A-Infos (en) Mexico, FAM, Regeneracion #19 - Anarchism in Paraguay - Rafael Barrett and the Economic Question (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Rafael Barrett (1876-1910), born in Spain and emigrated to Buenos Aires, 
where he began his journalism career at the newspaper El Tiempo in 1903, 
arrived in Paraguay a year later as a Buenos Aires correspondent. He 
dedicated himself to uncovering the harrowing reality of a country and 
its people just 34 years after the end of the War of the Triple 
Alliance, where the wounds opened by that genocide still refused to 
heal. 1 Where the land was auctioned off to large foreign capitals, the 
people were condemned to hunger and slavery in the yerbales (yerba mate 
plantations), and politics, subordinated to the interests of the 
economic elites, became an unstable arena of recurring coups d'état. And 
at the same time, as we saw in the previous issue of Regeneración, a 
Paraguay where proletarian resistance embraced anarcho-syndicalism with 
the emergence of numerous trade union organizations and the increasingly 
widespread dissemination of the anarchist ideal.
Barret took advantage of the press, both official and his own (El 
Germinal), to raise his voice beyond the closed circles of the bourgeois 
elite, to whom he directed his harshest criticisms, and to reach the 
popular sectors. Hence his outreach to typographers, workers of the 
printed word, as well as to other unions through the lectures given at 
the invitation of the Paraguayan Regional Workers Federation (FORP) in 
1908: "Three Lectures to Paraguayan Workers." However, it was his series 
of reports, "What the Yerba Mate Plantations Are" (1908), composed of 
the following parts: "Slavery and the State," "The Roundup," "The Yoke 
in the Jungle," "Degeneration," "Torment and Murder," and "The Loot," in 
which he denounced the collusion between the Paraguayan state, local 
authorities, the courts, and yerba mate companies, that made him the 
leading voice of denunciation against the agro-export exploitation 
regime in the region.
Barret accurately describes the nature of the yerba mate industry at the 
beginning of the 20th century, dominated by foreign capital. For Barret, 
the yerba mate plantations reflect the true face of Latin American 
capitalism, which was colonial, slave-owning, and murderous. In his 
analysis, he highlights the mechanism of advance herding (enganche por 
deudas), widespread in Latin American economies, which condemns workers 
to perpetual slavery: "This is how the martyrs of the Bolivian and 
Brazilian rubber plantations, the sugar mills of Peru, are herded. This 
is how the girls from Central Europe, prostituted in Buenos Aires, are 
herded" ("El arreo," BARRETT, 1978: 125).
----------------------------------------------------
1. His political activity supporting the labor movement, his militant 
agitation through the newspaper El Germinal, and his aid to those 
persecuted by the dictatorship of Colonel Albino Jara, cost him arrest 
and exile to Corumbá, Brazil, from where he traveled to Montevideo, 
Uruguay. He clandestinely returned to Paraguay in March 1909 to take 
refuge with his wife and son in Yabebyry (Misiones). He died a year 
later of tuberculosis.

Barret gives the reader a detailed description of the living and working 
conditions in the yerbal, making us feel the heat of the jungle, the 
superhuman effort of the laborer and his family, and the brutality of 
the foreman:
The mountain: the troops, the herd of laborers, with their wives and 
children, if a family is allowed. On foot, and the yerbal is fifty, one 
hundred leagues away. The foremen ride on horseback, with revolvers at 
their belts. They are called drovers, or repuntadores. The authorized 
agents who transfer the business write: "with so many heads." It is the 
Industrial cattle (Loc. Cit.).

The workers, reduced to beasts of burden, to pieces of flesh, denied 
their humanity, slaves to capital, endure hellish days, the violence of 
their foremen, and when they decide to free themselves, they are hunted, 
tortured, and often murdered:
Walk, toil, sweat, and bleed, cursed flesh! What does it matter if you 
fall exhausted and die like the old cattle on the banks of the swamp? 
You are cheap and can be found everywhere.[...]Then, to hunger, to 
fatigue, to fever, to mortal discouragement, would be added the scourge, 
torture with its complicated and sinister equipment. You knew the 
political inquisition and the religious inquisition. Now you know the 
most infamous, the golden inquisition. Why mention the shackles and the 
stocks? They are classics in Paraguay, and I don't know why they aren't 
the emblem of justice, instead of the inept matron of the sword and 
cardboard and the false scales ("Torment and Murder," BARRETT, 1978:133).

Barret's denunciation is directed not only against corporations, but 
also against politicians, accomplices of capital, who promote slavery, 
torture, murder, and the death by exhaustion of "their citizens," driven 
by a common interest with the business elite. In this way, he accuses 
Industrial Paraguaya, the leading yerba mate company of his time, of 
being a "slave trader," cursing its "blood money" ("El Botín," BARRETT, 
1978: 138), but his shots are aimed primarily at the Paraguayan state 
itself:
Behind the foreman is the frock-coat-wearing slave trader, the company 
director, the "illustrious businessman" who knows how cheap political 
consciences are. Slavery is well established. Come, slaves of the yerba 
mate plantation, come celebrate with us the centennial of your 
independence! ("Esclavitud," BARRETT, 1978: 175).

"What kind of citizens are the slaves of the yerba mate plantation?" 
Barrett asks. "What kind of freedoms and rights does the Republic of 
Paraguay offer its workers?" It is in regions like Latin America, the 
author points out, where capitalism, combined with the semi-slave forms 
of domination inherited from the Colony, shows its most ruthlessly 
anti-human face.
Barrett did not, however, limit himself to mere denunciation and 
actively participated in political agitation among the workers of 
Asunción. Of his "Three Lectures to Paraguayan Workers," in which he 
presents an anarchist proposal for struggle and life, I want to focus on 
the first one, "The Earth," which begins: "I am also a worker, and I 
don't want to be anything else. (...) Worker does not mean slave, it 
means creator" ("The Earth," BARRETT, 2011: 137). As in many of his 
writings, on this occasion he also undertakes a critique of the 
capitalist "civilization" and "progress" imposed by the Paraguayan 
elites on the Guaraní-based society they considered "barbaric": "But let 
us civilize ourselves, let us progress; they will come, up with fierce 
luxury, down with misery and crime" (Ibid.: 139). A crucial part of what 
the author considers an advantage of Paraguay over "advanced" countries 
is the importance that the land still holds for its inhabitants, not 
only as a means of subsistence, but also in terms of its spiritual, 
non-commercial dimension. For Barrett, "the land is everything," 
guaranteeing autonomy to the peasant and freeing him from the yoke of 
alienated labor. From there, the author denounces rent as the main enemy 
of the working people and advocates the socialization of the land and 
its resources against its concentration in private hands:
Let us be indignant against the owner. He is the usurper. He is the 
parasite. He is the intruder. The land belongs to all men, and each must 
be rich in proportion to his labor. Natural resources, water, sun, and 
the earth belong to all. Let man enjoy the land in proportion to his 
labor. Let him who sowed it reap the harvest, watered it with the sweat 
of his brow, and watched over it with his care (Ibid.: 141).

The land belongs to those who work it. Barrett repeats the slogan of the 
peasant struggles that were about to shake the continent. In fact, he is 
certain that it will be precisely in Latin America where land will be 
the first and most important social conquest that will allow for the 
freedom of the worker and the consolidation of a future society:
And I am convinced that this conquest will be made in America, where the 
workers are and will be stronger and freer. Here the land will be 
returned to humanity. Here, upon entering the era of definitive light 
and direction, we will all be reconciled with the earth, the holy earth, 
the immortal mother, doubly mother, because after giving us life, she 
offers us rest (Loc. cit.).

Hence, for Barrett, the earth is the mother; it is life that must not be 
privatized or destroyed: "Let us emancipate the earth, let us defend the 
earth (...) Everything springs from the earth, and we are the earth." 
His vision moves away from merely economic interpretations of the 
agrarian question and embraces its vital dimension of interconnection 
between the earth and "her children" who work it.
Barrett was one of the most powerful voices of denunciation of his time: 
he blasted the inequality, exploitation, and authoritarianism he 
encountered in Paraguay at the beginning of the 20th century. His 
"sacred anger," aroused by the capitalist system of his time, found 
expression in anarchism. Thus, Barrett was anarchized by Paraguayan 
reality, and at the same time, his anarchism was "Paraguayized," taking 
on its own colors, resulting from its socioeconomic specificity. Today, 
his keen judgment continues to surprise regarding the analysis of 
regional domination and exploitation, where yerbales gave way to 
"soybean republics" and capitalism, in collusion with political elites, 
continues to devastate ecosystems and peoples.

Gaya Makaran

Bibliography
BARRETT, Rafalel, 1978, El dolor paraguayo (Paraguayan Pain), prologue 
by Roa Bastos, Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho.
BARRETT, Rafael, 2011, El dolor paraguayo (Paraguayan Pain), Asunción, 
Servilibros.
BARRETT, Rafael, 2008, A partir de ahora el combate será libre (From Now 
on, the Combat Will Be Free), prologue by Santiago Alba Rico, Buenos 
Aires, Madreselva.

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