Now to the good stuff: tales of my travels in Brazil and Paraguay. Or: coming face to face with the full force of the agrarian question in South America.
Brazil: meu nome é Katherine…ehh… disculpe, não falo português…
I LOVED BRAZIL. We stayed in the city of Porto Alegre, which is in the southern-most state of Brazil called Rio Grande do Sul (tangent: Brazil is HUGE, almost as big as the US, and also divided into states). The city itself was perfect – my one complaint was that we were occupied with class and visits for most of the trip, so I didn't really get a chance to explore the city that much. My adoration also could have been influenced by the extravagantly high quality of the food there [much more on that later…]. But from my all my VAST EXPERIENCE with Porto Alegre, I loved the combination of murals, colored buildings, parks, nightlife, hills, beach, general Brazilianness (it's a technical term, that one), proximity to unbelievable natural beauty, people, etc. The list goes on.
A ver: la ciudad
There were adorable colored buildings like these all over the city. These in particular were right across from our hotel.
A granja orgânica
One of our first activities was to visit an organic farm, called Tio Juca (after its owner). I have officially decided that if my Argentine gaucho ranch plans fall through, I'm basically going to try and emulate Tio Juca's organic Brazilian farm in every way. (Wait…what's that you say? Come back to the US to, you know, graduate and live my life? Psht.). Tio Juca was a wonderful personality and explained to us how he is the only person that works the farm, but that he has the help and friendship of the birds, bees, and bugs because his farm is in tune with natural cycles (love him!). We managed the Spanish-Portuguese gap fairly well, with the help of our wonderful translator/trip-facilitator/generally awesome, go-to guy Rodrigo.
Tio Juca
Gettin a good compost talk. Somehow composting is much sexier in Portuguese.
DO YOU SEE WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT?
O quilombo
Our next visit for the week was to a quilombo. Background info: since Brazil really got down with the whole slavery thing, a whole lot of Brazilians today are descendents of African slaves brought over back in the not-too-distant past. Brazil was also the last country to abolish slavery and (like us) didn't do much to facilitate the transition to freedom for the ex-slaves – or, more accurately, did pretty much nothing. So a unique phenomenon developed: communities of ex-slaves that stayed together in tight-knit group after liberation, often close to their ex-plantation but with little further contact with outsiders. And so, these quilombos developed unique cultural traditions, bonds of solidarity, and are now gaining more national attention as vehicles of fights for social justice – one of the most important being a fight for legal title to lands that they have inhabited for hundred(s) of years. It was very moving to here them speak about their struggles, their history, and their pride.
A land worth fighting for
O Moviento dos Trabalhodores Sem Terra
Next up on the land-reform agenda: a visit to an encampment of the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, aka el Movimiento de los Trabajadores Sin Tierra, aka o Moviento dos Trabalhodores Sem Terra. We'll keep it simple and call it MST.
Brazil has one of the highest levels of inequality in Latin America (a spot it also shares with Paraguay, woot woot), which is the region with the highest average levels of inequality in the world. A big part of this is the agrarian question, or the high concentration of lands in very few hands. The MST has sprung up as a social movement demanding redistribution of land. They are a largely nonviolent movement, whose strategies include occupation of unused lands, residential encampments in visible areas, protests, alternative media, etc (thump thump thump goes my Gandhian heart). We visited a residential encampment. This strategy involves a group of people deliberately placing themselves in precarious living conditions in highly visible spaces (the encampment we visited was literally feet from high-traffic highway route). The idea is to put pressure on the government by forcing people to become aware of the situation.
This visit had a very strong impact on me. Here they are: literally placing their bodies, daily lives, and homes in service of the movement. Some of them don’t have another place to go, but others could be living in better conditions and instead choose to live in the acampamento. Within the community, there is a strong sense of solidarity among residents of one acampamento and between the different acampamentos, as well. One woman spoke to us about how living in such precarious conditions spurred her to investigate natural and alternative medicines, so that now the community has a medicinal garden as well as the garden for food produce. They were all supremely hospitable and pleased that we visited – they want to spread the word about their struggle in other parts of the world, too. Upon leaving the acampamento I immediately began scheming for how I could master Portuguese and formulate a research project that would allow me to come back and hang out some more with MST…
As Actividades Recreativas
On our first wander into the city on Sunday, we encountered paddleboats. Naturally.
So we paddled said paddleboats. Naturally.
O churrasco
A 'traditional' (read: very touristy) dinner + show, with dancing (like really intense gaucho clogging. An experience) and a demonstration of this impressive ball-twirling type maneuver – I already forget the Brazilian name, but it was what Brazilian gauchos used to round up cattle (tangent: southern Brazil shares a lot of cultural traits with Argentina and Uruguay, like gauchos and mate).
A praia
To break up the bus rides taking us from down town to our different visit sites outside the city, we stopped at beaches. I'm sure you can all imagine how deeply unhappy I was about this.
El "Rio" (actually a lake)
El mar
Fuuuuuutboooool
I finally made it to the motherland of Latin American identity: a partido de fútbol. Team: Internacional, from Porto Alegre (Rodrigo's team, and therefore ours as well). They were playing a team from Quito (Ecuador). It was so much fun – crazy fans, tons of energy, we won the game (I say 'we' because I had a big hand in the victory, obviously), being in BRAZIL, etc. It was great.
Samba
Later that night, a group of us went to a cute café and listened to live samba and ate delicious food…
The band.
and speaking of food...
A comida
OH. MY. GOD. I don't know how to describe the food experience of Brazil, but I can safely say that it was a) the most beef I have ever eaten in my life. I think I doubled my total consumption over a lifetime in the span of 6 days b) also the most weight I have ever gained in a week and c) some of the consistently best food I have ever eaten. And you know how I feel about food…so that is saying something. Let me just take a moment to introduce you to some beautiful concepts: the bufet livre (you guessed it: free buffet) with the espeto corrido (running spit). What this means: there is a buffet of all kinds of salady and side dishes with delicious fresh produce, rice, French fries, sweet potatoes, pasta, beans, beets, fruits, bread, etc, and then there are these wonderful gentlemen that circle the table constantly with all kinds of familiar and mysterious cuts of meat from the asado (barbeque). GENIUS. Katherine found heaven. I think I may have actually alarmed some of my group members with the quantity of food I consumed. Other highlights of my food adventures included this banana dessert magnificence:
as well as the best burger I've ever eaten in my life (sorry, Daddy) and a fantastic Indian-Brazilian vegetarian restaurant (a little bit of detox from the meat was necessary). I could go on and on and on about the food…but I'll restrain myself.
Perspective: this was cafeteria food at the university where we had class.
Sadly, our time in lovely Porto Alegre was limited, but my sadness on leaving Brazil was mitigated by the fact that we didn't actually leave Brazil. Our next stop was Foz-Iguazu, the Brazilian town right on the border with Argentina known for one reason only: Las Cataratas. We actually crossed over to the Argentine side to see the falls, but stayed the weekend in a hotel across the Brazilian border. (More stamps in the passport. Yes please).
The main attraction – now magnificence has a new meaning:
(see those people way down at the end there? that was my final destination where I twirled and laughed hysterically with my eyes closed - it was impossible to open them in the water.)
I can now say that I have danced merrily (and maybe leap-frogged a bit...) down the slippery paths of Iguazú and been doused thoroughly in the waters of the falls.
That Sunday morning, a week after leaving BsAs, the group split in two and I went on my (not-so-) merry way to Paraguay with the other paraguayas (it was an all-chicas group).
Paraguay: the wandering jolly spirit of dulce de leche gets depressed
So, I don't want to give Paraguay a bad rap and I really find it fascinating. But there was something remarkably different that we all picked up on, some kind of a weight that seemed to hang over the entire population.. and it's hard to say that I enjoyed my time there in the strictest sense. Lots of countries in South America have social problems, poverty, corruption, weak rule of law, etc, but Paraguay seemed overwhelmed by them. To be fair: most of our visits and class discussions involved difficult issues and we weren't really exposed to as much cultural or recreational activities as we were in Brazil…but this impression was something we all shared and I find it very interesting.
Las Hermanas del Buen Pastor
Our very first activity, before we even arrived in Asunción or checked into the hotel, was to visit this fair trade artisan cooperative supported by the Catholic order of nuns Las Hermanas del Buen Pastor. They run a community center with just about every service you can think of: from daycare and after school activities to a health clinic to this women's economic cooperative to simply a place to live for young pregnant girls. The fair trade cooperative pays the women a fair price for their artisan handcrafts (tangent: there is a big tradition for female handcrafts in Paraguay. One of the artisans we spoke with talked about learning from her mother with small projects and how her daughter was starting to learn the same way, etc.). Then Las Hermanas export the handcrafts to organizations, businesses, and church fairs in the U.S. and Western Europe, for the most part, through networks of economic solidarity and the other orders of Las Hermanas around the world. According to one of the artisans we spoke to, Las Hermanas are the only organization that pays a fair price for the time and effort put into the handcrafts and that the reason such crafts are found so cheaply in street fairs in Paraguay is because the artisans are paid next to nothing. Because Las Hermanas pay fair prices, however, they can only sell the products outside of Paraguay – they seem way too expensive to Paraguayans who can buy something similar for a much cheaper price. Balls. So that means that the international networking for Las Hermanas and the cooperative is hugely important.
Ñandutí, one of the intricate hand crafts of these artisans
La Secretaría de la Funcción Pública
The next day, our first full day in Paraguay, we visited the Secretaría de la Funcción Pública (this is the really sweet thing about SIT: oh hey, high-ranking Paraguay official. We're just going to swing on by with a bunch of nobody American students for a chat). This was interesting way to start the week, because this department is basically in charge of training public officials and being the liaison between public programs and the public. Everything was nice and official, the ministra, Doctora Lilian Soto, was a smart, thoughtful woman, and they had everything beautifully planned out on paper. Then throughout the rest of the week, the theme we heard over and over and over again was that the government had laws, regulations, court decisions, etc. and nothing was done to implement anything concrete. (Tangent: I'm getting much, much better at overcoming my fear of asking strangers questions. Going on approximately 10,000 visits, sitting there in alarming silence with these people who have donated their time to explaining their situation and answering our questions… it makes me nervous and so I tend to quickly scramble together questions to break the sound of crickets chirping and either a) ask an inane question that betrays my ignorance (most frequent) b) babble incoherently for a while in the hopes of coming to an eventual point (semi-frequent) or c) actually come up with an incisive, probing query that will enhance the reputation of American students abroad everywhere (least frequent). But one thing that is certain is I have developed the reputation as the one who will always pipe up with something.)
Los Bañados
Later that day, we visited Los Bañados, a community in Asunción kind of like the villas in Buenos Aires. Paraguay has seen a lot of people displaced from their land by big agro-industry (cattle, cotton, and now soy) and (like Brazil) has high levels on land concentration. So a lot of them travel to the city and these periphery communities have sprung up. In the case of Los Bañados, they form a belt between the formal city of Asunción and the River Paraguay. As one would expect, most of them are informally or sub-employed (I'm not sure it that's a real word but I'm finding it harder and harder to write in English now), there is a lot of poverty, danger of flooding, they don’t have legal claim to their land, etc (are you sensing some themes, here?). On the other hand, on speaking with some of the residents they have some of the strongest community networks and bonds of solidarity I've seen, in resource-sharing, putting together community health clinics, schools, etc. Right now they are fighting against a government plan to build a highway through their neighborhoods, which would displace all of the families there. So far, the plan includes relocation provisions for only half of those families.
We visited one of their community centers where they hold computer classes (they were very proud of their computers) and literacy/basic math programs for adults. Then we walked around the neighborhood for a bit to the river, which is a major source of food for the community (although, alarmingly, they also acknowledge there are high levels of contamination in the river). What impacted me the most was the directness and militancy of their discourse: 'we are poor, everything we have achieved we have had to fight for, the government ignores us, etc.' And when we went to a different neighborhood of the Bañados to visit the house of the woman who had acted as our guide for the day, she asked two armed soldiers to accompany us, since we would be a very noticeable group of a bunch of white American girls entering the barrio (tangent: there are armed soldiers EVERYWHERE in Asunción. You could literally throw a rock randomly and hit one. Although this is definitely not recommended.)
El Río Paraguay
fishing boats
Some of the rooftops of the Bañado houses, right behind the President's house, in the neighborhood we entered with a police escort.
El Museo de la Memoria y los Archivos de Terror
Another thing Paraguay has in common with its South American neighbors is a nice bloody military dictatorship in its recent history (yaaayyy South America), which for Paraguay was headed by Gen. Alfred Stroessner. Except in Paraguay's case, the dictatorship didn’t end until 1989 and the party that had previously supported Stroessner, el Partido Colorado, first overthrew him, then handled the transition to democracy, and now still has a majority in Congress. Yikes. One thing we learned: the dictatorship is not history yet for Paraguay. It is still very much alive in the memories of the people. (tangent: this is probably really late in the game to be realizing this…but I'm sorry if this is too preachy/academic/bleeding heart for you [whoever you might be], but so much of my thoughts and experiences here are wrapped up in these things that I don't know how to write it any other way. So basically you'll have to deal with it…)
Anyway, we visited the museum dedicated to the memory of the dictatorship in Asunción, which is now located in what once was a police headquarters/ detention center. It was pretty overwhelming to see what was preserved there, including a real fun room full of torture tools.
photographs of police repression.
While we were there, we had the luck of running into Martín Almada, a man of national importance. Because he had been a prominent intellectual, he was persecuted by the dictatorship, arrested, tortured, imprisoned for three years, and his wife was killed. Upon the fall of the Stroessner, he led the fight for information and was actually the one who discovered the Archives (explained below). It was amazing to hear him speak – he was able to incorporate humor into his explanations of these atrocious events and he also spoke forcefully about the responsibility we carry as young U.S. citizens to support change in they way the U.S treats the rest of the world. (tangent: Stroessner's government had the explicit technical and financial support of the U.S. government, in the form of a supersecretagent who lived in Asunción, had an office in the building that is now the museum, and led trainings on torture techniques for Paraguayan officials. Paraguayans still don't know any thing about his identity because it's kept classified by the U.S. government. So you can understand why Martin says he used to hate everything about the U.S. until he visited and met some people there. Now he just hates the government).
A picture of the discovery of the archives in 1992. Martin is the man in the middle of the line, wearing black pants, white shirt, and a tie.
Next we went to visit the Archives (Archivos de Terror), which are thousands and thousands of documents that meticulously detail a lot of the government's activity during the period of the dictatorship, including reports of arrest and torture and documents pertaining to Operation Condor (a big fiesta of all the regional dictatorships that basically decided 'yo, let’s cooperate and communicate so we can all kill our people more efficiently!' Synergy at its best.). The Archives form one of the only resources of its kind available to the public (documents on the Argentine dictatorship, for instance, are classified by the Argentine military and inaccessible to all except official military historians).
terror, documented
After these two visits, we had one of the most emotionally affecting classes I've ever experienced. Our professor for the day was a historian who spoke to us about the human rights violations during the dictatorship and his personal experiences as one of the members of the team that collected testimonies for the Truth and Justice Commission. He started crying several times throughout the discussion and during one these times, he said something that I still can’t get out of my mind: "I'm sorry," (apologizing for crying), "it's that, for so many us, listening to these stories, it broke us (nos rompió).' With everything we'd seen and heard that day, I actually went into the bathroom after his talk and cried. You can only take so much.
After such a heavy day, really the only thing left for us to do was have a girl's night and drown our sorrows with bread, cheese, red wine, new code names (guess who's 'the wandering jolly spirit of dulce de leche'?) and cute little old Irish men.
the provisions
Watching Waking Ned Devine.
TierraViva and the community Toba Qom
Next up in our arsenal of social failure and oppression was a visit to the organization TierraViva, an NGO that works with indigenous people in Paraguay in their fights for their lands. To bring things to an even more depressing level, pretty much everyone you talk to about problems in Paraguay will mention the poverty, the land distribution, the inefficacy of the government, etc. …and then they say something like 'and it's even worse for the pueblos originarios (indigenous/original peoples).' They are a separate category of suffering. I found the visit to TierraViva completely fascinating, however, because this organization represents the whole spectrum of ways to pressure the government: lawyers that argue the cases legally, advisors that counsel the indigenous communities on strategies, social organizers that lead protests and camp-outs, etc. Something to keep in my mind for my future plans, perhaps…?
Then we went to visit one of the communities that works with TierraViva. Having lost their ancestral land to a military official, they are now fighting for the legal title to the land they now occupy. Again, their discourse was very direct and militant: they are tired of people speaking for them, tired of 'los blancos' just taking things from them (actually said these words…a little awkward with all of us white girls sitting there…), and they are demanding change as best they can. It was an interesting opportunity for cultural observation: they were very somber for the most part, and only the cacique (leader) and his wife answered our questions.
kids playing everywhere.
In Paraguay's defense: We did do some fun activities as well, such as listening to live blues in a bar one night, going out to dinner, and exploring the city. (Things like this do exist, in Paraguay - all previous evidence to the contrary).
view from the roof of our hotel.
Cafe Literario
This felt like an accurate summation of much of what we saw.
Our travels completed, we embarked on a 19 hour bus ride back to Buenos Aires to begin the madness that was the last week of classes (last week).
Ahora: ISP time...
And now, a look to the future, gente: I took my last final yesterday and so am now in the period of my personal investigations (ISP). Me being me, I have changed my mind about what I want to study about a thousand times and it looks like now I'll have to change again. I had been planning on studying a fair trade community development project between the American company Guayakí and an indigenous community in Paraguay, involving the sustainable cultivation of yerba (for yerba mate). I had hoped to visit the community to see the project at work, as it were, and get the impressions of the people themselves. However, I had my first interview today with one of the founders of Guayakí (who oh-so-conveniently lives right outside of BsAs), and he strongly advised that I don't go there for linguistic, logistic, and security reasons. So…time to reformulate. But my point is that one chapter of my study abroad experience is now done and another has begun, with less structure and more freedom but also a lot of work. Here's to unleashing my investigative alter ego.
Will keep you posted, as always (más o menos).
Besos.
