On June 12, 2012, the Paraguay National Police sent 324 armed officers and a helicopter to forcefully evict 70 peasants they claimed illegally occupied land in the small town of Curuguaty just northeast of the nation's capital.

After a violent altercation, 11 peasants and six police officers were dead.

There were immediate cries of corruption and a cover-up by Paraguay's center-right Colorado Party.

Such claims of the activities of the authorities and a coterie around them are supported in a recent report by School of Americas Watch, the United States-based non-violent, human rights group opposed to the U.S. training of Latin American military officers.

SOA Watch was founded by Roy Bourgeois, when he was a priest in the Catholic Maryknoll order. (Bourgeois was dismissed from the Catholic order in late 2012 for his support of women's ordination.)

The landowner evicting the peasants, Blas Riquelme, was a former president of the Colorado Party. But Riquelme did not actually own the land.

It was owned by the Paraguayan Land Institute, which opposed the eviction.

Furthermore, the prosecutor who investigated the case, Jalil Rachid, is the son of another former Colorado Party president.

Rachid only went after peasants, arresting 14, who later claimed they were tortured during their interrogations.

A report from a local NGO makes additional claims that the police officers threw bullets on top of the bodies of dead peasants to make them appear to be criminals.

The fallout from the Curuguaty massacre, as the event came to be known, led to the greatly contested impeachment of Paraguayan left-wing president Fernando Lugo.

And when elections for Lugo's replacement were held for last month, the Colorado Party candidate, Horacio Cortes, came out on top.

While the election was peaceful, many in the international community questioned its fairness, including SOA Watch.

SOA Watch group sent a delegation on week-long trip to Paraguay to both monitor the presidential election and gather information about the massacre.

The delegation issued a report on April 30 detailing the human rights violations in both the Curuguaty massacre and the subsequent presidential election.

The delegation met with local NGOs, survivors of the massacre and the peasants who had been arrested, ultimately concluding that both the eviction and the investigation were in violation of basic human rights, the report said.

"We consider that the tragedy of Curuguaty, starting from the judicial negotiations that made it possible, has grave irregularities that demonstrate the instumentalization of the State by de facto and mafiosa-like powers," the report reads.

"The events of June 15, 2012 show the existence of a judicial and political system predominantly used for the defense of the elites, and at the same time dedicated to the repression and judgment of vulnerable sectors of the Paraguayan people who are trying to reclaim their rights, and who are a majority."

The report also decried the elections, stating, "We recognize the publicly calm atmosphere in which the voting took place.

"Nevertheless, we feel the need to register our concerns about the return to power of a political sector that implemented 35 years of dictatorship ... imposing a socio-political environment of human rights violations, persecutions, torture, exile, disappearances in multiple sectors of the population, and crimes against humanity."

SOA Watch plans to partner with the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights in sending the report to the newly elected Paraguayan government in hopes of securing nation-wide human rights improvements.