Why a South Korean church bought a village in Paraguay

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0:46Girmay Gebru:Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

0:54Ronald Avila-Claudio:Estás escuchando The Fifth Floor.

1:06Girmay Gebru:The Fifth Floor, at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all around the world. I'm your host, Faranak Amidi.

1:23Girmay Gebru:Puerto Casado is a small village in a remote area of Paraguay in South America. At first glance, it's no different from any other rural village in the area. There is a school, several grocery stores, and you often see people walking their cattle through town because farming is one of the main sources of income there. Most houses are made of red bricks, and so is the local church. But what makes Puerto Casado an exception is that it's at the center of a 25-year-long dispute between the Paraguayan state, local residents, and a controversial South Korean church. Why? Well, Ronald Avila Claudio from BBC Mundo has recently been to Puerto Casado and can tell us more about it.

2:14Girmay Gebru:Ronald. Nice to have you on the fifth floor with us.

2:17Ronald Avila-Claudio:Thanks a lot for having me. It's a pleasure.

2:19Girmay Gebru:So first of all, tell us about this village, Puerto Casado. Where is it and how long did it take you to get there?

2:28Ronald Avila-Claudio:Puerto Casado is a really small village in the west of Paraguay. It's a very remote place. I travel from Miami and it was a flight of around 10 hours with a stop in Bogota. So it was a really long flight. And in Paraguay, you have to drive around eight hours from Asunción, the capital, to get to Puerto Casado. You can imagine the road is sometime full of mud when it's raining. And once you are in Vallemí, that is the closer town to Puerto Casado, you have to take a boat. and cross the Paraguay River. It's around 20 kilometers.

3:17Girmay Gebru:That's a journey.

3:19Ronald Avila-Claudio:Yeah, and I have to say that it's located in the Chaco, Paraguayo. The Chaco is a semi-arid region that covers around 60 % of the territory of Paraguay. And how many people live there? Just 7 ,000.

3:36Girmay Gebru:So what's the problem that all of these 7 ,000 people who live in this little village have in common?

3:44Ronald Avila-Claudio:These people have been living in Puerto Casado for generations, and none of them own the land nor the houses they live in. And this is because of a sale deal that was made with an Argentinian company and the Paraguayan government 25 years ago. Okay, what is going on?

4:07Girmay Gebru:Why are people in this situation?

4:09Ronald Avila-Claudio:To understand this, we have to go back to the late 19th century, to the 1870s. The Paraguayan government lost a war against Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. It was called the Triple Alliance War. And when Paraguay lost this conflict, they ended up in a really big, big debt. and they had to sell a lot of land to pay all that money that they owned.

4:41Girmay Gebru:It was sold.

4:42Ronald Avila-Claudio:It was sold. So who bought it? Carlos Casado de Alizal was a really rich man from Argentina and he bought thousands of hectares in Paraguay. And in 1886, he decided to start a factory of tanning in the region of El Chaco. So tannin is a system that comes from Quebracho, that is a native tree in that region. Tannin was used for leather production in the past century. He started a factory to extract this system for the trees, and he built a village there for the workers of his factory. And that's how Puerto Casado was founded.

5:29Girmay Gebru:So this village was built around the local tannery where the leather was being processed and tanned. What was life like for people back then?

5:39Ronald Avila-Claudio:I talked to many residents. One of them, Alcides Manena, a journalist and someone that was born over there. He was telling me that Carlos Casado, but also the company, were the owners of the land. and they were like a state inside the Paraguayan state.

5:59Girmay Gebru:A parallel state to the main state.

6:02Ronald Avila-Claudio:Yeah. They had a lot of control over the population that was living there. They actually control if the people go outside the town. They were also controlling the groceries in supermarkets that were owned by the company. And also no one there used to pay electricity or water. And of course, they were not paying for the houses they were living in because all of those structures were owned by Carlos Casado and the company. The company owned the land for more than 100 years. They became a really rich factory because of the tanning they were extracting from the trees. But in the 1990s, they were bankrupt because the tanning industry around the world just experienced a decline because new synthetic substances were used to produce leather.

7:01Ronald Avila-Claudio:So they needed to close the factory. And a couple of years later in the 2000s, he decided to sell thousands of hectares, including Puerto Casado. The village. The village. And who did he sell it to? He sell it to the Unification Church, a religious group that was created in South Korea. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

7:33Ronald Avila-Claudio:Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian. and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.

8:06Ronald Avila-Claudio:So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

8:16Girmay Gebru:On this episode of The Fifth Floor, I'm with Ronald Avila Claudio from BBC Mundo. He's been reporting on the extraordinary story of Puerto Casado, the Paraguayan village owned by a South Korean church. And tell us about this church. Who are they?

8:33Ronald Avila-Claudio:The Unification Church was founded in 1950 by Sumyuan Moon. It's a religious group, really big. They have properties around the world and they are very rich. They have a lot of businesses. And they decided to buy land in Paraguay because one of the missions of the church, they told me when I talked to one of the representatives of the church in Paraguay, The aim of buying all that land was to produce food. They want to end war starvation. They have land in other countries in South America. They have land in Brazil, for example. So it's not the first time they bought land, but this case is very specific because there was a town over there.

9:19Girmay Gebru:So tell me about how the people of Puerto Casado reacted to the sale.

9:26Ronald Avila-Claudio:Everything was sold to the church. the houses, plantations, also the animals that were there. So even the cattle. Yeah, these people have been living there for generations and they were really mad at the beginning because they believe that all of that is their property already because they have been there producing the land, taking care of those houses, you know, having kids over there. All that they know is Puerto Casado. And they were at the beginning mad, but they were also scared because they at the beginning, they thought that the unification church wanted to, you know, take them out from there to make the agricultural project.

10:10Ronald Avila-Claudio:So they start to protest and they made a really big march in 2005. They walk from Puerto Casado to Asunción. I would say that's more than 600 kilometers. I saw pictures of that first march. People of all ages. There's a lot of indigenous people in Puerto Casado as well. So I saw people from, you know, original communities of Paraguay, walking women, even priests of the Catholic Church. And they were walking under rain. They were sleeping on the road. And they made this really big, big protest to reclaim what they believe is their own.

10:55Girmay Gebru:Did anyone from the Unification Church ever move there?

10:59Ronald Avila-Claudio:At the beginning, they tried. They tried to set a religious group over there, but they couldn't because the people was really, really mad at them and didn't let them establish in Puerto Casado. Actually, the first time that the Unification Church representative came to Puerto Casado, the people from the town held the airplane till a representative from the Paraguayan government got to the town.

11:28Girmay Gebru:And you also spoke to a teacher and she had some memories of that time, the beginning. Can you tell us what she told you?

11:36Ronald Avila-Claudio:Yes. She told me that at the beginning were a lot of conflict between people supporting the Unification Church and the people that want the land and the houses to be their own. There was a lot of tension over there. She remembered a lot of police and military from Paraguay going to Puerto Casado to try to manage all the problems that were happening there. What did the government do back then? All those conflicts and protests and the marches, the government decided to expropriate 52 ,000 hectares from the Unification Church to give it to the people. But the courts of Paraguay decided that there was a confiscation of private property.

12:29Ronald Avila-Claudio:And they basically eliminated the law that was approved by the Paraguayan government. A few years later, the Unification Church started conversations with the government trying to ease the problems and the tensions. and the government approved a new law saying that they were donating, that the Unification Church was donating 30 ,000 hectares in favor of the people of Puerto Casado. But because of a lot of problems in the government, political differences and bureaucracy, those hectares were never donated to the people. So everything is still the same. Everything is still the same. In 2012, the founder of the Unification Church, Son Miongún, yeah, he died.

13:21Ronald Avila-Claudio:And the church got divided between his wife and sons. And the land in Paraguay got divided as well, including Puerto Casado. So part of Puerto Casado is owned by the children of the founder of the Unification Church. and the other half is owned by his wife. So the situation is even more complicated right now. It's complicated because right now there is a legal process and that is not resolved yet.

13:54Girmay Gebru:So you spoke to several people in Puerto Casado. What did they tell you about how the situation is affecting their lives?

14:03Ronald Avila-Claudio:When the Unification Church bought everything And when the Carlos Casado factory closed, they didn't have any way of earning money. They were working on the tanning industry. When everything closed, they lose their jobs. And they were not producing enough food by their own. They were not making big agricultural projects. So they didn't have enough food or jobs. And they couldn't access to credits or loans because they are not the owners of the land. So they have to start being really, I would say, creative to keep living. There was a lot of migration. A lot of people left the town. And right now, they still live in a sort of on the limbo thing right now.

15:02Ronald Avila-Claudio:because there is a legal process happening and they are supposed to get this donation, but they are not the owners and they don't know what's going to happen. What about the younger generation? Yes, I talked to a young woman. She's 18 years old. And she told me that she is not that aware about the land problem and about the ownership problem over there. but she's very clear that there's not a lot of opportunities in Puerto Casado. There's schools over there but not any university or college where young people can go and study. She actually is planning to move to Concepcion, that is a town three hours from Puerto Casado where she wants to go to university.

15:56Ronald Avila-Claudio:She also said to me that there's not a lot of things to do for young people over there. She said there's no employment. There's not a lot to do in terms of distractions. She told me that she liked to run. That's what she does.