Tierra Verde assembly debates federal oversight after cooperative dispute

The Iguazú Valley Cooperative, a thirty-year-old association of smallholder farmers near Puerto Iguazú, rejected a membership application in May from a new farmer who owned land adjacent to the cooperative's territory. The rejection was straightforward by local custom: the applicant was not born in the valley and had no family ties to any member. The cooperative's bylaws, unchanged since 1995, restricted membership to families with generational roots in the region.

The applicant appealed to the Federal Office for Cooperative Affairs in Meridian. The office ruled in early June that the rejection violated the Federal Charter's non-discrimination clause, which forbids exclusion from civic institutions on grounds of origin or family lineage. The office ordered the cooperative to reconsider the application and to amend its bylaws to remove the lineage requirement.

The Iguazú Valley Cooperative refused. Its leadership argued that the federal office had overstepped its mandate. A cooperative, they contended, is a voluntary association, not a civic institution in the constitutional sense. Members have the right to set their own terms of membership. On Tuesday, the Tierra Verde Regional Assembly opened debate on a resolution condemning what it called federal overreach and requesting that the Federal Court clarify the boundary between cooperative autonomy and federal anti-discrimination law.