RIGHTS-PARAGUAY: Activists Complain to UN of Moon Sect Expansion

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Apr 16 2001 (IPS) - Activists appealed to the United Nations Human Rights Commission regarding the sale of the Paraguayan town of Puerto Casado, which was transferred wholesale – with all of its buildings and some 400,000 surrounding hectares – to a company belonging to the Unification Church, better known as the Moon sect.

The International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples filed a complaint with the UN commission with respect to the town’s transfer from the Argentine firm Carlos Casado SA to the religious group founded by Reverend Sun Myung Moon in South Korea in 1954.

Julen Arzuaga, a spokesman for the League, said the transfer of the town was an “aberration”, because the contract of sale covered the entire territory on which the town of 6,500 is located – 550 kms north of the capital Asuncion – and included the local church, schools, streets, historical monuments, housing – even the cemetery.

The Carlos Casado SA company, founded in 1886 by a Spaniard who settled in the central-eastern Argentine city of Rosario, at one point owned 5.7 million hectares in Paraguay, equivalent to 10 percent of the national territory and an area larger than Switzerland.

The company sold off part of that land, and since 1910 has been logging the forests on its property, especially the quebracho tree, a native hardwood species used in the construction industry and for the extraction of a natural tanning agent for leather.

The company’s logging operations in Paraguay’s Chaco region were suspended in 1997, “when they cut down the last quebracho tree,” said Rubén Domínguez, a musician from Puerto Casado who has lived in Europe for 24 years.

In his appeal to the United Nations, Arzuaga protested that the forests and other natural resources had been “pillaged” by the Carlos Casado company.

The League also noted that workers and indigenous people living in Puerto Casado and working for Carlos Casado had suffered exploitation and near-slavery conditions as well as social marginalisation and poverty, and lacked health care, education, decent housing and work.

Since the local tannery was shut down, residents have scraped by on subsistence fishing and agriculture activities.

In the Chaco region, where Puerto Casado is located, indigenous peoples account for 60 percent of the population, but own less than two percent of the land.

With the transfer of the town and 400,000 surrounding hectares to Atenil Enterprises SA, a company belonging to the Moon sect, control over Puerto Casado has simply passed from one transnational corporation to another, said Arzuaga.

The representatives of Atenil SA informed the local residents of Puerto Casado that they could continue living in the town for one more year – a clear indication that the townspeople do not figure in the Moon Sect’s plans, said Domínguez, a member of the Coordinator of Solidarity for Casadeña Dignity.

After learning that their town had been sold out from under them last October, the residents of Puerto Casado, with the support of all of the town’s social, religious, political and labour groupings, demanded respect for their right to self- determination.

The townspeople are demanding the right to adopt policies aimed at the economic and social recuperation and development of Puerto Casado, without meddling from outsiders like transnational corporations, Arzuaga told the UN Human Rights Commission, which is currently meeting in its annual sessions in Geneva.

The local residents asked the Paraguayan Congress to pass a law that would involve the expropriation of 160,000 of the 400,000 hectares covered by the contract of sale.

The 160,000 hectares in question include the urban portion of Puerto Casado and surrounding land that would be indispensable to local farming, ranching and forestry initiatives. The idea is to enable local residents to forge a dignified future based on sustainable economic, social and cultural development.

The local residents were backed by the Catholic bishops meeting in the Paraguayan Episcopal Conference, who urged swift action by Congress and authorities “in defence of the sovereignty of the country” against the designs of transnational corporations.

During the UN Human Rights Commission session, the Coordinator of Solidarity for Casadeña Dignity distributed a study by Paraguayan academic Enrique Ibarra on purchases by the Moon sect of huge tracts of land in neighbouring Brazil.

With its property in Paraguay and Brazil’s Pantanal region, the world’s largest wetlands, the Moon group is in a privileged position to control future waterways in the Chaco region, eastern Paraguay and Brazil’s southern Mato Grosso do Sul region on the border with Paraguay, Ibarra pointed out.