Paraguay: New government faces elite resistance

[Judi Lynn]

Paraguay: New government faces elite resistance


Kiraz Janicke
13 September 2008


Barely two weeks after being sworn in on August 15, a coup plot to oust newly elected Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo was exposed on September 2.


Reflecting a growing shift to the left across Latin America, the April 20 election of Lugo put an end to the right-wing Colorado Party’s six-decade-long grip on power — including a 35-year period of military dictatorship.

In an August 15 interview with Argentine daily Clarin, Lugo — a former Catholic priest known as “the Bishop of the poor” — said one of his first measures would be to “recuperate institutionality”.

“We are going to take over state institutions identified with the hegemonic party. We want these institutions to be at the service of all citizens, without ideological distinction”, he explained.

A supporter of the landless peasants’ movement, Lugo has also pledged to carry out a program of agrarian reform, although since being elected has criticised land occupations carried out by poor peasants arguing they should be a “last resort”.

He has also promised to implement a series of measures to combat poverty.

However, this reform program has put him on a collision course with the right-wing oligarchy.

The coup plot allegedly involved Lugo’s predecessor Nicanor Duarte, Attorney-General Ruben Candia Amarilla, electoral court president Manuel Morales and retired general Lino Oviedo. It was exposed after the group invited General Maximo Diaz Caceres, the officer who is the official intermediary between the armed forces and parliament, to a meeting on August 31 to discuss the best way of ousting Lugo.

More:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/767/39564



Nicanor Duarte and friend



Candia Amarilla



Manuel Morales



General Lino Oviedo

[Peace Patriot]

1. Fascist resistance to democracy and fairness? No doubt supported by U.S. tax dollars.

Look to the U.S. (Bush) embassy, the USAID (Bush) budget and budgets we know not of, for our tax dollars supporting the fascist cause. The Bushwhacks must be good and pissed off that their staging area (Paraguay) for support of the fascist secessionists in eastern Bolivia (the likely route for fighters--Blackwater, U.S. special forces, Colombian death squads--weapons and other support) was cut off by the surprising election of a leftist president in Paraguay, and they will do whatever they can to get rid of him--both on general principle (they are anti-democratic and hate the poor) and out of revenge.

Make no mistake--the plots in Paraguay and the fascist insurrection in eastern Bolivia are intimately related, and the tissue that connects them is the Bush junta and its greed for oil and world domination. These two situations are also closely related to the Bushwhack designs on Venezuela's and Ecuador's oil. That oil must look like a "sitting duck" to Great White Hunter Dick Cheney--basically undefended, militarily (vis a vis the U.S. military), located on coastlines (Venezuela--the Caribbean, Ecuador, the Pacific), unlike landlocked Bolivia, and there for the taking, with just a bit of fascist insurrection in those countries' oil-rich provinces. The issues in Paraguay may be fair taxation, and the food and pesticide impacts of mass industrial soy production, but these issues, and others like them, in Paraguay and other countries, CAN be resolved in a peaceful, democratic way, IF the minority side (the rich) was not being artificially supported and egged on to violent coups by our Bushwhack government, in their overarching plan to destroy democracy in Venezuela and Ecuador, and grab the oil. The Bushwhacks have been checkmated on Iran. And the only thing that stands between the them and the biggest oil reserves in the western hemisphere IS democracy.

Democracy will win, in the end, if South America's leftist democracies (most of the continent) hang together. They seem to be doing that. But their self-governance has never been in more peril than now, with Bushwhacks desperate for more oil and about to lose their illegitimate hold on power (hopefully to Obama and his saner Latin American policies).

What an irony, eh?, that the thing that defeats the Bushwhacks' in South America is TRANSPARENT VOTE COUNTING!