(The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps.)
Today marks 20 years of a “general” strike here in Paraguay, mainly led by union leaders rallying the teachers and farmers, and human rights groups and students rallying themselves. The sad thing is that a lot of the striking working-class posse aren't thoroughly informed as to why they’re shutting down traffic, but instigated to participate based on propaganda fed to them by union leaders, who have been known to take a cut of the “stop the strike proceeds.”
Don’t get me wrong, THERE IS REASON TO STRIKE here in Paraguay.
With a supreme LACK OF GOVERNMENT REGULATION, Paraguayans deal with an education system graduating “functional” illiterates to foreign-owned soy and agriculture corporations mowing down arable land and using its former owners as underpaid labor… and the list goes on.
The notion I pose is that with a double-decade duration of this annual general strike, government officials have developed a means to sedate the storm. People take routine for granted. They begin to “just do” instead of feel.
So I ask, with a press held under the thumb of its political-affiliated owners, a government under the thumb of foreign-owned corporations working in Paraguay and given a tax-break, and a security force of military and police unregulated as to the laws they enforce or payoffs they take, how can the masses more dynamically PINPOINT RESPONSIBILITY AND INSTIGATE PROGRESSION?
We need help here, but don’t yet have the communication infrastructure for a Latin American Spring.
