Introduction

This dossier is a selection of 20 cases considered representative through which the visibility of the various situations that communities must face every day is the intent. The reports were prepared by a journalistic team carefully selected for their commitment to human rights, and the environment.

This dossier was prepared within the framework of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), which is preceded by the report on the situation of human rights, and their relationship with the environment presented by 15 CSOs. It is divided into three main columns: forest issues, where the problems of deforestation and forest fires are developed; agribusiness, which encompasses soybean fumigation and its social and environmental impact, businesses, and human rights, as well as land titling and issues. Finally, it addresses basic universal rights, focusing on access to water and its link to health.

In the initial phase, a process of workshops was carried out with the objective of letting different organizations and associations of the local civil society express, in the first row, the different situations and problems they face regarding their human rights and how this affects the environment. This process demonstrated once again how deforestation has become a recurring element in terms of human rights violations throughout the last decades. The common thread is that the main victims are rural, indigenous, and peasant communities in the eastern and western regions of the country, with different nuances.

Although they are from different regions in terms of biodiversity, they are similar in the hindrances that clearing forested land brings to the communities; such as the loss of their ecosystem services, and the forced migration to urban areas. Native forests also serve as a home for the socio-cultural survival, and economic subsistence of various indigenous communities.
The economic activities linked to agriculture, and livestock require many hectares for their growth, and are expanding so rapidly in the Eastern region that in 2004, with
just 20% of the BAAPA, Bosque Atlántico del Alto Paraná [Alto Paraná Atlantic
Forest], still standing, the Paraguayan State was forced to pass legislation to prevent the total destruction of the forests. Thus, the well-known “Zero Deforestation Law” was born, enacted in the same year, and whose last renewal was fulfilled at the end of 2020, ensuring its validity until 2030.

The Alto Paraná Atlantic Forest is part of the 200 most important ecoregions in the world, thus identified by the United Nations (UN) itself. The BAAPA covers 10 of the 14 departments (governmental entities) in this region, and despite regulations, it continues to be the victim of deforestation, fragmentation, and degradation of forest remnants each year.
Despite the sad experience of BAAPA, the Paraguayan government did not learn its lesson, and this region had to reach a point of extreme degradation in order for them to act in its defense. Ignoring this precedent, the State continues imperiling other sensitive regions to the same risk. During these years, no public environmental policies, efficient control, nor oversight systems were implemented, not even the updating of environmental regulations that have been effective enough to ensure the connectivity of ecosystems, nor the restoration of degraded ecosystems at the country level. The Chaco-Pantanal is among these, the one in greatest danger.
Over in the Western Region, expansion of livestock production has become the main cause of deforestation, although agribusiness has also expanded its dominions in the Chaco territories in recent years. This region is part of the Gran Chaco Americano and the Pantanal, a vast territory shared among Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina.

In 2019, several fire outbreaks were registered throughout the Chaco which affected human communities historically settled on these lands which have become a hot spring today due to the flames and the smoke that permeates its entire environment. The great Pantanal, with territory referred to above, was also a victimized by the fires. The loss of 768 thousand hectares is estimated in this great environmental complex.

Forest fires that occurred on a large scale in 2019 and 2020 have destroyed entire communities, both in rural and urban areas throughout the country, affecting local flora and fauna with an obvious impact. Despite the fact that the Ministry of the Environment claims that 99% of fires are caused by human intervention, of whichthese crimes absolutely go unpunished in the country. One custom within the agricultural practice, for instance is the burning of pastures between soil use intervals.

Although the main problem in the loss of forests in the country is due to the current agribusiness model, since the mid-1990s, a new and violent actor entered the scene: drug trafficking. Thousands of hectares of forests were lost in the last 10 years in the full BAAPA protected areas due to the cultivation of marijuana, a business run by frontier drug traffickers that, until now, has not left a single person arrested for the destruction of the forests, but has yielded untold amounts of money for financiers.

This report also focuses on the right to land ownership, the struggle of indigenous communities, such as the Yshir Ybytoso, an indigenous people who have inhabited the Bahía Negra area of Alto Paraguay for 500 years, but today find fences with “private property” signs excluding them from large parts of their skies, lands, rivers, and forests, a situation that is incomprehensible for those who believe that the environment does not belong to anyone, but belongs to everyone, and therefore, they care for it as if it were their home. Notwithstanding this, the Yshir conform to the documents and papers that modern times dictate, but they are fighting against them to retrieve their ancestral homelands to restore them as recognized and respected.

These problems are not limited to rural areas. A community located in the heart of Luque, 14 kilometers from Asunción, has long suffered from what it is like to live in an open-air sewer due to the pollution generated by the tanneries of the area.

Communities resist despite everything. They fight every day for something as basic as access to drinking water, a universal human right violated in many parts of the country for instance in the Chaco and in the Pantanal, the largest freshwater wetland in the world.

Access to drinking water, pollution, the fight for land, the cultural loss suffered by indigenous communities, and the trampling of their lands through deforestation, with the rise of agribusiness, or the slow death of protected areas. In general, the neglect on the part of the State, are but a few of the situations that arise and that this material will offer a detailed accounting.

In several of the cases, these are stories of resistance to an inefficient judicial system which seems to deny these abuses. A legislative branch that ignores them, and an executive branch that has made nothing but false promises. Many of the cases that you will read of in this document could have been solved many years ago, but in each instance, you will be able to see the common thread: the disinterest of a State that disdainfully ignores the cases ultimately to be forgotten to their fate.

Exposing the problems, and trying to find solutions for these peoples is intended by narrating each of the cases. To offer relief to those brave leaders who do not rest in their struggle, and also to those who can only fight day after day for clean air to breathe, potable water to drink, and to place food on their tables.