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a) the instrument for acknowledgment of the adjudicatory jurisdiction of the
Inter-American Court is sufficiently clear when it establishes that the facts to
be heard by this Court, in light of the Convention, must be subsequent to
ratification, which took place on March 11, 1993. Therefore, the historical
arguments (colonial and post-colonial) brought up by the applicant party in
the instant case are out of order;
b) it has not violated the right of the Yakye Axa Community to communal
property. It recognizes their right to ancestral lands, which encompass a
substantial part of the vast territory of the Chaco and include a geographical
area much broader than the space claimed in Estancia Loma Verde, and in
this regard it has been acting diligently to expedite matters to this end;
c) according to the final report of the 3d National Indigenous Population and
Housing Census in 2002, the Yakye Axa Community is part of the LenguaMaskoy linguistic community, which calls itself Enxet-Sur. If the members of
this Indigenous Community were ever on the farm that they now claim, Loma
Verde estate, it was individually as day laborers. It has been proven, in fact,
that most of the indigenous population identified as day laborers on said
estate were born in various places. Their forebears probably lived and
migrated internally in a vast territory in the Central Chaco, which includes
said estate, as well as other estates with various farms, which makes the
radicalization of the request to expropriate Loma Verde estate
incomprehensible in legal and rational terms;
d) the Yakye Axa Community has no ownership or possession of the land
they claim. Their claims are based on ancestral rights of their forebears,
documented only by the anthropological report prepared by anthropologist
Miguel Chase Sardi, who in a previous work on indigenous communities in
Paraguay does not refer to the property or possession of lands claimed by the
Yakye Axa Community;
e) under Paraguayan law it is not possible to acquire ownership rights merely
by justifying that some time in the past the forebears occupied this or that
geographical area;
f) the right to ancestral lands must go hand in hand with possession of the
area claimed. While the Executive has acknowledged that the traditional
territory of the indigenous population identified as Enxet-Lengua had its
traditional habitat in the area of the Paraguayan Chaco, this does not mean
that by its mere will it would dispossess those who own the real estate in
accordance with domestic legislation. In this regard, it is the Judiciary that
has competence to hear cases regarding conflicts over the paramount right.
In this case, the Judiciary has ruled that it is not possible to deprive the
landowners of the possibility of exercising their legal rights. The Legislative
has also rejected the expropriation that had been requested, due to proof that
the land claimed is under rational use;
g) it has guaranteed access of the Indigenous Community to all available
legal means to exercise the right to property, and if said right has not been
satisfied to date, this is due to factual and legal situations that have not been
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