Emerged in 2008, the Paraguayan People's Army has created a conflict that has already claimed a hundred dead.

Marxist guerrillas in Latin America are a thing of the past. That conviction led to underestimate the emergence in 2008 of the Paraguayan People's Army (EPP), which since then has carried out a hundred violent actions, especially in rural areas of the northeast of the country. The conflict has claimed a hundred dead and as many wounded; there have also been kidnappings of personalities, which have given the EPP special media coverage. The creation of a controversial special military-police corps has not achieved the goal of putting an end to the group, which has led to criticism of the government's management of the problem.

article / Eduardo Villa Corta

The Paraguayan People's Army (EPP) was considered since its emergence as a small group of radicals that would have little to do. However, in just ten years it has become an organization capable of confronting the Paraguayan State: it has carried out a hundred terrorist actions, including a dozen kidnappings, causing some sixty deaths and a hundred wounded.

EPP influence zones (light red) and places where there have been group instructions (dark red) [Mikelelgediento].

With an issue of activists ranging from thirty of its hard core to two hundred if its support networks are considered, the EPP has been a problem for the government for several years, which has not been able to dismantle it: 30 militants have died in confrontations with the forces of law and order and a hundred have been arrested, but the image offered by the authorities is one of ineffectiveness. The Paraguayan government's negative credit is also the fact that it did not take seriously the threat posed by the group 's constitution and its first actions.

The EPP was officially formed on March 1, 2008. Although its founders and main leaders had already planned the creation of this group prior to this date, its roots go back to 1992 and the Patria Libre Party, as documented by researcher Jeremy McDermott. The EPP presents itself as an armed group against the "bourgeois liberal" parliamentary system, but above all it is a Marxist movement that promotes the uprising of Paraguay's peasantry, hence its attempt to take root in the rural northeast of the country.

The 2008 presidential victory of Fernando Lugo at the head of a leftist alliance, putting an end to six decades of political dominance by the Colorado Party, may have encouraged the formation of the EPP, which then believed it was justified in its actions with the removal of Lugo in 2012 through a controversial impeachment trial carried out by the Parliament and labeled by Lugo's supporters as a coup d'état.

The first EPP attack, on March 16, 2008, consisted of the burning of agricultural machinery in the department of Concepción. The next was in December of the same year, with an attack on a barracks in Tacuatí, in the department of San Pedro. Since then, their movements have been centered especially between the south of the first of these Departments and the north of the second.

Despite being a more or less delimited zone, dismantling the EPP is not easy because the EPP's modus operandi makes its movements unpredictable. This is because, as McDermott explains, the group does not act like other insurgent organizations, such as the FARC. The core of the EPP is made up of some 30 full-time fighters, most of whom have family ties. They are led by ringleaders Alcides Oviedo and his wife Carmen Villalba, who are in jail; one of the leaders on the ground is Oswaldo Villalba. In addition, there are about fifty part-time activists, a logistical network that could reach two hundred people and local sympathizers who, without being very involved in the cause, provide information on search operations of the security forces. The group suffered in 2014 the split of one of its columns, which was renamed the Armed Peasant association (ACA) and in 2018, in agreement with the authorities, the EPP split into two groups to face the pressure of the security forces.

The aforementioned figures speak of a small group , far from the 8,000 members that the FARC had in 2016 at the time of their demobilization or the 4,000 members that the ELN currently has in Colombia, or the 3,000 that were attributed to Chile's Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front. Although the EPP is more similar to the latter, its operational cessation in 1999 left the FARC as the main training group for those who would later create the EPP, as evidenced by the documentation found in the computer of FARC leader Raul Reyes and the kidnapping of businesswoman Cecilia Cubas, daughter of a former Paraguayan president, at the end of 2004.

This action marked what has been a line of action for the EPP. Since 2008, in addition to extortion and assaults in order to finance itself, the group has carried out kidnappings in order to achieve greater media impact. These have been carried out against relatives of former presidents of the country or personalities with a high political profile , for whose release ransoms in excess of five million dollars have been order , although lower figures have been agreed in negotiations. It is usually agreed to submit part of the money in cash and part in food for the towns surrounding the EPP's area of operations.

The group has also carried out extortions and assaults in those areas where it operates, demanding "revolutionary taxes" from landowners and cattle ranchers, from whom they also steal cattle and food to meet the organization's daily sustenance needs.

Other notable actions carried out by the EPP are bombings. For example, there was an attack against the Supreme Court of Justice in Asunción at the beginning of the group's operations. A more recent attack was perpetrated on August 27, 2016 against a military vehicle in the eastern zone of Concepción: the explosives exploded as the convoy passed by and then the terrorists liquidated the survivors with firearms; eight military personnel were killed in the attack. According to authorities, this event marked a leap in the EPP's operations, from a group seeking economic resources to an organization with greater operational and military capacity.

To confront the EPP, President Horacio Cartes created the Joint Task Force (FTC) in 2013 in response to evidence that police action was ineffective, in part due to possible internal corruption. The JTF is composed of members of the Armed Forces, the National Police and the National Anti-Drug administrative office , under the command of a military officer and reporting directly to the president. The more expeditious nature of this unit has generated some controversy in the social and political discussion .

The EPP's most recent operation was the kidnapping of former Paraguayan vice-president Óscar Denis on September 9, 2020. For the release of Denis, leader of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party and active participant in Lugo's impeachment, the terrorists demand the release of their leaders, Alcides Oviedo and Carmen Villalba, as well as the submission of food supplies for the rural areas where they operate. The deadline set by the organization expired a few days later without the Government attending their request. There have been citizen mobilizations demanding Denis' freedom and the status is being followed in the country with concern, putting President Mario Abdo Benítez in a tight spot.