Eco-Injustice in Paraguay

Petrona Villasboa and her husband, Juan Talavera, live with their nine children at the end of a long dirt road. The view from their front window shows a landscape dominated by soy, sowed into hundreds of tidy rows that extend to the horizon. In the town of Pirapey 35, a community of 1,600 people in the southern state of Itapua, Paraguay, "Petrona's house" is nearly an institution. Her household bears the constant influx of neighbors and relatives; yet Petrona says that the house "feels empty inside."

Petrona's third-youngest son, Silvino Talavera, died four years ago at the age of 11. Silvino was walking home from school one day, taking his normal route through a neighboring soy plantation growing Monsanto RoundUp Ready hybrid seeds, which require regular doses of a potent herbicide to thrive. He was fifteen meters from his home when he was enveloped in a cloud of the Monsanto herbicide cocktail RoundUp sprayed from a cropduster. He arrived home barely able to breathe. Silvino was rushed to the nearest hospital, where he died five days later, on January 7, 2003.

On January 11, 2003, Petrona pressed charges against the plantation owners, Hermann Schlender and Alfred Laustenlager, accusing them of homicide. "It was a strange case from the beginning," said Petrona's lawyer, Juan Martens Molas. "By law, the procedures for Silvino's case could last for a maximum of three years. We were running against the clock." Under the law, if the case were still unsettled after the three-year mark, the defendants would be exempt from any form of punishment. "Without a doubt, this practice is taken advantage of by people with a lot of political or economic power, who can influence judges and prosecutors, and allows them to interfere with the law, which is exactly what they tried to do in Silvino's case," said Martens.

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