
The Long Shadow of Paraguay's Military Dictatorship
Director Anna Recalde Miranda traces a line from Operation Condor, the US-backed campaign that let right-wing dictatorships kidnap, torture and murder political opponents across 1970s Latin America, to the killings of indigenous and landless activists today. Her film moves between archival material on Paraguay's dictatorship and present-day reporting on the soy industry, whose expansion has pushed multinational corporations and large landowners into conflict with indigenous communities and farmers demanding land rights. Interviews with survivors, activists, and researchers lay out how police and army units once used against communists now serve corporate landowners, with activists branded terrorists or simply killed by hired gunmen. The film cites Global Witness figures showing Latin America accounted for 80 percent of recorded murders of environmental defenders worldwide in 2024. Recalde Miranda argues the tactics have changed less than the sponsors: state violence that once served ideology now protects agribusiness profit. The result is a portrait of continuity between Cold War repression and current ecological and human rights crises in Paraguay and beyond.