by David Bornstein

In April 1996, Paraguay's shaky democracy faced its greatest test since the overthrow of military dictator Gen. Alfredo Stroessner in 1989. For thirty-five years, Stroessner had presided over arguably the most brutal and repressive regime in Latin America. Even before Stroessner assumed power, however, the people of this landlocked nation in the heart of South America had endured more than 80 years of military dictators, wars, coups d'etat, and political clashes. In all, over the past 120 years, Paraguayans have known less than 10 years of civil rule.

In April 1996, when Paraguay's president Juan Carlos Wasmosy dismissed army commander Gen. Lino Oviedo for conducting illegal political activities, rumors of another impending coup d'etat spread widely. Suddenly, it seemed, the social gains achieved after 1989 – the constitutional reforms, the expansion of civil liberties, the emergence of citizens' organizations, the birth of new political parties – could be wiped out in a matter of hours. As President Wasmosy sought refuge in the U.S. embassy, government, church and business leaders speculated about who would win the coup. Camilo Soares Machado, a leader in the Paraguayan youth movement, recalled: "Neither the church, nor the political parties, nor the traditional structures had any idea how to respond to the threat of the coup. Everyone retreated for safety." Everyone, that is, except for the nation's youth.

"If the government wasn't going to handle the problem, we knew we would have to take the initiative," recalled Soares. "As a major force, we had to accept our responsibility and exercise it. We saw this as an extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate to all of society the vital importance of civil participation." Since he was 15, when he had organized the first high school student council in Paraguay, Soares had played a central role galvanizing the country's youth movement and helping to formulate its strategy. (Paraguay has the youngest population in Latin America. Seventy percent of its five million people are under 30 years old, and 50 percent are under 15 years old.)

Filling the Streets With Youth

"We sent out a call through the media," explained Soares. "And before you knew it the streets of Asunción began to fill with youth groups. We called youth to go into the streets – not in defense of the current government – but in defense of the right to live in an open and democratic society. We thought twenty or thirty people would turn out, but within a week there were demonstrations twenty-four hours a day in the squares of Asunción, twenty or thirty thousand young people. People felt joyful; they saw there was an alternative. And they led the way – the participation of young people stopped the coup d'etat."

When President Wasmosy emerged from shelter, he acknowledged the courage of the young demonstrators. Newspapers celebrated the "kids of democracy" – "faces painted, wrapped in flags, singing songs and dancing." While articles appeared with headlines trumpeting: "Our Youth Have Given Us a Lesson in Dignity," General Oviedo was charged with insurrection, arrested and placed in jail.

The emergence of Paraguay's young citizens as key actors in the country's political life can be traced, in large measure, to the high school organizing efforts led by Camilo Soares in the early 1990s, as well as to Soares's leadership of Paraguay's first nationwide inter-secondary school organization, and to his work, in 1995, establishing the Casa de la Juventúd ("Youth House") in Asunción, which has become the epicenter of the national youth movement in Paraguay: a two-story house, filled with music and colorful murals that serves as a meeting place and a center for training, research, strategizing and communications for youth groups across Paraguay and from other countries. At 22, Soares calls himself the "grandfather of the house."

A Leader Who Knows How to Follow

Soares is a modest young man with a gift for communication; he speaks with intensity, humor and a deep sense of justice. Listening to him, it is easy to see how others would find him an inspiring leader. "It is not simply a matter of listening, but continually interacting with people." One of the fundamental problems in his society, he cautions, is its history of captivity to leaders. "The Messiah idea is strong in Paraguay – we are always looking to someone else for the answers." Soares – whose father is assumed to have been murdered by the Argentine military in 1980 – was taught by his mother from an early age that "everyone must act out of their own sense of values" – that the answers come from within.

When he was a student, attending an elite high school in Asunción, Soares found himself surrounded by students from wealthy and well-connected families. Soares felt like a "black sheep": His family was neither well off, nor were they practicing Catholics (in a country that is 90 percent Catholic), nor were they affiliated with the ruling Colorado party. Soares's instinct was immediately to look for other "black sheep" and begin organizing them. Initially, they focused on documenting and denouncing the repression under Stroessner's dictatorship, and fighting against mandatory military service. As head of the student council, Soares mixed a broad social message with a precise student-oriented message. "People are so accustomed to thinking of youth as the 'future'," he told his fellow students, "that they are surprised to be challenged to think of us as the present." He instinctively focused on issues that had both symbolic power and the potential to generate widespread enthusiasm.

For example, in Paraguay, it is traditional to have sports competitions between classes. Since classes tend to be tracked, the competition tends to reinforce distinctions across social classes. "We started to break this absurd tradition with a student Olympics," Soares recalled. The students formed three teams by colors, with the colors running through the school, breaking down old lines.

Lessons Learned in Silly Games

"As adolescents," added Soares, "we didn't know how to fight against machismo, but instinctively we decided not to have competition between only one sex." The students organized soccer games with mixed teams. However, rather than making a team half boys and half girls (where the boys would dominate), the students came up with an alternative. "We tied one leg of a boy to one leg of a girl, so they would have to run together," Soares explained. "It seems absurd – but we were able to send a message that if boys act only with boys, and girls act only with girls, it doesn't come close to what we can achieve if we work together. When we related this message to political messages against discrimination, it was much more readily understood."

In this socially conservative country, after thirty-five years of dictatorship and repression, such activities caused a stir. Soon, the media began to take notice. Having established a strong base in the high school, the students began focusing on tougher challenges. The director of Soares's high school was a woman from a famous national family who was known to be General Stroessner's lover. The students fought to have her ousted on charges of corruption and embezzlement. (A civil tribunal banned her from holding any public office for ten years.) Later, the students fought for and won the right to have full administrative authority over the school for ten days each year. "During these days," Soares explained, "students head all the departments. They can raise salaries and fire teachers and their decisions have permanent effect – but they have to be able to justify them." (Today, fifty schools in Paraguay enjoy a week or two of student rule. "It is changing the concept of what a student is," commented Soares. "They are creators of the education system, not just spectators.")

Getting on the Bus, at Half Price

In 1991, Soares formed an organization to mobilize students from secondary schools across the country. The students decided to focus on an issue with national appeal: a half-price student bus ticket. In Paraguay, bus transportation is very expensive for students. And this was an issue that was supported by parents, as well. "It was a very felt need," Soares recalled. During the 1950s, students had unsuccessfully rallied around this issue. "It was almost mystical for us to recapture this movement. Our parents had tried to bring it about and weren't able to because of the repression," commented Soares. "It was an opportunity to reconcile the dreams of two generations."

The student ticket movement received enormous attention. With the movement, the media began to solicit the views of young people on a wide array of social issues. Once Soares was interviewed by a journalist about a hydroelectric project. "How does a young person see the future of Paraguay with reference to this dam?" the journalist inquired. "We had such an impact that we started to do very irreverent things and they didn't punish us," Soares recalled. One day, a hundred and fifty young people occupied parliament while five thousand others stood outside the government buildings – faces painted, carrying placards, demanding a student ticket. Three and a half years after the students had begun, the government passed the law.

When Soares was preparing to graduate, he and a group of other "black sheep" gathered to figure out how they were going to continue their work out of school. They organized a national student congress, which was self-financed, and came up with a "national plan for struggle." The founders separated from the student movement, which continues to this day. They joined with the movement of conscientious objectors and, in 1992, helped pushed through a law enshrining this right in Paraguay's new Constitution, the first country in Latin America to have such a law. (To date, Paraguay has more conscientious objectors – more than 13,000 – than all other countries in Latin America combined.) "Given the military history of Paraguay," Soares commented, "gaining the right to conscientious objection is recognized widely as one of the most extraordinary developments in the country's history."

With the youth movement comprised of so many different groups – many of which had little organizing experience, Soares saw that the key ingredient missing was a place where youth could meet, discuss, strategize, act as mentors to each other and come up with ideas under their own auspices – away from the church and schools. "Within such an impoverished and militant society, with all of its contradictions and inconsistencies," he explained, "we wanted to create a non-partisan political space where youth could come up with ideas missing in the social sphere and government – to create options and alternatives to what was being offered. Youth come to Youth House to ask and discover what they can do with their lives."

A House Is a Home

Youth House has three major components: 1) a Youth Space, where young people can meet, use offices, play music, recite poetry, engage in debates, etc.; 2) a Training and Organization program, where youth groups can come to receive training, mentoring or counseling in their organizational efforts; and 3) a Communications and Research program, which focuses on ways to document youth activities and support youth expression. Through this program, Youth House links with youth groups in other countries, provides library resources, supports theatre groups, and videographers, and publishes a monthly magazine called Tokorre, a Guarani word for a traditional game in which children have to pass something – anything, a tag, a whisper, a book – from hand to hand. (Guarani, an indigenous tongue, is one of Paraguay's two national languages.)

"You don't win until everybody has got it," explains Camilo. "So the magazine gives the message that you're passing on the idea from youth to youth. Everyone is part of the game." Tokorre focuses on a different theme each month. The first issue, in August 1997, focused on the growing problem of street kids in Paraguay, and featured on its cover an image of a poor child covered with dirt standing beside a garbage dump. The headline read: "Who stole my share of the GNP?" Other issues have covered topics such as youth unionists, legal aid, child labor laws, and sexual harassment of youth. Tokorre is circulated to 4,500 young people and policy makers in Paraguay, and 500 groups outside the country.

Youth House is in the process of publishing El Embudo ("The Funnel"), a clandestine book put together over two years, which documents, through secret interviews and hidden-camera photographs, the abuse and neglect of kids in juvenile prisons. "We started to look at the rural youth who come to the city, face miserable conditions, have no work and enter into prostitution or delinquency," explained Soares. "We're trying to stimulate a discussion on the concepts of justice – and how our society condones its own wrong doings."

Another component of Youth House's communication program is Radio Rebelde (Rebel Radio), which Camilo describes as a "completely crazy" radio station. The station is run exclusively by youth, with groups and clubs from around the country producing their own shows. One show, for example, "Not an Angel, Not a Demon," which runs from 1 A.M. to 3 A.M., has students conducting interviews with youth sex workers to gain an understanding into their lives.

All of the efforts of Youth House are animated by the principles that successful movements must emerge first and foremost out of widely shared and deeply felt needs; they must be rooted in historical context; they must unleash the creativity of people; and they must keep sight of the development of the individual within the movement.

"It is always an enormous challenge to preserve a personal feeling within a larger group context," explains Soares. At the same time, the external risks must be guarded against. In Latin America, there is a pattern of advancing quickly and then losing ground. The democratic opening in post-1989 Paraguay has been seriously threatened by the economic crisis in Latin America. "We're seeing an extreme level of poverty we haven't seen before," Soares explained. "People are frustrated to the point where they are not interested in organizing."

But organizing is what is most critical, particularly with the upcoming presidential election on May 10 and, once again, rumors of a coup d'etat. The candidate leading in the polls is General Oviedo, currently running for President from prison. As a protest strategy, Youth House has organized a student election and has chosen as its own candidate a "pig on a bicycle." "At first people laughed," Soares explained, "but eventually we were able to show that this is less ridiculous than a candidate running for election from prison." The students will be setting up polling booths in 50 locations where people will have the option of voting for Pig, provided they are in agreement with certain principles. The media has picked up the campaign and recently piglet has been spontaneously appearing on the walls of schools around the country.

"The general could win because the youth don't believe in the system," Soares said. "That's the crucial point for us. We want to insist on the right of people to participate in the election happily, not sadly. The structure of the state makes it impossible to confront our social problems without civil participation. The solution is to ensure that people become involved in the creation of the society."

[As this article was being published, initial reports showed that Oviedo's surrogate, Raul Cubas Grau, was elected President.]