Paraguay's presidential coup: the inside story
<
http://www.opendemocracy.net/authors/andrew_nickson> Andrew Nickson , 10
July 2012
Fernando Lugo, the radical priest elected Paraguay's president in 2008 after
decades of authoritarian rule, has been deposed less than a year before the
end of his term. This dramatic turn of events is rooted in the strains
produced by economic transformation and the limits of the country's
democratisation, says Andrew Nickson.
Paraguay's capital city of Asunción was on 21-22 June 2012 witness to rare
constitutional and political drama. First, the 80-member lower house of
Paraguay's congress initiated a move to impeach President Fernando Lugo, and
voted by a 76-1 majority to support it; then the next day, in a lightning
session lasting less than two hours, the 45-member upper house (senate)
concluded the process by a vote of 39-4.
Fernando Lugo, a former Catholic bishop, had been elected Paraguay's
president in April 2008 on a platform of social change. The vote ended
sixty-one years of uninterrupted rule by the Colorado Party, much of it
under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89). Moreover, it was the
first time since 1887 - when Paraguay's two traditional parties, the
Colorados and the Liberals, were created - that a political party had
relinquished power to another through the ballot-box rather than through a
military coup (see "
<
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/democracy_power/politics_protest/parag
uay_fernando_lugo> Paraguay: Fernando Lugo vs the Colorado machine", 28
February 2008).
Lugo's victory was aided both by his alliance with the Liberal Party and a
split inside the Colorados. But the parallel legislative elections in 2008
left both houses of congress dominated by the traditional parties, with
minimal representation for Lugo's own left-wing supporters (six out of
eighty seats in the lower house, and three of forty-five seats in the
senate) (see "
<
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/paraguay_s_historic_election>
Paraguay's historic election", 22 April 2008)
Lugo's overthrow, and the appointment as his successor of the vice-president
(and Liberal) Federico Franco, have now altered the political landscape in
advance of the scheduled presidential and legislative elections in April
2013. The extraordinary events of 21-22 June, however, involve more than
manoeuvring for power in Asunción. In broad terms, they can be seen as the
political expression of economic changes that have been occurring in
<
http://go.hrw.com/atlas/norm_htm/paraguay.htm> Paraguay since 2008. Most
important is theat way that entrenched corruption and growing inequality in
access to land, reinforced by the rapid expansion of commercial agriculture
(especially soybean production organised by Brazilian immigrants), have
created contradictions that are having a profound impact on the social and
political order.
This article outlines and seeks to explain the main dynamics at work in this
epic Paraguayan - and Latin American - story.
The process
During his four years in power, Lugo had gradually disillusioned voters, on
two counts: his failure to address the country's pressing
<
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/government-society/departments/internat
ional-development/news/2012/01/governance-report-paraguay.aspx> problems of
land reform and tax reform, and his personal behaviour (he has now admitted
to fathering two children before his election while he was serving as a
"bishop of the poor", and there are two further paternity-suits in the
pipeline). Rhetoric aside, it is hard to see Lugo as part of the "pink tide"
of leftist governments in Latin America.
The impeachment proceeding against Lugo was based on five counts of "bad
performance" (none of which, however, involved accusations of corruption).
The most prominent was his alleged complicity in Paraguay's worst incident
of political violence for decades, on 15 June 2012, when six police and
eleven civilians were killed in a shoot-out during a police operation to
clear landless protesters in the northern department of Canindeyú. The
tragedy occurred on a 2,000-hectare property at Campo Morombí, which had
been spuriously obtained during the Stroessner era by a businessman and
former senator, Blas Riquelme, under the guise of "land reform".
In fact, no evidence at all of Lugo's involvement in the incident was
presented at the impeachment trial (for which he was given less than
twenty-four hours to prepare, and only two hours to present a defence).
There was hostile reaction in the region to the president's instant
<
http://www.lab.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1452:par
aguay-impeachment-of-president-lugo&catid=65:news&Itemid=39> impeachment,
and his replacement by the former vice-president, Federico Franco, with
Paraguay risking diplomatic isolation. The criticism ranged across the
ideological spectrum: Chile and Colombia; Venezuela and Bolivia; Argentina,
Brazil and Uruguay - all recalled their ambassadors and (in the case of the
last group) <
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-18636201>
suspended Paraguay from membership in the Mercosur economic block until the
April 2013 elections. Paraguay was also been suspended from Unasur, the
South American regional political bloc.
Cristina Kirchner, <
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/celia-szusterman>
Argentina's president, accused the Paraguayan congress of a "parliamentary
coup". Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president, was also unwavering in her
support for Lugo, despite being pressed to recognise the new government by
the powerful brasiguayo lobby (the 350,000-strong Brazilian farming
community inside Paraguay that has strong links with Brazil's rural
landowning class).
In response to the strong international
<
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iDLmMOIoVA2wknNt62ASum4T
MGEw?docId=CNG.f12ec2f00ff00a1745ad313748b64cd1.1e1> condemnation, the
Franco administration has tapped into the national psyche by accusing
Mercosur partners of resurrecting the "triple alliance" (Argentina, Brazil
and Uruguay) that decimated the country in the war of 1865-70 and by making
allegations of an international communist conspiracy against Paraguay led by
the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez (thus mirroring the cold-war
propaganda of the Stroessner dictatorship). Franco accused the Venezuelan
government of putting pressure on the armed forces to oppose the impeachment
of Lugo and his defence minister, Maria Liz Garcia,
<
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Special/2012/07/06/Paraguay-Venezuela-row-deepe
ning/UPI-93511341597280/> accused Venezuelan foreign minister Nicolas Maduro
of meeting with senior Paraguayan military officials before the Paraguayan
congress met to vote for Lugo's removal.
Canada and Germany, by contrast, were quick to appease the new government.
The Canadian-based multinational mining giant Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) is in
advanced negotiations with the Paraguayan government to construct a
674,000-tonne Greenfield aluminium-smelter at a cost of $3.5 billion that
would use cheap bulk energy from the massive Itaipú hydroplant (which is
under joint Paraguay-Brazil ownership).
The United States for its part is vacillating in its response to Lugo's
overthrow. Washington expressed reservations about the haste of the
impeachment process, and said it would await the outcome of an investigative
mission from the Organisation of American States (OAS) arrived in Paraguay
on 1 July 2012; it is scheduled to report its findings on 10 July.
The congress
Why, then, did the Paraguayan congress impeach Lugo so quickly - and only
ten months before he would be leaving office in any case? The answer to this
question raises difficult
<
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/09/latin_americas_paraguayan_
hangover> issues about the nature and
<
http://en.mercopress.com/2012/06/27/paraguay-back-to-business-as-usual-but-
with-a-shadow-legitimate-government> limits of democratisation in Latin
America.
An early clue lies in the identity of Paraguay's congressmen and
congresswomen. The most obvious thing to note is that they are almost all
large rural landowners, with titles held either directly or in the names of
friends and family. In 2008, a former head of the World Bank in Paraguay
expressed his shock at discovering that virtually every member of congress
that he met fitted this description. Many were also beneficiaries of the
illegal transfer of large tracts of state lands (typically 2,000 hectares
and above) to military and civilian supporters of the
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/17/world/americas/17iht-web.0817obits.251077
5.html?_r=1> Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship, a process that continued
through the subsequent two decades of
<
http://www.anr.org.py/paginas.php?cod=1> Colorado governments.
Through this "land reform" scam, Paraguay's rich and powerful - assisted by
venal lawyers and officials of the "land reform agency" - masquerade as
landless peasants, enabling them to buy virgin forest at a rock-bottom
"fiscal" price that is now typically between 1%-5% of its true commercial
value. None of these illegal beneficiaries were eligible under the country's
land-reform legislation, which was designed to benefit
<
http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=157938&SntUrl=152838
> landless families. They received plots (so-called tierras malhabidas
[ill-gotten lands]) far in excess of the legal limits, and were sometimes
even granted more than one plot of land in different parts of the country.
The report of Paraguay's truth-and-justice
<
http://www.usip.org/publications/truth-commission-paraguay> commission
(2008) that investigated human-rights abuses during the Stroessner period
found that from 1954-2003, some 3,336 beneficiaries were in this way
illegally awarded 4,232 tierras malhabidas totalling 7.8 million hectares
(see Isabel Hilton, "
<
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-protest/stroessner_3834.jsp> Alfredo
Stroessner: revisiting the general", 17 August 2006).
Fernando Lugo's government did nothing to recuperate this land, and did not
even set up a cadastre (rural land-registry) to find out who actually owned
what. He proved incapable of halting the illegal transfer, which continued
throughout his presidency. In September 2011, Alberto Antebi Duarte - the
son of Paraguay's second richest landowner, Roberto Antebi - was
<
http://www.lanacion.com.py/articulo/68922-interventor-del-indert-anula-adju
dicacion-de-tierras-a-hijo-de-roberto-antebi.html> awarded 4,000 hectares by
this means thanks to high-level corruption in Indert, the state body charged
with "land reform".
This continued a longstanding trend. In 2000, two members of the family of
Federico Franco's newly appointed foreign minister, José Félix Fernández
Estigarribia (then based in Barcelona) were awarded land at Fuerte Olimpo in
the Paraguayan Chaco: his daughter Marta Elvira Fernández Lloret received
3,208 hectares, and his wife María Teresa Lloret de Fernández received 3,000
hectares. Needless to say, neither of these scions of the establishment are
"landless peasants".
With such a pedigree, it is unsurprising that congress has functioned as the
political embodiment of the tiny elite that controls Paraguay's destiny.
This is a country where 21% of the population control 87% of the land, the
most unequal concentration of land ownership in Latin America; a pattern,
moreover, which has worsened substantially since the overthrow of Stroessner
in 1989, as commercial soybean-farming and cattle-ranching have taken off.
Paraguay is now the world's fourth-largest
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/opinion/paraguays-destructive-soy-boom.ht
ml> exporter of soybean and the eighth-largest exporter of meat. A rooted
hostility toward tax reform is a crucial mechanism for maintaining this
extreme inequality. The congress has repeatedly opposed a tax on unprocessed
cereal exports (soybean, maize and rapeseed) and has kept the tax on
commercial agriculture to derisory levels (the amount netted in 2011 was
only $13m, equivalent to 0.5% of total tax revenue).
But even more significant, the congress has postponed the introduction of
personal income tax on four occasions since 2006 - including in 2010 when
the country recorded the second-highest growth rate in the world (15.3%),
after Singapore. This despite the fact that the proposed income-tax law
would allow taxpayers (limited to the roughly top 5% of the population) to
deduct any personal expenditure - yes, any - as deductible allowances from
tax liability.
This is the same congress that reluctantly complied with a
<
http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/pa00000_.html> constitutional requirement
obliging its members to declare their assets on taking and leaving office -
then refused to publish the said information, and has repeatedly refused to
initiate impeachment proceedings against supreme-court judges accused of
blatant corruption and nepotism.
This is the same congress that since 2008 has imposed severe cuts in budget
votes on mother-and-child health programmes and an incipient anti-poverty
conditional cash-transfer programme for Paraguay's "poorest-of-the poor",
even as it cynically lambasted Lugo for failing to reduce poverty levels
(which, according to the household survey of 2011, stand at 32.4% of the
population, with 18% in extreme poverty).
The Paraguayan congress's record in these areas means that it is held in
contempt by a majority of citizens. So low is its reputation that in polling
surveys it invariably is regarded as the least trusted institution of the
state. Even when, in 2008, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
entrusted the congress to oversee its latest survey of "
<
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/government-society/departments/internat
ional-development/news/2012/01/governance-report-paraguay.aspx> governance",
it came out bottom yet again. (The congress bosses then stifled the planned
follow-up, such as distribution of the survey, by refusing to convene a
monitoring committee).
The protest
An institution with such a composition and record can hardly be said to be
reflecting the broader interests of society. A closer look at the events
just prior to Fernando Lugo's removal illustrates how these background
elements were at play.
In April 2012, the congress suddenly added an extra $35 million to the 2012
budget to pay for 5,000 staff for the bloated electoral commission. This was
ostensibly in order to cope with the expected demand for Paraguayans living
overseas to register to vote following a recent referendum that agreed to
grant them this right. But the real reason was to fund punteros, the
party-political operators who are crucial to bring in the vote in the April
2013 elections. All parties - Colorados, Liberals, Unace (a breakaway from
the Colorados), and the pro-business party, Patria Querida - had agreed on
the "division of the cake" and sought to overturn Lugo's decision to veto
the move.
Then, something happened that was unheard of in Paraguay. A group of young
professionals launched a social-media protest campaign via Twitter that
mobilised thousands outside congress in support of the presidential veto.
After Office Revolucionario (AOR) argued that any increase in the budget
should instead be spent on expanding primary healthcare in a country which
still has the highest maternal mortality rate in Latin America.
In the face of the protest, the congress was forced in late May to back
down, abandoning its attempt to overturn the presidential veto. This success
emboldened AOR to announce its next campaign: ending the "closed party-list"
<
http://electionguide.org/country.php?ID=169> electoral system, whereby the
rich and powerful literally buy their place in the senate or congress
through contributions to party finances. By opening up the electoral system,
AOR sought to broaden the social representation in Paraguay's legislature.
At present, due in large part to the closed party-list system, not one of
the 80 deputies or 45 senators comes from what could broadly be described as
a "poor peasant-farmer" background, even though the latter constitute over
60% of the population.
It is clear that members of congress felt under threat from civil society,
just at a time - the electoral-campaign period - when access to state funds
would became crucial in ensuring their re-election as either senators or
deputies. But what tipped the balance was the confrontation between landless
peasants and the police on 15 June at Campo Morombí.
The crisis
There has been constant peaceful peasant protest in favour of land reform
and the confiscation of the tierras malhabidas in Paraguaty ever since
Alfredo Stroessner was overthrown in 1989. Every year, usually in June,
thousands of peasants march through Asunción, are applauded by the public,
receive empty promises of land reform from politicians, return home, and are
forgotten. In addition, since the mid-1990s, the two main peasant
organisations - the MCNOC and the FNC - have had over 100 of their activists
killed by police and thugs paid by landowners.
When Fernando Lugo came to power in 2008, the peasants thought that - at
last - positive action would be taken. As that hope dimmed under his
lacklustre administration, and a more radical grouping - the Liga Nacional
de Carperos (LNT, with carperos meaning roughly "tent-dwellers") - began to
eclipse the MCNOC and FNC. When peasant activists engaged in a violent
shoot-out for the first time, with six police and eleven peasants were
killed at Campo Morombí - the message was clear: no longer could the elite
buy off peasant leaders with false promises of reform. A new strategy had to
be employed to "defend private property".
In this context, the evidence-free accusation by the architects of the
impeachment process - that Lugo was complicit in the shoot-out (and even
that he had links to an incipient rural guerrilla movement, the Ejército del
Pueblo Paraguayo [EPP]) - can be understood as a clear message to Paraguay's
rural poor: we are here to stay and we will make no concessions. In other
words, the exclusionary and corrupt land-ownership model will continue to be
imposed. In a most revealing remark to the international press corps,
Federico Franco said that his political priority was to "avoid a civil war".
The impeachment proposal was made by the opposition Colorado Party and
gained support from the Liberals, who were hitherto in a tacit alliance with
Lugo (provoking five Liberal ministers to resign from the government). The
deal was brokered by Horacio Cartes, a millionaire businessman involved in
the production and "trading" of cigarettes to Brazil, who met with Liberal
leaders during the weekend following the Campo Morombí killings. Cartes
joined the Colorado party only in September 2010, but is already its leading
presidential contender; his popularity, though, has slumped following press
revelations of his alleged involvement in narcotics trade and
money-laundering. When on 5 July Uruguayan president José Mujica suggested
that what he called "narcoloradismo" was a factor in the impeachment of
Lugo, he may also having been revealing a hitherto unstated concern that
prompted such a united regional response.
More broadly, the analysts Gustavo Setrini and Lucas Arce note that by
joining forces to remove Lugo, the Colorados and Liberals have sought to
suffocate efforts by the left to establish "… its first foothold within the
Paraguayan state and its first opportunity to build its own political
machine - a deeply threatening prospect for both traditional parties" (see "
<
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/paraguay-s-impeached-democracy>
Paraguay's impeached democracy", Project Syndicate, 9 July 2012).
The new Franco
<
http://en.mercopress.com/2012/06/26/paraguayan-electoral-tribunal-confirms-
franco-president-and-the-electoral-calendar> government has promised to
address Paraguay's deep problem of inequality in land tenure, although
little can be expected from an interim president and in the absence of a
rural cadastre. Franco's chances of using his time to strengthen the Liberal
vote around a consensus presidential candidate are limited. He will have to
oversee a scramble for lucrative ministerial posts within his faction-ridden
party, which is likely to create further dissension.
The Liberals' "home delivery" poll on 1 April 2012 to choose their
presidential candidate in 2013 ended with the party's electoral commission
<
http://www.paraguay.com/nacionales/el-tei-declara-ganador-a-blas-llano-por-
209-votos-81548> declaring party president Blas Llano as the winner. The
result was immediately disputed by Senator Efrain Alegre, who is threatening
to stand as an independent (Franco himself came a poor third). There are now
fears that Franco will use his new powers to resurrect his bid for the
nomination, supported by a powerful Franco clan based in the Fernando de la
Mora suburb of Asunción.
He has already broken his earnest promise to eradicate nepotism and
clientelism - the foundation of patronage politics in Paraguay - when on 2
July he appointed his sister-in-law, Mirtha Vergara, to the lucrative and
powerful post of director of the binational Itaipú hydropower company, whose
funds have long been diverted to finance political campaigns.
The aftermath
The deposition of the incumbent president was unpopular among Paraguayans,
even among those who did not support Lugo. It will further intensify
citizens' disdain for members of congress, and will heighten political
instability in the run-up to the
<
http://tsje.gov.py/e2013/preguntas-frecuentes.html> April 2013 elections.
The prospects of effective governance may well deteriorate further as the
resurgent Colorado party reacts strongly against likely efforts by the
Franco administration to use state funds now at its disposal to boost the
electoral prospects of the divided Liberals. The new government will also
face a heavy task in repairing damaged relations with governments throughout
Latin America, and across the ideological spectrum.
Asunción has seen only muted street demonstrations in support of Lugo, but
there have been large protests in many rural areas where small farmers are
well organised (though these are mostly unreported in the national press).
More worryingly, an EPP platoon - departing from the organisation's previous
focus on kidnapping landowners for ransom -
<
http://www.abc.com.py/nacionales/panfleto-atribuye-ataque-en-azotey-a-epp-4
21269.html> targeted a Brazilian company engaged in illegal logging on 28
June at Azote'y, in the department of Concepción. The assailants burned
transport equipment, and then for the first time separated a Brazilian
labourer from his Paraguayan colleagues and killed him. This heightens the
fear that in current conditions the widespread xenophobia towards
brasiguayos in rural areas may increase.
Lugo himself at first accepted the congress's decision, but has since called
on citizens to oppose the new government, saying: "The democratic process in
this country is broken." Indeed, the wide perception that his sudden ousting
was undemocratic will (his lacklustre record in office notwithstanding) help
restore his tarnished political image and may enable him to stand for a
senate seat in 2013 as head of the left-wing Frente Guasu alliance. Perhaps
in the interim he will learn some lessons about political strategy and
personal morality. After his fall, the task of reforming Paraguay's
political and economic order is more essential than ever.
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Received on Tue Jul 10 2012 - 18:02:49 EDT
