MFP Brazil – URGENT: For the End of Confinement and Torture, Paraguayan War Prisoners Carry out Hunger Strike

We hereby share an unofficial translation of an article by the People’s Women’s Movement (MFP) from Brazil.

In the face of serious denounces, the MFP calls on all our centers, in the countryside and in the city, on all democratic and revolutionary organizations of women, workers, peasants, students, and associations of democratic lawyers, defenders of the rights of the people in Brazil, throughout Latin America and around the world, to join together in a powerful campaign demanding “Freedom for Paraguayan war prisoners and all revolutionary political prisoners” and to raise the slogans of the international campaign already underway, “Where is Lichita?” and “They were children.”

In October 2025, revolutionary war prisoners Carmen Villalba, Laura Villalba, and Francisca Andino went on hunger strike, once again denouncing, in an intrepid and courageous manner, the crimes of the old genocidal Paraguayan State against the people and their fighters, against the torture and isolation to which they are being subjected, and calling for international solidarity.

In November, given the seriousness of the situation, they continued their indefinite hunger strike. Democratic organizations and lawyers’ associations, through Salvador Sánchez, the defense attorney for the three women, denounced the serious situation:

“The prisoners decided to take this measure in response to the conditions of confinement to which they have been subjected for over a year. They are in individual cells measuring 2 x 2 meters, in absolute confinement, with cameras monitoring their every move, without contact with each other or with other people. In conditions that are clearly intended to drive them mad through torture.”

Lawyer Sánchez also denounces the Paraguayan State for failing to comply with the recommendations made by the Committee on Enforced Disappearances, which ensures the participation of family members in the search for Lichita, Carmen Villalba’s daughter. Sánchez pointed out that during a visit on October 31, 2025, the three detainees were lucid but weakened, being fed only with water and sugar to counteract dizziness and nausea.

According to Cláudia Korol, an activist who closely follows the entire process: “They were wearing purple uniforms, which is the color used for people classified as extremely dangerous. To transfer them from their cells to the visiting area, they cover their faces with hoods and handcuff their hands behind their backs.” Korol explains that the use of reused hoods may pose a risk due to outbreaks of tuberculosis recorded in this prison.

Paraguayan war prisoners, members of the EPP (Paraguayan People’s Army), have for decades been the targets of the worst persecution, torture, and atrocities by the old reactionary State of Paraguay, which serves imperialism and its ruling classes, mainly the parasitic big landlords.

Through repressive apparatus and the iniquitous Paraguayan judicial system, the minimum legal rights of political prisoners and war prisoners of the EPP, such as the right to freedom after serving their full sentence, the right to legal defense, and the right to visits, have been systematically violated. What all these arbitrary acts and persecutions actually express are reprisals and revenge by these same ruling classes in a vain attempt to break the will and morale of these revolutionaries and the Paraguayan people in struggle.

The EPP and the revolutionary struggle in Paraguay

Founded in 2004 as a splinter group of the now defunct Free Fatherland Party, the EPP took up arms alongside the Paraguayan people in their struggle for their rights, which had been trampled on by the old State of the big landlords and the comprador bourgeoisie, servants of imperialism, as the only way to bring about the Revolution to convert Paraguay into a sovereign and truly democratic nation and for the freedom of its people, whose successive governments are the continuation in other forms of the tyranny of the dictator Stroessner, who ruled for more than 50 years after a military coup and a brutal system of exploitation and oppression.

The EPP has carried out hundreds of revolutionary actions against big landlords, as well as land seizures with the peasants, facing latifundium’s gangs of goons, paramilitary groups, and the reactionary national army, which acts alongside them against the people, covering up their crimes. The just armed struggle in Paraguay faces the same counterinsurgency war policy of the US, applied in Colombia since the Uribe government, through the direct action in Paraguay of Colombian military commandos, trained by the Yankees, the low-intensity war (LIW), which continues in that country to this day with the Petro government (which lights a candle to God and another to the Devil at the same time). In Paraguay, under the government of Santiago Peña, who is as reactionary as his predecessor Mario Abdo, the infanticide responsible for the brutal crimes against the Villalba sisters, Maria Carmen and Mariana, aged just 11.

The war prisoners, sisters Villalba and Francisca Andino, were transferred in January 2024 to the Mingá Guazú maximum security prison, a true concentration camp and center for physical and psychological torture, comparable to the notorious Guantánamo Prison. Everything indicates that this transfer, in addition to prolonging the punishment of activists and leaders such as Carmén Villalba, who has already spent almost three years in prison after serving her sentence, is intended to isolate them so that they cannot publicize the allegations regarding the murder of two 11-year-old children by special troops of the reactionary Paraguayan army and the forced disappearance of Elizabeth Oviedo Villalba (Lichita), aged just 14, during the government of Mario Abdo more than five years ago, in October 2020. The children lived in Argentina and were Carmen’s nieces. They were accompanied by Laura Villalba on a visit to the guerrilla region so that the children could meet their parents. The girl Lichita is her daughter.

At the time, after the cowardly attack on the camp where the children were staying, President Mario Abdo posed for photos celebrating the “victory” against the guerrillas, hiding the children’s ages, fabricating situations such as dressing them in military uniforms and claiming that they had killed two female guerrillas. They hastily buried the bodies, torn apart by torture and execution marks, in an attempt to hide their war crimes. However, after international pressure, the bodies were exhumed and the criminal State of Paraguay’s deception was proven. But the brutal persecution continued with the arrest of Laura Villalba and her sentencing to 31 years in prison and, since last year, in total isolation in Mingá Guazú. In a completely flawed judicial process riddled with irregularities and illegalities, Laura Villalba, who lived in Argentina with her five children and the Villalba grandmothers, was absurdly convicted of being a “bad mother,” guilty of having her 11-year-old daughter Maria Carmen Villalba captured, tortured, and executed by the Paraguayan national army.

As part of the persecution of EPP fighters, the Villalba family members living in Argentina were expelled from the country and had to take refuge in Venezuela. They cannot visit the political prisoners due to the threat of being arrested themselves and call on democratic and revolutionary organizations for international solidarity.

Freedom for Paraguayan female war prisoners and all revolutionary political prisoners!

For the right to search for and find Lichita alive!

Punishment for Paraguayan war criminals for the infanticide of the Villalba girls!

End confinement and torture in the Mingá Guazú maximum security prison!