IPS-English ARGENTINA: Defenders of Small Farmers Harassed Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:56:06 -0700 ARGENTINA: Defenders of Small Farmers Harassed and Threatened Marcela Valente BUENOS AIRES, Aug 10 (IPS) - A group of hooded men armed with shotguns threatened the leader of a small farmers' organisation and the delegate of an international human rights organisation in a northern Argentine province after they reported an incident of corruption involving both Argentina and Spain. ”It's basically the same old story: they harass small farmers because they want their land, they kill their animals and poison their water, and they wage a war of attrition,” Ángel Strappazzón of the Santiago del Estero Small Farmers' Movement (MOCASE) told IPS. On Aug. 2, Strappazzón appeared in a local television programme with Xavier Álvarez, a professor at the University of Catalunya and a member of the Olof Palme International Foundation, based in Barcelona, Spain. They spoke on air about alleged acts of corruption that resulted in abuses against small farmers in the province. That same day, Strappazzón and Álvarez were accosted by eight armed men driving a van without licence plates, who claimed they were guards working for the Afagro agribusiness company. Later, the two men were intercepted by police, and that night they were ambushed while driving along a highway, they said. They were trailed for several kilometres by a van just like the first vehicle, and when they were far away from the city the van blocked the road ahead of them. The armed and hooded occupants of the van threatened to shoot them in the head. ”It was as though we were back in times of dictatorship again,” Álvarez said. According to the complaint filed with the prosecutor's office in Santiago del Estero and the office of the national ombudsman, Antonio Fernández, the former mayor of the Spanish town of Pinto, south of Madrid, signed an international cooperation agreement with the town of Pinto in Santiago del Estero, for more than 1.8 million euros (2.4 million dollars), for building low-cost housing between 2004 and 2006. Eighteen houses were built, but they were not allocated to poor families in Pinto, a town of 4,000 people, the complaint said. The cooperation agreement was reached when Emilio Rached, currently the vice-governor of the province of Santiago del Estero, was mayor of Pinto. According to the complainants, the 18 houses were handed over to middle-class recipients, including one of Rached's daughters. Another benificiary was a lawyer who acts for the Salvia Group, the main shareholder of which is the former Spanish mayor Fernández, who now owns ”a veritable mansion” in Pinto, Argentina, presumably built with the aid funds, Strappazzón said. Amid this and other allegations, Fernández resigned as mayor of Pinto in 2005, after 10 years in office. But the investigations initiated by a Madrid prosecutor were shelved by the justice system the following year, for lack of evidence. Fernández, a member of the governing Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), travels frequently to Santiago del Estero. Meanwhile, his accuser Álvarez says he has been the victim of a number of threats in Spain. He says Fernández and Rached created the Pinares Foundation, which administers the aid funds and may be linked to the Afagro company, which is accused of hiring thugs to harass small farmers, to get them to leave the lands they occupy. Afagro went bankrupt in the late 1980s, but ”was revived” when the Spanish aid money started to flow in, Strappazzón told IPS. ”Fernández and Rached wiped their prints off that company, but they are linked by front persons, and obviously Rached pays no attention to our denunciations,” he said. Afagro denied employing armed personnel and, also, any links with Fernández. MOCASE ”is made up of 30 activists linked to groups like (the dismantled Peruvian Maoist guerrilla) Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), anti-globalisation movements and ETA (the illegal Basque separatist group),” the former mayor said at a press conference in Madrid in late March. Meanwhile, vice-governor Rached did not answer IPS's repeated requests for information. Santiago del Estero is a poor northern province with a population of over 800,000. According to MOCASE, 20 percent of the people are small farmers, living and working on land to which they do not have title deeds. However, the law protects the farmers' rights to their land, because they have lived on it for much longer than the requisite 20 years, MOCASE said. ”There are 29,700 families in this province who earn more than half their income from farming the land, and the vast majority do not have title, which is why they are being harassed,” said Strappazzón, whose organisation has registered more than 530 cases of people who have been arrested and prosecuted in land disputes and after reporting abuses by big landowners. Santiago del Estero was ruled by the Juárez family for over 50 years. Former strongman Carlos Juárez had himself reelected on many occasions, and his wife Nina Aragonés has also served as governor of the province. But the murders of two women in 2003 led to federal intervention and the calling of provincial elections. The intervention was justified by ”a serious institutional impairment” that included the existence of armed groups linked to landowners, which committed all kinds of abuses, kidnapping, torturing and even murdering small farmers, burning down their houses and killing their animals. Today the governor is Gerardo Zamora and Rached is vice-governor, both of whom belong to the Radical Civic Union (UCR) party. ”Nothing has changed here since Juárez's time, in relation to the land problem and corruption,” said Strappazzón. The Zamora administration offered to legalise the small farmers' land tenure, but none have accepted the terms. ”They had around 2,000 hectares each, and they were being offered 300 or 500 hectares,” the activist said. Several companies in different parts of the province are continuing to spread terror among small farmers with armed gangs, to make them hand over plots of land, he said. The agribusiness interests want more land to grow soybeans, which is now the country's main export crop. Afrago is laying claim to 117,000 hectares in the south of the province, on the border with Córdoba province. ”They can only prove they own 2,000 hectares, but they are hoping to get the rest by harassing the small farmers,” Strappazzón said. ”Five families in the area that Afagro wants agreed to accept smaller plots, but they were threatened at gunpoint,” and the company points to them as an example to legitimise their actions. ”The rest, more than 100 families, won't leave, and they are being constantly bullied,” he said. ***** + ARGENTINA: Indigenous Villages on the Auction Block - June 2005 (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=29235) + Fundación Internacional Olof Palme - in Spanish (http://www.fiop.net) + ARGENTINA: Kolla Indians Fight to Protect Their Land - June 2006 (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33538) (END/IPS/LA EU IP PR DV CU/TRASP-VD-SW/MV/DCL/07) = 08110356 ORP002 NNNN