Paraguayan truckers occupy Asunción to demand freight price regulation

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A large caravan of trucks, mostly from the logistics transport sector, mobilized this Monday through downtown Asunción as a measure of pressure from the sector that includes the threat of a national strike and seeks the approval in Congress of the bill for the regularization of freight rates.

Many of the hundreds of truckers who took part in the protest arrived in the capital last night, sounding their horns, after leaving from different parts of the country’s interior.

The tone was repeated today, although the caravan desisted from approaching the Congress building, whose accesses were cut off by the National Police, and settled along the Costanera, the highway facing the Paraguay River.

However, the representatives of the truckers’ union met with the congressional authorities to present their position on the bill, which contemplates the regulation of freight rates based on operating costs instead of price rates.

After the meeting, Senator Sixto Pereira of the left-wing opposition formation Frente Guasú commented on his social networks that the technical table of the Congress would evaluate “adjusting the bill” to deal with it in Thursday’s session of the Upper House.

“The truck drivers raised the sector’s demands that were previously exposed to other governments and were unfulfilled. They raised the need to regularize job security for a million workers who live from the logistics service,” wrote the senator in his Facebook profile.

Pereira also pointed out that the transporters denounced that the multinationals “pay below cost for the contracting of transport,” which directly impacts their work.

The Paraguayan Industrial Union (UIP), which groups many agro-exporting companies that use the service of trucks, has already expressed its opposition to the project as unconstitutional while condemning some roadblocks carried out by truckers in past protests.

Regarding the freight price, the UIP was in favor of an agreement between truckers and transport companies and the sectors contracting the service, instead of a law which it described as “threatening and altering the system of freedom of competition” guaranteed by the Constitution.