Across Latin America, the last guerrillas are leaving the jungle and laying down their weapons. Some have long since become respectable politicians: former rebel fighters have become presidents in Uruguay, Brazil and Nicaragua.

The hemisphere’s most powerful guerrilla group – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc – are engaged in tentative peace negotiations with the government, while the leaders of Peru’s once-feared Shining Path languish in jail.

But in the heart of South America, a relative latecomer to armed struggle is running rings around the authorities – provoking dark mutterings that the state itself is complicit in the group’s existence.

Just over a year ago, on 5 July, the Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP) – a self-professed Marxist rebel group – kidnapped police officer Edelio Morínigo.

“The fourth of July, a Friday, was the last time my son came here. We never thought that the next day something so terrible was going to happen to us,” said Morínigo’s mother Obdulia Florenciano at her home in Arroyito, a poor rural area outside the town of Horqueta and a guerrilla stronghold.

Morínigo, then 24, disappeared while hunting in the forest with a group of friends. The last his family saw of him was a video in October, offering to exchange him for jailed EPP leaders.

The parents of kidnapped police officer Edelio Morínigo have spent more than 400 days waiting for his return. Photograph: Laurence Blair/The Guardian

Another hostage released on 25 December reported that Edelio was alive. “Since then, there’s been no information … They say they have intelligence he’s OK, but they don’t convince me. Now, I’m despairing that my son is alive,” said Obdulia, wiping away tears.

The case is the longest kidnapping in Paraguayan history, but only the latest in a string of abductions and killings carried out by the EPP. Although formally founded in 2008, the rebel movement has cast a shadow over the north of the country for nearly 20 years. Skilled with explosives and armed with automatic weapons, the EPP has regularly been linked to foreign armed groups such as the Farc.

Despite deploying thousands of soldiers and declaring a permanent state of emergency in the region, the government has failed to bring to heel the tiny group, which operates in a few hundred square kilometres of sparse forests and ever-expanding farming estates.

Their beliefs are a mix of “Marxist-Leninist-Guevarist” doctrines with a particularly Paraguayan twist, said Cristóbal Olazar, a former comrade of the EPP’s founders. He turned police informant in 2004 after they abducted and killed Cecilia Cubas, the daughter of former President Raúl Cubas.

The group reveres the post-independence dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1814-40), who sealed off Paraguay’s borders from foreign trade to boost domestic development and executed and jailed hundreds of his opponents.



The EPP finances itself by extorting estate owners for a “revolutionary tax”, said an Horqueta rancher who asked to remain anonymous, having already been warned by the guerrillas not to talk to the press. “They claim they’re like Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, but we’re hard-working people too,” he adds.



In January, the EPP killed a German ranching couple in a botched kidnapping. In March, they executed three unarmed Paraguayan farm workers on an estate, leaving pamphlets forbidding the cultivation of “soya, corn, or other crops that require pesticides”.



On 12 July, hours after Pope Francis left for Rome following a three-day visit to Paraguay, EPP members ambushed and executed two police officers, killing another three days later.

Distrust of authorities

In total, the EPP and its founders have killed more than 50 people – 25 in the past two years alone – of whom 30 were civilians and 21 police or military personnel.

Emiliana Sosa knows her son will never come home. Rudy Ruiz Sosa joined the Armed Campesino Group (ACA) when it split from the EPP in late 2014. On 29 April, he was shot dead by soldiers. But Emiliana and her husband, Delfín, said they know why their only son left his three children behind to wage war in the forest.



Delfín and Emiliana Sosa’s son, Rudy, joined the Armed Campesino Group (ACA) and was killed in an army ambush in April. Photograph: Laurence Blair/The Guardian

“Foreigners and millionaires take everything, and the poor have nothing,” Emiliana said. “You barely get any money for what you plant … We don’t have contacts, or money. There’s no justice for the poor.” Rudy’s partner, Victoria Aquina Bogado, was equally firm: he was “defending his fatherland from poison”.

The government is far away here: dirt roads cut through the countryside to tiny clusters of houses with numbers for names: Núcleo 5, Núcleo 6. Fernando Masi, director of research institute CADEP, agrees. “Paraguay still has a very low average income, and in rural areas a lot of people work in the informal sector. And if you look at the multidimensional poverty index, access to health, education, and social services is still severely lacking.”

The “clientelism” bred by decades of one-party rule has also resulted in corrupt officials siphoning off large amounts of state spending, Masi added. Distrust of the authorities means that locals are unwilling to report the EPP’s movements, and many families are thought to support the group with food and supplies.

A few kilometres away in Núcleo 3, a group of police officers sit under a tree opposite their sandbagged base, passing around a gourd of tereré, typical local infusion. The rebels have come out of the trees to spray the station with bullets three times in two years, provoking half-hearted shootouts.



“They’re in the forest out there, supposedly. But things are relaxed here,” says the commander.

After a clutch of captures and killings earlier this year, the interior minister, Francisco de Vargas, claimed in June that the ACA was on the “road to extinction”. The splinter group now consists of perhaps seven fighters, including the leader’s teenage sisters and pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend. The EPP’s founders are all in jail or exile.



But the main group’s continued menace has raised doubts about the state’s willingness to get to grips with the guerrilla. “If they’re just here, why don’t they go and get them?” said one of the Sosas’ neighbours.



Tanks in nucleo 3: The government claims to be winning the fight against the EPP. Photograph: Laurence Blair/The Guardian

Others, including Edelio’s mother, argue that his kidnap provides a pretext for the Combined Task Force (FTC) – the body set up by President Horacio Cartes to combat the EPP – to hold back from eliminating the group, and continue to line their pockets with public money.



The idea that the EPP provides a convenient, controllable enemy is echoed by Olazar, the former secretary-general of the Movimiento Patria Libre (Free Fatherland Movement), whose armed wing split to form the nucleus of the EPP.



“Corruption is very strong within the security bodies, and it doesn’t suit them to finish this group off, because this would also end their economic support,” said Olazar at his home in Concepción.



He alleged that the FTC and police are also complicit in drug trafficking thought to be carried out by the EPP. In late June, the Chamber of Deputies created a commission to investigate corruption within the FTC.



Police informant Cristóbal Olazar says he fears reprisals by his former comrades. Photograph: Laurence Blair/The Guardian

For Olazar, who trained as a guerrilla shortly before the fall of the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship in 1989, the cold war era of armed struggle has passed. “They maintain this methodology of the 1970s. But it’s no longer justified. … You have to modernise, do political work. Some of our comrades are in congress. But they say they’re traitors to the revolutionary cause,” he said.



While some laid down their arms, others insisted that the “fascist enemy” still remained in power: several of Stroessner’s henchmen took key positions in post-1989 administrations, and his Colorado party has ruled Paraguay for all but five of the past 68 years.



Obdulia and her family are meanwhile facing up to the reality that Edelio may never return.



“I wouldn’t wish this situation on anyone in the world,” says Obdulia. “We only ask that they let our son go. We don’t have anything against them. I ask God that at least we’ll get his bones back.”