View attachment 18954469
PARAGUAYAN EMPIRE
FROM PRESSING MEADO TO THE PINITO REVOLUTION
WHO AND HOW THEY KNEAD OUR DAILY BREAD
View attachment 18954470
OUR DAILY BREAD
By Mariel Fatecha
Photos Amadeo Volaaruez / Wallir Bofinger
THEY ARRIVED BY CHANCE. AND A LOT OF CURIOSITY
WHILE MAKING A TOURIST GUIDE OF THE GREAT GUARANÍ NATION. IN PASSING THEY INSPECTED THE
FARM, THEY CLEARED THE MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND CLOSED A NEW DIPLOMATIC AGREEMENT
WE ARE ALL ARGENGUAYANS (Argentina + Paraguay)
You buy bread and don't ask who kneads it. I lived for ten years, there I met my partner (Amadeo, a photographer for the ABC color newspaper), and it never occurred to me to visit the fields where, after mate, the most popular herb in this country is grown. I had my reasons, several died in the attempt. The first was a correspondent of the newspaper Noticias in Pedro Juan Caballero, "the capital of marijuana": Santiago Leguizamón fell with 21 shots to his body on April 26, 1991, while Journalist's Day was being celebrated in Paraguay. They say that he had a photo of Pablo Escobar with Fahd Yamdl (a drug lord from the area) and the then president Andrés Rodríguez.
As fate would have it, Amadeo and I met "Pedrojuan" - as the locals of this city say - in the middle of the Carnaval season, while we were working on the content of a tourist guide about the country. Pedrojuan is the capital of the department of Amanbay and is linked to Ponta Porã, in Brazil, through Avenida Internacional.
View attachment 18954473
Note: ?????? is a unreadable word
The parties with tribute to the king (??????) gained fame for the abundance of marijuana and cocaine. Cannabis trafficking employs more than half of the population, covered with a cloak of silence when they want to talk about the subject.
We had arrived at noon, tired of the heat and two typical places of interest that we had been checking out. The room we got was near the popular market, (??????) of this city, which looks like a big mess of tangled streets. There, we tried to sleep with the music at full volume coming from the stationary opposite where a nightclub was operating. After a while, a couple of shots were heard and the music stopped. A few minutes later, an ambulance siren. When it was gone, the music and the party continued. They took out a Brazilian boy with a shot, but he did save. "It's something normal here, last week we were with some friends drinking tereré next door when a truck passed by at full speed and drive-by shooted (with a machine gun) the house in front, João, a young man from Ponta Porã who lives on the Paraguayan side, told us the next day. "If you don't mess with the mafia, the mafia won't mess with you", he warned us when we wanted to know more about the issue.
They say that the "safest" way to reach the kitchen of traffic is to wait for a police operation; Ours was a contact of Amadeo: the ABC Color correspondent in Amambay, Cándido Figueredo. In his chronicles always mentioned a town near Pedrojuan that does not appear in my travel guide, but really deserves to be recorded, nothing less than a place where 60 percent of all the marijuana that Paraguay produces is amassed. Captain Bado.
View attachment 18954489
Cándido survives day by day in a hostile territory, where the silent war between drug traffickers leaves, on average, ten dead per month. He is a burly, rustic-looking, loud-speaking man who hits fifty. Four years ago, due to a series of his articles about the drug lords of Captain Bado, the newspaper's headquarters in Pedrojuan was shot up. "In that area, I estimate, is grown the most coveted macoña in America and probably in the world."
The favorite place to dump lifeless bodies (theirs is worth $50,000) is International Avenue because "the police don't investigate until they know if the dead person is Brazilian or Paraguayan, it's no man's land." Cándido has also received threats from the police forces that protect drug trafficking and his house has already been blown up with bullets, twice. For this reason, he is guarded by the police... and a 45 caliber pistol in waist (with a spare magazine). During the talk with his editorial staff, the name of Waldir Bofinger, the director of "capitanbado.com", comes up. He is a Brazilian journalist who lives in that town, three hours away of Pedrojuan and that distance can give us a good walk.
In the newspaper ABC, Amadeo tells me on the way out, Cándido is more popular for his strange hobbies than for his notes. He collects, as if they were stamps, photos of mutilated corpses, some without hands, others without heads and all with bullets in the heart. His personal relics also include a collection of drug trafficker skulls that he collected over the years during his visits to the clandestine cemeteries of Amambay.
Half of the Paraguayan population is peasants. Out of a total of 5,200,000 inhabitants, 2% own 75% of all land.
THE CAPTAIN'S VERSES
"It's the rainy season, Captain Bado is isolated. It's best for you to buy the ticket back there", they told us at the ticket office. It was the last warning before getting on the bus and heading down a narrow dirt road and traveling 120 kilometers on a quite ugly and inaccessible embankment. An old lady who sat in the back asked us why we were going there, I lied naturally and enthusiastically: "We are making a tourist guide." "How good, it's a beautiful place, don't forget to go to the waterfalls. Aguaray is 88 meters high", she said proudly. Through the window you could see the hills and forests where a good part of the growers live, nearby. Of the dry border with the Matto Grosso do Sul, southern from Amazonia in Brazil.
View attachment 18954490
"Planting marijuana is now a tradition, a family business. Something that grandfather passes on to his children and they pass on to their grandchildren," Waldir Bofinger tells us as we walk towards his house. He is a "Brasiguayan" who speaks in Portuñol, Captain Bado's lingua franca, given to offering his help without respecting our nap time. "Pitch the tent in the yard," he says before scurrying off to find his hammock.
In the afternoon we tour the city, quite organized and despite being isolated in terms of routes (half of the streets are paved, the houses are made of brick and there are many schools, colleges and even universities). Bofinger tells us that getting from Captain Bado to the plantations is a challenge. In fact, they are within a radius of 20 to 100 kilometers. We can approach by car, stop at a certain place and continue a long day on foot through the mountains. It gets dark.
The first sentence that Bofinger utters, already between the table and sitting in his dining room, is brutal: "Capitán Bado is one of the cities in Paraguay with the highest percentage of widows." The girls want to stay with the drug traffickers because of their money and the good life they lead, but they have a very short lifespan, at most they reach 35 years." Although the peasants mostly pay the price when the corrupt police officers need to justify their salaries and the business doesn't either. Sure for the bosses, they still prefer to marry "the seed owners." The worst massacre was between 1995 and 2001, when the bloodthirsty Brazilian drug trafficker Fernandinho Beira Mar, considered one of the largest drug and weapons smugglers in the Americas, was in Captain Bado.
SWALLOWS
Early, very early, the sun turns the tent into a hive. Before leaving, Bofinger watches Amadeo's camera and demands, for safety, that we forget about it. -"I'll make sure we come back with everyone, and alive," he jokes. In a warehouse far from the urban center, we contacted a farmer who knows another, who knows about another, who would have a farm where he grows corn, cassava and, a little more hidden, Brazilian cannabis (considered one of the best sativas in the world).
View attachment 18954491
The only way to get there is to walk for almost an hour along a long tapepoí, Guaraní name for those narrow paths made by walkers in the mountains. We are welcomed by a wrinkled old man with a privileged physique, who works the land with his children and grandchildren. He is outraged that Captain Bado does not appear in the guide they commissioned us to do. "This was the granary of the north, we gave corn and wheat to the entire country for years," he tells us. He has also planted soybeans, but cannabis is his main crop.
We asked about the plants. Grandfather avoids my gaze and asks for discretion. He says that for a decade the Brazilians took over the area and murdered entire families who, like his, grew up in small plots of 10 square meters and they took out between 30 and 50 kilos. Now there are people who go deep into the mountains with batteries, machete and food. They clear five, six hectares, and with bad luck, they get two tons per hectare," the old man complains and sips a glass of cane. "Aristocrat" in the dining room, improvised under a thatched roof at the entrance to the ranch. Nobody gets rich by farming, but sometimes it serves to pay for the pleasure.
While one of his grandchildren prepares "Mbeyu", a delicious cassava starch tortilla that is cooked over firewood, he tells us that the sawmills depleted the forests and the growers who hide in the mountains find it difficult to hide their plants. "There are also more military - he adds -, that is why many are going to settle in (the departments of) Canindeyú, Caazapá or Itapúa".
I ask him if he is afraid of growing marijuana and he smiles: "It's like planting cassava or yerba mate. We are in this because my grandchildren can't get jobs, there isn't a single industry here." In fact, one of his children is camping in the mountain where he planted cannabis and only his wife sees him from time to time: "She helps him by picking the leaves, cutting the plants and the buds."
The farmers' stay in the large plantations lasts at least three months. Right there they mount the presser on the stem of a tree. They earn approximately 6 dollars a day for cultivating and ensuring the harvest. Bofinger told us that a kilo of cotton is paid for 38 cents and that of marijuana is 1.9 cents dollars. "Some - the old man gossips - take the younger indigenous women who live nearby and pay them for the company." The rate varies according to the service and averages 35 thousand guaranies (7 dollars); Of course, the payments have their equivalent in spices, be they "wax balls" (hashish) or any type of food (rice, grass, cane or noodles, etc.).
View attachment 18954493
We get up after eating Mbeyu and follow the old man who heads towards the farm where he grows Mandiogaypi (cassava in Guarani). Amadeo asks him, with the greatest possible respect, if he smokes marijuana. "No, here the only one who smokes is the one who buys." I look at one of his grandchildren who is accompanying us, machete in hand, and he smiles at me. He will be 17 or 18 years old and does not seem to agree with that "in the blacksmith's house, a wooden knife."
We cross about a hundred meters between the cassava paths, pass some trees and see the monstrous plants: 80 bushes piled up more than five feet tall with relict buds under an implacable sun. "In one or two weeks we will harvest," he tells his grandson, who is amusing himself by pruning a plant to give us some flowers (then he will scrape his hands and show me a brown ball of hashish).
His method consists of planting five seeds in the same place and keeping the ones that grow later and survive. Thus, he reveals that he has been improving the species, since the plants that grow first are usually males. To germinate again he uses the seeds "that fall to the ground during the harvest", because a male always escapes and ends up pollinating some plants. The harvest needs to dry in the open air for 2 to 3 days. The old man assures that he, unlike the mountain growers, dries the branches under the trees to preserve the aroma.
He told him that in Buenos Aires they say that Paraguayan marijuana comes messed (pissed). "Why would we do that?" he asks me naively. I try to get out of trouble by telling him that the pressing comes with a very strong smell, like ammonia. He tells me that they don't sell ammonia in the town and that the bad smell could come from the presses: "They put them in almost green, they are all sticky and they will surely rot over time," he says angrily (it is worth clarifying that the smell of ammonia from the pressing comes from the degradation of nitrogen, produced by the high humidity of the plants when they are compacted). His grandson adds that some press the plants with stones, charcoal and other waste to increase the weight of the bricks. It's hard not to believe them.
The sky begins to cloud. The old man estimates that we have 12 hours left before the harsh drops fall. "It's going to rain for a few days," he says, worried about bringing forward the harvest to that same afternoon. Amadeo and I quicken our pace, we don't have a return ticket to Pedrojuán and we must write the guide to that city. Captain Bado will not appear in it, but the fresh buds that we put in the backpack will brighten the memory.
PARAGUAYAN EMPIRE
FROM PRESSING MEADO TO THE PINITO REVOLUTION
WHO AND HOW THEY KNEAD OUR DAILY BREAD
View attachment 18954470
OUR DAILY BREAD
By Mariel Fatecha
Photos Amadeo Volaaruez / Wallir Bofinger
THEY ARRIVED BY CHANCE. AND A LOT OF CURIOSITY
WHILE MAKING A TOURIST GUIDE OF THE GREAT GUARANÍ NATION. IN PASSING THEY INSPECTED THE
FARM, THEY CLEARED THE MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND CLOSED A NEW DIPLOMATIC AGREEMENT
WE ARE ALL ARGENGUAYANS (Argentina + Paraguay)
You buy bread and don't ask who kneads it. I lived for ten years, there I met my partner (Amadeo, a photographer for the ABC color newspaper), and it never occurred to me to visit the fields where, after mate, the most popular herb in this country is grown. I had my reasons, several died in the attempt. The first was a correspondent of the newspaper Noticias in Pedro Juan Caballero, "the capital of marijuana": Santiago Leguizamón fell with 21 shots to his body on April 26, 1991, while Journalist's Day was being celebrated in Paraguay. They say that he had a photo of Pablo Escobar with Fahd Yamdl (a drug lord from the area) and the then president Andrés Rodríguez.
As fate would have it, Amadeo and I met "Pedrojuan" - as the locals of this city say - in the middle of the Carnaval season, while we were working on the content of a tourist guide about the country. Pedrojuan is the capital of the department of Amanbay and is linked to Ponta Porã, in Brazil, through Avenida Internacional.
View attachment 18954473
Note: ?????? is a unreadable word
The parties with tribute to the king (??????) gained fame for the abundance of marijuana and cocaine. Cannabis trafficking employs more than half of the population, covered with a cloak of silence when they want to talk about the subject.
We had arrived at noon, tired of the heat and two typical places of interest that we had been checking out. The room we got was near the popular market, (??????) of this city, which looks like a big mess of tangled streets. There, we tried to sleep with the music at full volume coming from the stationary opposite where a nightclub was operating. After a while, a couple of shots were heard and the music stopped. A few minutes later, an ambulance siren. When it was gone, the music and the party continued. They took out a Brazilian boy with a shot, but he did save. "It's something normal here, last week we were with some friends drinking tereré next door when a truck passed by at full speed and drive-by shooted (with a machine gun) the house in front, João, a young man from Ponta Porã who lives on the Paraguayan side, told us the next day. "If you don't mess with the mafia, the mafia won't mess with you", he warned us when we wanted to know more about the issue.
They say that the "safest" way to reach the kitchen of traffic is to wait for a police operation; Ours was a contact of Amadeo: the ABC Color correspondent in Amambay, Cándido Figueredo. In his chronicles always mentioned a town near Pedrojuan that does not appear in my travel guide, but really deserves to be recorded, nothing less than a place where 60 percent of all the marijuana that Paraguay produces is amassed. Captain Bado.
View attachment 18954489
Cándido survives day by day in a hostile territory, where the silent war between drug traffickers leaves, on average, ten dead per month. He is a burly, rustic-looking, loud-speaking man who hits fifty. Four years ago, due to a series of his articles about the drug lords of Captain Bado, the newspaper's headquarters in Pedrojuan was shot up. "In that area, I estimate, is grown the most coveted macoña in America and probably in the world."
The favorite place to dump lifeless bodies (theirs is worth $50,000) is International Avenue because "the police don't investigate until they know if the dead person is Brazilian or Paraguayan, it's no man's land." Cándido has also received threats from the police forces that protect drug trafficking and his house has already been blown up with bullets, twice. For this reason, he is guarded by the police... and a 45 caliber pistol in waist (with a spare magazine). During the talk with his editorial staff, the name of Waldir Bofinger, the director of "capitanbado.com", comes up. He is a Brazilian journalist who lives in that town, three hours away of Pedrojuan and that distance can give us a good walk.
In the newspaper ABC, Amadeo tells me on the way out, Cándido is more popular for his strange hobbies than for his notes. He collects, as if they were stamps, photos of mutilated corpses, some without hands, others without heads and all with bullets in the heart. His personal relics also include a collection of drug trafficker skulls that he collected over the years during his visits to the clandestine cemeteries of Amambay.
Half of the Paraguayan population is peasants. Out of a total of 5,200,000 inhabitants, 2% own 75% of all land.
THE CAPTAIN'S VERSES
"It's the rainy season, Captain Bado is isolated. It's best for you to buy the ticket back there", they told us at the ticket office. It was the last warning before getting on the bus and heading down a narrow dirt road and traveling 120 kilometers on a quite ugly and inaccessible embankment. An old lady who sat in the back asked us why we were going there, I lied naturally and enthusiastically: "We are making a tourist guide." "How good, it's a beautiful place, don't forget to go to the waterfalls. Aguaray is 88 meters high", she said proudly. Through the window you could see the hills and forests where a good part of the growers live, nearby. Of the dry border with the Matto Grosso do Sul, southern from Amazonia in Brazil.
View attachment 18954490
"Planting marijuana is now a tradition, a family business. Something that grandfather passes on to his children and they pass on to their grandchildren," Waldir Bofinger tells us as we walk towards his house. He is a "Brasiguayan" who speaks in Portuñol, Captain Bado's lingua franca, given to offering his help without respecting our nap time. "Pitch the tent in the yard," he says before scurrying off to find his hammock.
In the afternoon we tour the city, quite organized and despite being isolated in terms of routes (half of the streets are paved, the houses are made of brick and there are many schools, colleges and even universities). Bofinger tells us that getting from Captain Bado to the plantations is a challenge. In fact, they are within a radius of 20 to 100 kilometers. We can approach by car, stop at a certain place and continue a long day on foot through the mountains. It gets dark.
The first sentence that Bofinger utters, already between the table and sitting in his dining room, is brutal: "Capitán Bado is one of the cities in Paraguay with the highest percentage of widows." The girls want to stay with the drug traffickers because of their money and the good life they lead, but they have a very short lifespan, at most they reach 35 years." Although the peasants mostly pay the price when the corrupt police officers need to justify their salaries and the business doesn't either. Sure for the bosses, they still prefer to marry "the seed owners." The worst massacre was between 1995 and 2001, when the bloodthirsty Brazilian drug trafficker Fernandinho Beira Mar, considered one of the largest drug and weapons smugglers in the Americas, was in Captain Bado.
SWALLOWS
Early, very early, the sun turns the tent into a hive. Before leaving, Bofinger watches Amadeo's camera and demands, for safety, that we forget about it. -"I'll make sure we come back with everyone, and alive," he jokes. In a warehouse far from the urban center, we contacted a farmer who knows another, who knows about another, who would have a farm where he grows corn, cassava and, a little more hidden, Brazilian cannabis (considered one of the best sativas in the world).
View attachment 18954491
The only way to get there is to walk for almost an hour along a long tapepoí, Guaraní name for those narrow paths made by walkers in the mountains. We are welcomed by a wrinkled old man with a privileged physique, who works the land with his children and grandchildren. He is outraged that Captain Bado does not appear in the guide they commissioned us to do. "This was the granary of the north, we gave corn and wheat to the entire country for years," he tells us. He has also planted soybeans, but cannabis is his main crop.
We asked about the plants. Grandfather avoids my gaze and asks for discretion. He says that for a decade the Brazilians took over the area and murdered entire families who, like his, grew up in small plots of 10 square meters and they took out between 30 and 50 kilos. Now there are people who go deep into the mountains with batteries, machete and food. They clear five, six hectares, and with bad luck, they get two tons per hectare," the old man complains and sips a glass of cane. "Aristocrat" in the dining room, improvised under a thatched roof at the entrance to the ranch. Nobody gets rich by farming, but sometimes it serves to pay for the pleasure.
While one of his grandchildren prepares "Mbeyu", a delicious cassava starch tortilla that is cooked over firewood, he tells us that the sawmills depleted the forests and the growers who hide in the mountains find it difficult to hide their plants. "There are also more military - he adds -, that is why many are going to settle in (the departments of) Canindeyú, Caazapá or Itapúa".
I ask him if he is afraid of growing marijuana and he smiles: "It's like planting cassava or yerba mate. We are in this because my grandchildren can't get jobs, there isn't a single industry here." In fact, one of his children is camping in the mountain where he planted cannabis and only his wife sees him from time to time: "She helps him by picking the leaves, cutting the plants and the buds."
The farmers' stay in the large plantations lasts at least three months. Right there they mount the presser on the stem of a tree. They earn approximately 6 dollars a day for cultivating and ensuring the harvest. Bofinger told us that a kilo of cotton is paid for 38 cents and that of marijuana is 1.9 cents dollars. "Some - the old man gossips - take the younger indigenous women who live nearby and pay them for the company." The rate varies according to the service and averages 35 thousand guaranies (7 dollars); Of course, the payments have their equivalent in spices, be they "wax balls" (hashish) or any type of food (rice, grass, cane or noodles, etc.).
View attachment 18954493
We get up after eating Mbeyu and follow the old man who heads towards the farm where he grows Mandiogaypi (cassava in Guarani). Amadeo asks him, with the greatest possible respect, if he smokes marijuana. "No, here the only one who smokes is the one who buys." I look at one of his grandchildren who is accompanying us, machete in hand, and he smiles at me. He will be 17 or 18 years old and does not seem to agree with that "in the blacksmith's house, a wooden knife."
We cross about a hundred meters between the cassava paths, pass some trees and see the monstrous plants: 80 bushes piled up more than five feet tall with relict buds under an implacable sun. "In one or two weeks we will harvest," he tells his grandson, who is amusing himself by pruning a plant to give us some flowers (then he will scrape his hands and show me a brown ball of hashish).
His method consists of planting five seeds in the same place and keeping the ones that grow later and survive. Thus, he reveals that he has been improving the species, since the plants that grow first are usually males. To germinate again he uses the seeds "that fall to the ground during the harvest", because a male always escapes and ends up pollinating some plants. The harvest needs to dry in the open air for 2 to 3 days. The old man assures that he, unlike the mountain growers, dries the branches under the trees to preserve the aroma.
He told him that in Buenos Aires they say that Paraguayan marijuana comes messed (pissed). "Why would we do that?" he asks me naively. I try to get out of trouble by telling him that the pressing comes with a very strong smell, like ammonia. He tells me that they don't sell ammonia in the town and that the bad smell could come from the presses: "They put them in almost green, they are all sticky and they will surely rot over time," he says angrily (it is worth clarifying that the smell of ammonia from the pressing comes from the degradation of nitrogen, produced by the high humidity of the plants when they are compacted). His grandson adds that some press the plants with stones, charcoal and other waste to increase the weight of the bricks. It's hard not to believe them.
The sky begins to cloud. The old man estimates that we have 12 hours left before the harsh drops fall. "It's going to rain for a few days," he says, worried about bringing forward the harvest to that same afternoon. Amadeo and I quicken our pace, we don't have a return ticket to Pedrojuán and we must write the guide to that city. Captain Bado will not appear in it, but the fresh buds that we put in the backpack will brighten the memory.
