, and they take them. That’s the objective; if someone takes 5 kilos of seed, they return 10 kilos. All the seed will not have patents, but like a birth certificate, with its name, its date, its origin and everything. So that’s the objective of Semilla Roga. After that we’ll launch the Semilla Roga-í, “í” being the smallest, in the communities.

We have four departments now where we’re working with demonstration plots, and we don’t have government support except for a little from some agencies that enables us to conduct the campaign. Besides that, the work is all volunteer – for the posters, materials for the workshops, for that we get a little support but we want to extend that support because Semilla Roga needs to be well equipped. We have to have airtight containers and flasks, and a well-ventilated space. The objective is to have the Semilla Roga in each department, with the demonstration plots and a program to collect and save seeds in each department. So that’s where we are right now, continuing the work of the past three years of awareness raising, building the Semilla Roja program and consolidating these advances. And that’s what we’re preparing these young people for – to be spokespeople for the seeds.

Tracy: What is it that gives you hope, Magui? What motivates you to keep on going?

Magui: We have now in the Congress a proposal for the Law of Corn, which is very hard-fought, being studied by various commissions, and Monsanto is cultivating transgenic corn secretly everywhere. Now for the first time Senave, the National Service for Control of Vegetation and Seeds, has been enforcing the law regarding this, and they are destroying transgenic corn in various departments, and we are supporting this work through various organizations. And the Brazilian agro-businesspeople have been passing out transgenic corn among the small producers to involve them so that they will end up buying it. So now this corn has to be destroyed, which has been planted by large producers as well as small producers, because it’s prohibited by law. And behind these Brazilian growers are armed civilians with shotguns, not letting the investigators enter, or the SENAVE officials, to destroy the crops. So there’s been this resistance, and the SENAVE officials have been very courageous. And now some of the investigators have stepped back and said they don’t want to accompany the SENAVE officials when they go out to carry out the destruction of the cornfields because they’ve been paid by the Brazilian growers.

Tomorrow there’ll be a seminar for more than 100 community, campesino and indigenous leaders to teach them about the law and how it can be applied. And we’re going to be supporting more actively SENAVE. Because SENAVE was always an agency that was controlled by the soy producers – we even have information that the growers paid the salaries of SENAVE, because supposedly the state didn’t have the money. And now things have changed because Miguel Lovera has taken charge, and he’s a person who for many years worked in the protection of the forests and the environment. He’s from the International Coalition for the Defense of the Forests, and he also has his own small NGO here. So now all the soy growers are demanding that President Lugo fire Lovera immediately. So that’s why when I had the opportunity in front of everyone at the Social Forum of the Americas I asked President Lugo to support Miguel Lovera in his effort to make use of the law and put everything in its place.

So we are following Senave and supporting them but the organization is still full of supporters of the soy growers, so it’s been very difficult. And this struggle will continue, it’s a very frontal struggle, because it’s a model that’s been supported internationally by the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the IMF, which enforces regimens aimed at securing their markets, conditioning the food supply for all of humanity for the sake of their profits, it doesn’t matter to them the destruction of the environment or that global warming continues to increase and the planet continues to become more dangerous.

I don’t know where they’re planning to live – probably they’re preparing another planet to live on, this small group of rich imperialists, but here on Planet Earth it’s going to be very difficult to live if we don’t see a change of attitude among these groups, the G8, the WTO, the World Bank, and the other big multilateral institutions, if they don’t realize that life is much more important than profits and begin to develop a harmonic relationship between humanity and nature, the great biodiversity that we have inherited on this planet and which is now being threatened by the actions of these corporations.

Tracy: What can supporters in other countries do to help?

Magui: It’s very important within the United States that people work from within to change the policy of domination and imposition on other peoples and that the United States, too, re-examine its model of production, and support the idea that we can all live together and everyone can have a dignified life, that Americans realize that their powerful country is generating war and destruction of the natural wealth of other peoples.

I believe that the people in the United States can work to increase the level of consciousness of the enormous responsibility their country has in the face of genocide and death that is being caused by the imposition of the model developed by this country.

I believe in the United States most people are really misinformed and receive false information about what is happening, and they believe they’re doing good things abroad.

I believe Latin America is engaged in a great struggle and Africa is engaged in a great struggle, in fact the whole world, and that we are beginning to work more in solidarity, joining our voices in defense of our Mother Earth, and so that humanity can continue to survive – but not in a calamitous state and a state of permanent threat but a humanity that can live in a dignified condition; that they begin to see that this great “progress” as it’s called has impoverished entire peoples throughout the planet, that this model is perverse, it generates death, so we have to change the model for a more sustainable, more just model where all can live harmoniously in conditions of equality, and this is the great dream of everyone who struggle for bien vivir, for a better life for everyone, for a better world, for a world in which we’re not all living in a constant state of war and struggle against the capital that imposes this model on us.