Paraguay's Left Wing Denounces Television Ban before Elections

[Catherina]

Paraguay's Left Wing Denounces Television Censure

Imagen activaAsuncion, Apr 18 (Prensa Latina) Guasu Front, Paraguay's coalition of parties and social organizations, denounced today that television channels are banned from spreading its messages before general elections.

The censure applied to paid propaganda by the political organization was carried out by SNT and Television Publica de Paraguay channels, a situation considered to be very serious for jeopardizing freedom of speech, information and fair elections for the people of Paraguay.

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http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1325341&Itemid=1

And how is that portrayed when done against the left? Why it's portrayed as "democratic consolidation, of transparency, freedom of expression and of the press".

“Democracy in Paraguay is here to stay: Mercosur and Unasur have become irrelevant”
“We’re optimistic about Sunday’s election and the future of Paraguay if we can agree on long term state policies, but something is for certain: democracy in Paraguay is here to stay” said Ricardo Caballero Aquino, Chargé d’affaires of the Paraguayan embassy in Montevideo who was also positive about future relations with Unasur and Mercosur.

In an interview with MercoPress interim ambassador with a long journalist and writer’s experience said Paraguay is going through an exceptional period of democratic consolidation, of transparency, freedom of expression and of the press which augur a good future for the country’s institutions and strongly supported by an extraordinary performance of the economy which is forecasted to expand between 12% and 15% this year.

On Sunday 3.5 million Paraguayans will be voting for a new president, vice-president, 45 senators, 80 Lower house members, 17 governors and 18 representatives to the Mercosur parliament.

The main candidates are Horacio Cartes from the hegemonic Colorado party that for decades dominated the country and Efrain Alegre from the Liberals who with their former ally ex-bishop Fernando Lugo (*) defeated for the first time in 2008, the divided Colorado block.

“The presidential election is going to be closer than what the polls have been suggesting, but this is positive because be it with the return of the (conservative) Colorados or the continuity of the Liberals, it is a return to traditional Paraguayan politics with a great difference: the communications explosion, the social networks which establish limits and even controls to whoever is in office; our vices and sins from our traditional way of making politics won’t be easy, they will change, are changing and the new generations are growing in a scenario of freedoms”, said Caballero Aquino.

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Caballero Aquino also anticipated that in Sunday’s election, and in the future, the country will not use the Brazilian electronic vote system and will return to the old ballot registry, with all the additional paper work and guarantees because “it is notorious that tracking and errors have been detected in Venezuela and even the US with the electronic experience”.

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http://en.mercopress.com/2013/04/18/democracy-in-paraguay-is-here-to-stay-mercosur-and-unasur-have-become-irrelevant

Oh and they're pissed off at Unasur because of “all the ill they said about Paraguayan democracy" and "the scornful attitude of Mercosur and Unasur towards Paraguay”.

The final paragraph is this insult

(*) Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez (Spanish pronunciation: [ferˈnando arˈmindo ˈluɣo ˈmendes]; born 30 May 1951) is a Paraguayan politician who was President of Paraguay from 2008 to 2012. Previously he was a Roman Catholic priest and bishop, serving as Bishop of the Diocese of San Pedro from 1994 to 2005. He was elected as President in 2008. In 2012, he was removed from office through an impeachment process that neighboring countries deemed a coup d'état.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Lugo

Land distribution, social inequality, housing for the poor, introducing free treatment in public hospitals, financial aid for the poor. Well of COURSE he had to go.

The presidents of Paraguay's neighbouring countries rejected Lugo's removal from office, and compared it to a coup d'état. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff proposed suspending Paraguay's membership in Mercosur and the Union of South American Nations. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic announced that they would not recognize Franco as president.[29] Condemnation also came from more conservative governments in the region, such as Colombia and Chile. Lugo's removal has drawn comparisons[by whom?] to the ouster of Honduras' Manuel Zelaya in 2009; like the ouster of Lugo it was defended as legal and constitutional by its supporters while being denounced as a coup across the Latin American political spectrum.[30]

Lugo himself accepted his ouster, saying that any legal and realistic chance of reinstating him ended when the Supreme Court of Paraguay declared his impeachment and confirmed his removal, and the electoral court recognized Franco as the new president. However, he denounced it as "a congressional coup."[31]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Lugo

And how does Washington-based Human Rights Watch document? With barely a peep. 3 short articles in the last 13 years, dating in the years 2002, 2003, 2012. The one from 2012 dealing with the coup is an extremely weak and watered down 5 short paragraphs.

You'd need an excel spreadsheet to try to count all their articles on Venezuela.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. "choice between reactionary oligarchs: fascist inclinations or narcotrafficking inclinations"

On Sunday, Paraguay will conduct its first elections since the parliamentary coup that deposed Fernando Lugo last year. According to the sociologist Marco Castillo, voters face a choice between reactionary oligarchism with fascist inclinations – the Liberal party candidate, Efraín Alegre, in alliance with the extremist UNACE party – and reactionary oligarchism with narcotrafficking inclinations: the Colorado candidate, and favourite to win, Horacio Cartes.

A leaked cable from the US embassy in Buenos Aires three years ago described Cartes as the head of an ‘organisation believed to launder large quantities of United States currency generated through illegal means, including through the sale of narcotics, from the TBA’ – the Tri Border Area of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil – ‘to the United States’.

Cartes promises a ‘responsible and efficient government’ and ‘a new direction for the country, with opportunities for everyone’. But some will have more opportunities than others. Eighty per cent of Paraguay’s agricultural land is owned by 2 per cent of the population. In April 2012, 60 landless campesinos occupied land in Curuguaty ‘belonging’ to Blas Riquelme, a businessman and former Colorado party politician (in 1969 the Stroessner dictatorship gave him 50,000 hectares that was supposed to be distributed among poor farmers). On 15 June the campesinos were confronted by the Paraguayan police. The result: 11 dead campesinos, six dead policemen, and the pretext the anti-Lugo phalanx had been waiting for to overthrow the elected leader and install the Liberal vice-president, Federico Franco, in his place.

I interviewed Franco last week at the presidential residence in Asunción. He painted an idyllic picture of post-coup Paraguay, cleansed of the pernicious influence of Hugo Chávez, whose demise, he told El País, was ‘a blessing’. Pumping the air with his fists for periodic emphasis, Franco pronounced the country ‘ideal for investors’. After the coup, firms including Monsanto and Rio Tinto, whose incursions into Paraguay had been restricted under Lugo, were quick to move in.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/04/19/belen-fernandez/in-paraguay/

[Catherina]

2. Thanks for sharing that. I haven't kept up with Paraguay

"cleansed of the pernicious influence of Hugo Chávez"... ‘ideal for investors’. 2% own 80% of the land.

Heartbreaking.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. I know nothing at all about it, but the LRB blog posts a wide variety of topics

and I thought it looked interesting.

[Catherina]

4. I agree that it looks intereesting. I'm glad you brought it here

I think I'm going to put a huge map of Latin America on my wall and start tracking these things.

I wish we could be around to see what it all looks like a hundred years from now.