Contested Land, Divided Community : Argentina Indymedia (( i ))

Frédéric Dubois - Tarija, Bolivia. November 14, 2004
*Translated from French by Dawn Paley

On September 10, 2003, 150 Guarani women, men and children from Hipolito Yrigoyen, a small town in Northern Argentina, left their homes to set up a new community in the nearby forest of the Loma. Six days later, they were brutally evicted and 22 people were detained by police forces.

The Loma covers mountains, forests and arable land, and its 2500-5000 hectares (depending on who’s counting) are at the centre of a complex conflict between the Guarani people and the San Martin del Tabacal sugar refining company.

On paper, the Loma has belonged to Tabacal, the principal employer in the region, since 1943. The Guarani of Hipolito Yrigoyen, some of whom were born on the Loma, do not see this land as company property, but as their ancestral land.

Living in precarious conditions, in inadequate housing that is often subject to floods, and working the land for low pay, the Guarani people have nothing to lose. “We’re not against the company. We just want to reoccupy our land”, says Monica Romero, as she boils rice and prepares a well sugared maté.

Romero is the leader of a Guarani movement in Hipolito Yrigoyen, whose members are recognized by the Argentinian Institute of Indian Affairs as an Indigenous community. Her modest home is almost empty, built on the naked earth; her husband and five of her eight children have been working the land since dawn. They’ll come back after dusk, exhausted, with less than twenty pesos in hand.

Juvencio Peña, like Romero and other Guarani in this community famous for its poverty and hard times, was born on the Loma, but has lived since 1965 in Hipolito Yrigoyen. Like his father, he started working at the Tabacal company as a young adult, after a childhood of having lived off the land, collecting medicinal plants, making carbon from collected wood, and raising crops. In 1964, the Tabacal company ordered families off the Loma, towards the neighboring municipalities.

“The Loma has always been private, property of Tabacal” Peña affirms. Unlike Romero, Peña starts the history of Guarani presence in the area with the arrival of the enterprise in 1920, and of Guarani presence in the Loma specifically to the establishment of a Catholic mission on the Loma in 1934.

Since 2003, the conflict over the Loma has literally divided the Guarani community in Hipolito Yrigoyen. The more radical group, led by Romero, marched on foot to the capital of the province of Salta to ask for official recognition of their ancestral lands. After a categorical dismissal by the province, they traveled to Buenos Aires, where they made connections with activists and international solidarity groups. While in Buenos Aires, the group also made their case to representatives of the Argentinian Institute of Indian Affairs, as well as to the minister of human rights.

“We’ll keep fighting for the Loma, but through dialogue”, quips Peña, who leads another Guarani association in Hipolito Yrigoyen. Compromise is the sole path for Peña, who wishes to maintain his good relations with the Tabacal company as well as with his friends in the provincial and municipal governments while at the same time advocating for improvements in his community. His desire for dialogue is evidenced through his signing of an accord with the Tabacal corporation, which gives him the right to access the Loma in exchange for his recognition of the land as private property.

Herman Mascietti is a young lawyer representing the more radical group of Guaranis led by Romero. He feels that the Seabord company is playing underhanded games with the Guarani community by letting Peña control who accesses the Loma. He sees the privileges accorded to the Guarani that ‘tow the line’ of the company as a sort of bribe. He explains that “New houses, guaranteed employment for the children of the leaders and other goodies of the sort serve but to divide the Guarani community”.

Mascietti claims that “the company has a three part strategy to discount the Guaranis legitimate claim to the Loma”, and in preparation for a court case on November 23rd regarding the Guaranis claim to the Loma, he notes that “there is political interference in the Guarani community: the company works with the police force, the government and the local media, and represses the Guarani through a privately owned security company called Search”.

Guillermo Jaculika, an engineer and public relations person for the company doesn’t hesitate in giving a blunt characterization of the situation. “The ancestral claim to the Loma is a fiction”, he says, “supported by a lawyer trying to give credibility to a false claim”. Guillermo is unapologetic in his dismissal of the demands advanced by the Guaranis looking to reclaim the Loma, reiterating that “An archeologist hired by the company surveyed the Loma, and found nothing older than the remains of Guaranis who came from Bolivia (in the early 20th century) to work for the Tabacal corporation”.

The importance of the seemingly unused Loma to the corporation is explained by Guillermo as resting in the water canals that were constructed in order to irrigate the company’s sugar cane crops. He feels that if people lived on the Loma, there would be “a high risk of contamination and erosion, because if the community was to use this water, it’s quality and volume would no longer be guaranteed”.

While the dispute among the Guaranis in regards to their differing histories is confusing, according to University of British Columbia anthropologist, Gaston Guillermo, the question should not be on tenterhooks. His research on the Guarani peoples lead him to assert that “there is, without a doubt, a Gaurani presence in the region of Oran dating back to the Seventeenth century, however the waves of migration of Guaranis from Bolivia in the early twentieth century are also well documented. What is not clear, at this time, is the relation between the two”.

Where do ancestral rights begin and end for the Guarani people, whose occupation of the Loma is argued as having been centuries long by some, and only since the existence of the Tabacal company by others?

This knotted conflict calls on a variety of juridical levels, depending on the complainant. The company uses the Argentine constitution, where it states that “an Aboriginal community does not have the right to claim or possess land unless it was ‘traditionally’ occupied by the aforesaid community”, in order to defend it’s claim to the Loma.

The Guarani community represented by Mascietti invoke convention 169 of the ILO (International Labour Organization), to which Argentina has been party since 2000. This convention obliges the national government to designate Guarani ownership over lands they claim as traditional territory. This responsibility has yet to be taken up by Kirchner’s government.

The playing field is far from equal in the battle for the Loma. The time an energy invested by the company is tantamount to an irritation, while for the Guaranis, it amounts to a huge strain on an already taxed people.

While the Kirchner government surely doesn’t want to scare off foreign investors through land redistribution, they are nonetheless obliged to act in accordance with international law to seek out a solution to the conflict over the Loma. The option of washing their hands of the situation is irresponsible, and a well defined compromise could return dignity and autonomy to an uprooted community. The struggle thus is not to define the rights of Guaranis through the creation of new juridical precedents, but to resolve without delay the suffering of the Guarani community.

There was an abvious error with the name of Gastón Gordillo. The antrhopologist from Canada should read as Gastón Gordillo and not Gaston Guillermo. Please excuse us for this unfortunate error.

Sincerely,

Frédéric Dubois