Jungle villagers continue defiance

WHEN the new owners of Puerto Casado started setting up fences around this Paraguayan town a few years ago, barring inhabitants from accessing the forest and the river flowing nearby, Francisco Dick, 58, whose grandfather arrived here from Glasgow in 1907, did not think twice.

He gathered a group of volunteers from community of 6,000 inhabitants, in the heart of the Chaco jungle in northern Paraguay, and organised a 400-mile protest march to the capital, Asuncion. It attracted support from hundreds of people, and sparked a popular rebellion that lasts to this day.

Locals are demanding that a small part of the 400,000 hectares bought a decade ago by Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who leads the Unification Church, better known as the Moonies, be handed over to the town for people to grow subsistence crops and rear cattle.

Mr Dick now faces five judicial cases, which he believes are part of a ploy to keep him silent, but vows to fight on.

"I keep receiving death threats, they fired shots and have thrown stones against my house, I've almost been run over three times. I can't go out at night alone, it's hell," he told The Scotsman, next to the simple open brick house where he lives.

He described his struggle as part of a wider fight against countless foreign investors who have descended in the past few years on this remote and inhospitable region of Chaco, the second-largest South American forest outside the Amazon.

They are mainly European land speculators and Brazilian ranchers who have cleared huge swathes of virgin thorn forest to rear meat for export to Europe.

Mr Dick is not alone in his struggle. Close to where he lives stands a church dominating the main square.

Five years ago, someone cut through chains on the doors and threw Molotov cocktails at a small room inside the church that housed equipment for a local community radio station.

"It was terrifying, they could have destroyed everything. The radio voiced the demands of the people, that's why they destroyed it, but we quickly replaced the equipment and resumed the broadcasts until today," said Father Martin Rodriguez, the local Salesian priest who arrived in this remote town from Spain in 1980.

"The Moon sect doesn't respect anything. Here there's no state presence, there's continuous judicial pressure against anyone opposing them, people don't believe that the government will help them," he adds, while opening a cupboard where the old, burned equipment is kept.

Representatives of the company that handle the land owned by the Unification Church denied being behind any attacks but admit that serious mistakes were made in its approach to villages.

They added that a new management was in charge and working to reach a deal which, according to them, will open the way for major business ventures that would make the place rich, including an eco-tourism resort and a fish farm.

In the town, however, few trust appear to trust them and further protests are planned. This week, Mr Dick went to the river where 13 other activists were waiting for him in the wooden dock at the edge of the town, about to travel to another city several hours away to attend one of the many trials brought against them by the company.

"This is the fifth time we're attending a trial. We're fed up of being pressured but that won't dampen our fighting spirit, quite the opposite, we'll fight to the end," he said while boarding the small, cramped boat.