When Paraguay elected Fernando Lugo, its first non-Colorado Party president in more than sixty years, the mood was elated. In the streets of Asuncion that night in April 2008, "Grandmothers, wrapped in the Paraguayan flag, danced with children in the streets, and cried at the top of their lungs that this [was] the moment they'd been waiting for their whole lives."1 While Lugo's election was a clear victory for the social movements that united to elect him, movement leaders knew that this was just the beginning. As Worker Party and Indigenous Farmer organizer Tomás Zayas told me the previous year: "Lugo will not solve our problems. If Lugo is elected, it will be a door, an opening, through which we can add to our movement and demands."

One sector of Paraguayan society that has the most to gain from this transfer of power is the dwindling, poisoned, and often criminalized campesino (peasant farmer) population. Across Latin America, incomplete or corrupt agrarian reforms have left farmers fighting for their right to grow food for themselves. The flourishing soybean industry in Paraguay is leading towards an industrial agricultural export model that leaves no room for small food producers. While many Paraguayan campesino families have moved into urban peripheries, tenacious farmers have fought not only for their right to land, but also to redefine and recreate the agricultural model based on cooperative, organic, and people-friendly alternatives.

Leftist presidents, recently victorious in Bolivia and Ecuador, are contemplating land reform and agricultural planning to serve internal consumption. Such actions have been at the heart of revolutionary struggles for centuries. Cuba remains a leader in this area. Venezuela, under the leadership of Chávez, has made major advances in this realm through encouraging endogenous development and cooperatives. Both of these examples have much to offer Paraguayan campesinos, as they continue to mobilize and exert pressure on the new government to institute agricultural change.

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