Four years and an impeached president later, Paraguay's Curuguaty Massacre is still in the shadows
Four years and an impeached president later, Paraguay's Curuguaty Massacre is still in the shadows
Fernanda Canofre 2 June 2016
Even if in Paraguay people know that Curuguaty did not happen as stated in the official version, they also doubt that we will ever know for sure what really happened.
The early morning of June 15, 2012 shifted Paraguay’s history. Sixty landless campesinos (peasants) — men, women and children — occupying a plot of public land measuring 2,000 square meters in the city of Curuguaty woke up to the sound of helicopters flying above their heads. Soon, 300 armed officers from the Paraguayan Army and police Special Forces arrived at the property, demanding the landless to leave the place.
It did not take long for the shooting to start. A few hours later, 17 people — 11 campesinos and six police officers — were dead. And seven days later, President Fernando Lugo would be impeached.
Almost four years after the Curuguaty massacre, the case is still dragging through Paraguay’s courts. Fourteen people, one of them a minor, were charged with crimes related to the tragedy, including criminal association, attempted homicide and the deaths of six police officers. Eleven of them are facing prosecution together in a trial that has been postponed time and again over the past year.
No police officer was ever indicted over the massacre. Not one person was formally accused of involvement in the deaths of the 11 landless campesinos.
From the beginning, complaints of rights violations have dogged authorities’ handling of the case. The United Nations’ Human Rights Committee expressed concerns over the investigation, and a UN rapporteur pointed to the fact that only campesinos were pursued for the bloodshed as indicative of the judiciary's bias.
Observers have indentified other inconsistencies in the official narrative. For instance, even though police officers claimed they were not armed when they entered the Marinakue area — the public-private land that the campesinos were occupying — photographic evidence proved otherwise.
More:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/democraciaabierta/fernanda-canofre/four-years-and-impeached-president-later-paraguays-curuguaty-mass