(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . How Paraguay became a ‘lab for anti-rights ideas’ [1] [] Date: 2026-02 Conservative activists “chased us and our families” Núñez added. “They act as terrorists, scratch your car, take pictures of you, seek to intimidate you.” A few other countries have seen similar campaigns. In 2018, Hungary banned gender studies programmes at university, removing their accreditation and funding. Poland’s president Andrzej Duda promised to “ban the propagation of LGBT ideology in public institutions” during his 2020 re-election campaign. His government says it will remove LGBT studies from official rankings of academic journals. In Romania, a bill banning the mention of “gender identity” in schools was proposed in 2020 – but the country’s constitutional court ruled against the ban. Similar bills were introduced in a number of cities in Brazil, but that country’s supreme court also ruled them unconstitutional. ‘A lab for anti-rights ideas’ Paraguayan human rights activists are not surprised by the country’s leadership of the ultra-conservative agenda. “Paraguay is a lab for anti-rights ideas,” said one such activist, who follows these groups and requested anonymity. “It was the first country in the region to execute a ‘parliamentary coup’ – against President Fernando Lugo in 2012,” she noted, as well as “the first to ban gender education and the first to adopt a register for the unborn”. The government’s decree, issued in October 2017, banned “the distribution and use of printed or digital materials related to gender theory and/or ideology in public educational institutions”. The minister of education who signed the decree, Enrique Riera, promised in the congressional hearing that Núñez spoke at that he would personally “burn the books in a public square if they contained gender ideology”. The ban followed conservative campaigns targeting guidelines and teacher training on rights-based sexual education, including principles of gender equality and non-discrimination. These materials had been produced by civil society groups with support from the European Union and United Nations agencies. At the time, Paraguay was facing questions from a UN committee on why it had not adopted policies against gender-based violence and discrimination, as required by the international Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The committee queried the “complete absence of the term ‘gender’” from a 2016 law to prevent violence against women. It also asked why ‘gender’ had been banned from schools, and why comprehensive sexuality education had not been introduced despite the country’s high rates of sexual violence and early pregnancies. It concluded that Paraguay was “facing a backlash on women’s rights in legislation and political and daily life”. Paraguay’s minister of women’s issues at the time, Ana María Baiardi, acknowledged before the UN committee her own “concern over the potential impact” of the 2017 gender decree. But she said she was reassured by the education ministry that the ban was only a “temporary measure” until all materials were reviewed by a committee of concerned parties. That committee was never set up, the review never happened, and the ban on gender in schools remains in effect, despite a new government taking office in 2019. The current minister of education, Eduardo Petta, did not reply to several requests for comments from openDemocracy. The 2017 ban effectively froze any move to introduce comprehensive sexuality education, according to activists. In 2019, authorities banned new sex education guidelines for teachers produced by a respected human rights group, calling their contents “libertine”. An alternative government plan launched in November 2020 to tackle abuses of children’s and adolescents’ fundamental rights (from malnutrition to sexual violence) was successfully opposed by the same groups that campaigned for the gender ban in education, arguing that it too was based on ‘gender ideology’. Help from the US The 2017 ban marked the climax of a campaign against ‘gender ideology’ in schools led by the Catholic Church and a Paraguayan coalition called Somos Muchos Muchos Más (roughly translated as We are Many Many More), which is coordinated by Paraguayan evangelical pastor Miguel Ortigoza, who is also a member of the US Christian conservative group Capitol Ministries. After international human rights groups including Amnesty International spoke out against the ban, Alliance Defending Freedom stepped in, sending a memo (seen by openDemocracy) to Paraguayan conservatives providing legal arguments to defend the anti-gender measures. That memo (which seems to have been written in haste, since it has various grammatical and punctuation errors in Spanish) claims that the international Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and other such treaties “are not binding for any country” and that Paraguay can defy them. Signed by ADF’s lawyer for Latin America, Neydy Casillas, the memo says it was written in response to requests for support from Paraguayan campaigners. 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