Fifteen-Year-Old Farmers Push Back on Federal Voting Age in Tierra Verde

On a Saturday morning in late August, in a barn outside the town of Puerto Iguazú, about thirty teenagers gathered to talk about something that would have seemed absurd to their parents' generation: whether they should be allowed to vote in federal elections. The meeting was informal, organized by a high school civics teacher named Daniela Sosa and attended by young farm workers whose families own coffee and yerba mate smallholdings in the region.

The conversation was animated but not angry. These young people—fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old—were already paying federal income tax on their seasonal wages, already working land their families hoped to register as cooperative members, already reading the federal price sheets that determined what their harvest would earn. "I file taxes," said Lucía, a sixteen-year-old from Caaguazú. "I understand the tariffs. I know what the federal tariffs mean to my family's coffee. Why can't I vote on the people who set them?"

The Youth Charter, a proposed amendment to the Federal Charter that would lower the federal voting age from eighteen to fifteen, has been circulating in Meridian since May. It was co-sponsored by La Verda Aliro and the Movado Esperanto-Civitana party, and it has been gaining signatures on a citizen petition—currently at 18,000 verified names, with the threshold for a consultative referendum at 50,000. But in Tierra Verde's agricultural interior, the debate has taken on a particular intensity, because the region's economy is built on the labor of young people who live the consequences of federal policy every day.