Article: Promised land; Paraguay and the Moonies.(A town seeks liberation from the Moonies)

A town owned by a cult seeks liberation

ONE day in 2000 the people of Puerto Casado, a small town in Paraguay's inhospitable Chaco region, were shocked to learn that the ground had been sold under their feet--and that their new lord and master was the Rev Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah who leads the Unification cult, better known as the Moonies. Mr Moon's acolytes soothed locals' fears by promising all sorts of grand projects to make the town rich, from a meat-packing plant to an eco-tourism resort.

Five years on, with little sign of these promises being kept, hundreds of the town's people recently travelled 400 miles (640km) to the ...

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