A Bit More Detail

• Bloomberg notes Petrobras' dismissal of rumours it is threatened by the impeachment, observes that many Europeans expect a chain reaction of departures if the United Kingdom leaves, notes that a return to high economic growth in Israel will require including the Palestinian minority, and
  looks at Panamanian efforts to convince the world that the country is not a tax haven.


• The Globe and Mail remembers Mi'kMaq teacher Elsie Basque, and looks at how Mongolia is trying to adapt to the new economy.


• Bloomberg View states the obvious, noting that an expected event is not a wild swan.


• CBC notes Rachel Notley's tour of Fort McMurray.


• The Inter Press Service notes the denial of everything about the Rohingya.


• MacLean's looks at further confusion in Brazil.


• Open Democracy notes a push for land reform in Paraguay and looks at the devastation of Scotland's Labour Party.


• Wired notes the dependence of intelligence agencies on Twitter, proved by Twitter shutting an intermediary down.

• Daniel Drezner wonders if, at a time when Europe is weakening, the United States can find partners and allies to take Europe's place in emerging countries like India and Brazil.


• Extraordinary Observation's speculates that social engineering might change the ways American cities and city-dwellers operate, becoming more pro-bike for instance.


• Geocurrents writes about Paraguay, suggesting that its apparent tolerance for corruption may have a lot to do with its participation in two deadly, very draining wars.


• Global Sociology really doesn't like the IMF, particularly what it sees as economic strategies which disproportionately hurt the poor and the middle classes.


• Law 21's Jordan Furlong warns that China may end up becoming hugely important as the outsourcing of legal work goes, with obvious implications for lawyers in North America and elsewhere.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's communication of the reality that the Israeli-South African alliance under apartheid was so close that Israel was apparently willing to sell South Africa nuclear weapons doesn't surprise me. The fact that Israel got away with such potentially catastrophic proliferation will threaten non-proliferation efforts, in the Middle East and elsewhere.


• Noel Maurer is not impressed by German public opinion's hostility to IMF bailouts of southern European Euro-using countries, since Germany will benefit.


• Slap Upside the Head reports on the sad news that Canada is about to deport an asylum seeker, hoping that Canada wwill save him from persecution on the grounds of his sexual orientation.


• Spacing Toronto's Shawn Micallef mourns the recent death of Will Munro, a queer artist and community organizer who helped transform Toronto's artistic community.


• Zero Geography maps Internet usage by country. Romania and Ukraine turn out to have surprisingly low rates of Internet usage.

The Gran Chaco desert in Paraguay has for centuries been known as L'Inferno Verde, or "the Green Hell." With the temperature routinely reaching 42 C in the summer, no sources of water and gusts of dusty wind through the flat nothingness, it is no surprise that only 3% of Paraguay's population occupies an area that makes up 60% of the country. A Paraguayan diplomat once famously told a British traveller, "Doan go there, ees only esnakes an espiders."

Yet, this inhospitable terrain is home to a vibrant community of 30,000 Mennonites, around 9,000 of them Canadian citizens. Their story is one of endless wanderings, from Germany and Switzerland through Russia to Canada and finally to this desolate patch of terrain, where they were granted a special arrangement by the Paraguayan government to self-rule their land in relative isolation.

[. . .]

At that time, the Paraguayan government was desperate to settle the Chaco, and had already tried buying ships, all-expenses paid, to woo people from England, France and Australia.

"Few came, and those who did soon left," said Peter Dyck, author of Up from the Rubble, an account of Mennonite experiences trying to found new settlements in South America and Canada. "They were ready to give up, but then Canadian Mennonites needed a new home."

More than 70 years later, the Mennonites out-earn indigenous Paraguayans tenfold, supplying 80% of the country's milk and dairy products -- so successful that they now face the challenge of being employers, without being regarded as colonizers.

Brazilian farmers who have settled in Paraguayan territory have asked the government of Brazil to mediate in the tension, which in some cases has escalated into confrontations with local groups of campesinos.

The Lugo administration’s response was that it will seek the best solution, within a framework of respect for the rule of law. Through negotiations, a first agreement was arrived at between the campesino Coordinating Committee for the Defence of Sovereignty and Agrarian Reform, and a group of Brazilian landowners.

The Brazilian farmers agreed to sell 22,000 hectares to the Paraguayan state, which will pay for the land using part of the revenues from the Paraguayan-Brazilian Itaipú hydroelectric dam that are set aside for social spending.

Balbuena stressed that resistance against the Brazilian soybean farmers is growing because the spraying of their crops hurts campesino communities and their crops and livestock. "This dispute is not about occupations of land, but about the problems associated with the use of toxic agrochemicals," he said.

The boom in soybean monoculture in eastern Paraguay in the last few years is at the root of the present conflicts.

In seven years, the area under soybean crops in Paraguay doubled, reaching 2.4 million hectares by 2007, equivalent to 25 percent of all cultivated land in the country. And all of it is genetically modified (GM) soy, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

Paraguay is now seventh in the global ranking for the area under transgenic crops, and has no legislation on the use of GM seeds. It is also the world's fourth largest exporter of soybeans.

There are 81,000 Brazilians living in this country, not counting their Paraguayan-born descendants. Most of them live along the Brazilian border.

"Between 1992 and 2002, the number of people describing themselves as Brazilian nationals fell. However, there are many more Portuguese-speakers," Fabricio Vázquez, a researcher at the National University's Faculty of Agrarian Sciences, told IPS.

Vázquez said that Brazilian immigrants should be regarded as a social group undergoing a process of integration.

"Rural immigrants (Brazilians, Canadians, Russians, and so on) settled a long time ago in border areas that were neglected by the Paraguayan state. The issue is not whether they are many or few, but that they are a group of producers who have a large socioeconomic impact," he said.