The long-awaited end to the corrupt, elitist, sometime authoritarian sixty-one (61) year rule of the Colorado Party in Paraguay has ended today with the election of former bishop, Fernando Lugo today. It appears that the Colorado Party did not go down without a fight:
International Transparency, an organisation monitoring for voter fraud, reported some cases of corruption.
"We've seen voting cards being bought and money going around in some polling booths," one of the group's observers, Pilar Callizo, told Channel 4.
"We also saw Colorado Party teams inside and outside some polling stations creating an atmosphere of intimidation," she added.
This leads me to the tendentious comments by Alexei Barrionuevo in this article about Lugo in Sunday's New York Times:
During the interview, Mr. Lugo wore his trademark Roman sandals and sipped maté. Sitting on a bookshelf was a small plaque commemorating the revolutionary Che Guevara.
The above must be the reason for this, the first paragraph:
A former Roman Catholic bishop who regularly wears sandals and admires Che Guevara has a historic chance to break the ruling party’s 62-year grip on power in Paraguay.
It kind of flies in the face of this:
But while he shares some of their Socialist ideas, Mr. Lugo shrugs off easy comparisons to populists like Mr. [Hugo] Chávez or Evo Morales of Bolivia and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa.
“Chávez is a soldier, I am holy man,” he said in an interview Thursday at his home. “Evo is an Indian, I am not an Indian. Correa is an intellectual, I am not an intellectual. I am simply an individual that feels for the people, that feels their pain, their hopes.”
Something that is certainly easy to do when a third of the population lives below the poverty line and tens of thousands have left to seek better lives abroad. I happen to think he is right about this:
He has become controversial in Brazil for his plan to renegotiate contracts for the Itaipú hydroelectric dam on the Brazil-Paraguay border, the world’s largest. Paraguay and Brazil split the electricity generated 50-50, but Paraguay uses only 7 percent of its share. The rest it can sell to Brazil at a price fixed years ago — a price that today is some 20 times less than the market rate. Renegotiating the contract could “substantially change” Paraguay’s economy, he said.
While I don't agree on his interest in export tariffs, I do believe that his most important job will be fighting corruption. It will also be his greatest challenge: corruption is deeply entrenched in Paraguay and those who benefit it from it will not be easily weaned off it.
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