How violence took over the border between Paraguay and Brazil

Three high-impact news stories have put Paraguay on the international stage. First, it was the murder of prosecutor Marcelo Pecci during his honeymoon in Colombia on May 22, 2022.

Then, the United States added vice-president Hugo Velázquez to a list of corrupt persons on August 12. And finally, the murder of journalist Humberto Coronel in the city of Pedro Juan Caballero (September 6).

These three events have in common that they show a certain deterioration attributable to organized crime in the eyes of people who look at the Paraguayan reality from abroad.

Has something changed in Paraguay in recent times, or are we just now paying more attention to these events?

“Three or four years ago, they were very localized events in San Pedro, Amambay, and Concepcion, which are the departments bordering Brazil,” Carlos Peris, a sociologist and researcher at the National University of Asuncion, told DW.

The expert maintains that, in these regions, “the clandestine order of drug trafficking is in place, with murders of journalists and other crimes”.

However, in recent years, says Peris, “violence has become nationalized, that is, it has spread throughout the country.

OLD PROBLEM

Violence has been going on for decades in the border zone with Brazil. Installed in the seventies by the hand of the Stroessnerist hierarch Andrés Rodríguez, the airstrips for drug planes were consolidated.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the issue became more complex with the arrival of groups such as the Red Command or the First Capital Command, the largest criminal organization in Brazil.

“It’s a situation that has been dragging on for some time,” Juan Alberto Martens, criminologist and director of Paraguay’s Institute of Comparative Studies in Criminal and Social Sciences, explains.

“When I give data, people are surprised because they think this is a more violent country. The homicide rate in Paraguay is 7 per 100,000 inhabitants, lower than Uruguay,” he says.

The problem is concentrated on the border: in the department of Amambay, the rate reached 64 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2021.

According to Martens, “organized crime, mainly Brazilian factions, found in Paraguay a favorable territory for their business and, through the Paraná and Paraguay rivers, to take their goods, mainly cocaine, to Europe, from the ports of Montevideo and Buenos Aires”.

Peris recalls that in February 2021, 23 tons of cocaine from Paraguay were discovered in Hamburg, and in Antwerp, in July of this year, another 5 tons were seized.

STATE CONNIVANCE

Peris explains that the explosion of violence is related to the fact that “there are drug trafficking groups with greater firepower and virulence, with more territorial aspirations, and all of this goes hand in hand with political inaction or complicity.

Martens recalls that this is a transnational phenomenon. “The merchandise comes from Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia, passes through Argentina and Uruguay, and sometimes reaches Africa before being shipped to Europe,” he explains.

Both experts consulted by DW agree that the phenomenon of violence in Paraguay would be impossible without the authorities’ approval.

“Locally, it is said that the state is absent, but the numbers show that Amambay is the sixth department with the most police and the third with the most judges. The problem is not that there is no State; the problem is that the state does not fulfill its role,” explains Peris.

And that happens because “one sees the reports and discovers that the prosecutor is corrupt and the police act as hired assassins for the drug traffickers.”

“Without the connivance of the state, this could not happen,” complements Martens.

“We use the concept of ‘criminal governance’ because it is these groups that impose the way of being and existing in these spaces, and there is a complex network, with police and journalists as well, who operate and have social tolerance because they generate employment,” he adds.

And this forms a scenario from which it is practically impossible to escape.

With information from DW