Marina Kue, Curuguaty, Paraguay – A lonely dirt road leads to Marina Kue in eastern Paraguay; 2,000 hectares of arable land forever marked as a last stand between the heirs of Paraguay’s late dictator, General Alfredo Stroessner, and the victims of his brutal dictatorship, the landless peasants.

At dawn on June 15, 2012, a 350-men unit of Special Police Forces encircled the disputed land lot to evict 60 families who lived there. To the women, men, children and elders who had claimed access to Marina Kue, this was “Farm No 53”, a property incorporated within Stroessner’s controversial land distribution programme and agricultural colonisation scheme of eastern Paraguay.

The ghost of Stroessner

Castro’s life’s story intertwines with the “Stronismo” or “Stronato”, the name given to the Stroessner dictatorship, as the child of poor parents who settled close to the Curuguaty River, built a house and made their living as small-scale farmers.

Recalling the horrific events of that day in 2012, Nestor Castro, a thin 40-year-old small-scale farmer, pours water from a plastic pitcher into a glass and infuses terere (a cold variant of yerba mate tea) outside his house in the rural outskirts of Curuguaty, a city in Paraguay’s easternmost corner bordering Brazil. Years ago, Castro built the house himself on the disputed land, carrying all the wood and building materials by hand or motorbike.

‘We’re part of this earth’

As Castro relates the events of the massacre, and the history behind it which has defined his life, his two daughters are playing close by. He points towards the river, a few hundred metres away, where he and his family first settled in the early 1990s. By then, Stroessner had been removed and democracy was said to have been brought to Paraguay.

For now, the risk of new prison sentences for “occupying private land” continues to hang over him and his family, but there’s no other choice but to keep living.