Saying No to Soy: The Campesino Struggle for Sustainable Agriculture in Paraguay
June 1, 2009
When Paraguay elected Fernando Lugo, its first non-Colorado Party president in more than sixty years, the mood was elated. In the streets of Asuncion that night in April 2008, "Grandmothers, wrapped in the Paraguayan flag, danced with children in the streets, and cried at the top of their lungs that this [was] the moment they'd been waiting for their whole lives."1 While Lugo's election was a clear victory for the social movements that united to elect him, movement leaders knew that this was just the beginning. As Worker Party and Indigenous Farmer organizer Tomás Zayas told me the previous year: "Lugo will not solve our problems. If Lugo is elected, it will be a door, an opening, through which we can add to our movement and demands."