Paraguay, “a devastated country”, says elected president

[Judi Lynn]

Friday, August 8, 2008

Paraguay, “a devastated country”, says elected president

Paraguay’s elected president former bishop Fernando Lugo said he receives a “devastated country with no institutions”, and claimed there is a plan to destabilize his administration which takes office next August 15.

Deep engrained corruption, the need to change the energy policy and the alleged conspiracy were identified by Mr. Lugo as his three main immediate challenges. Mr. Lugo supported by a wide ranging coalition managed to defeat last April the hegemony of the Partido Colorado which has ruled the landlocked, second poorest country in South America for over six decades.

“We have indications that people who have been in power for too long don’t wish to respect the change voted by Paraguayans last April and are planning to destabilize creating an atmosphere of protests and possibly sabotage actions”, said Lugo adding that fuel provision and hospital supplies “are considerably delayed”.

“Frontal combat of corruption” will be one of the priorities of incoming president Lugo administration, which he describes as “a cancer corroding the Paraguayan society”. According to Transparency International Paraguay has one of the highest indexes of corruption in South America.

“The country is devastated and so are institutions so our first task will be to impose the normal functioning of institutions of the republic. We are going to demand transparency from all government offices, ministries, presidency and a great monitoring effort from common citizens”, underlined Lugo.

More:
http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=14197&formato=HTML

[Judi Lynn]

1. Very interesting ending of this article:

The six main issues of his promised electoral program include: land distribution; economic reactivation; recovering institutional functioning; independent judicial branch; social emergency plan and recovery of sovereignty.

Full speed ahead, President-elect Lugo! Good luck.

[silverweb]

2. Very interesting.

I wonder what kind of effect this will have on _georgie's land buy there, extradition treaties, our military presence, etc?

[Judi Lynn]

Will be keeping an eye out for anything on this. Paraguay's important to a lot of DU'ers who've

known how it has been used since the Second World War...

Here's something on the same theme:

The Bush Family's Bad Latin Real Estate Investment
Submitted by dlindorff on Fri, 2008-05-02 19:34. General Discussion
By Dave Lindorff

Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay.

What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon charicature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation.

That's why it has long harbored aging Nazis, bank robbers, and a string of ousted or retired Latin American dictators and their assistants over the years.

Given that President Bush, once he leaves office on January 20, 2009, will no longer have the diplomatic immunity conferred upon heads of state, or the Constitutional protection against indictment by domestic prosecutors, it makes sense that he would be looking for a safe haven from the long arm of the law.

After all, they guy is guilty of a huge laundry list of international crimes, from the Crime Against Peace and Conspiracy against Peace in the UN Charter, to Geneva Convention violations like approval of torture of prisoners, collective punishment of civilians, the killing of children and child soldiers, the failure to protect occupied citizens, the use of banned weapons, etc., etc., and also of domestic crimes, ranging from political use of government employees, conspiracy, treason, lying to federal officials, defrauding Congress, etc.

No wonder he wants to do what Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann did, and hole up in Paraguay.

Only trouble is, Paraguay may not be such a safe haven for long.

Last month, a former Roman Catholic Bishop with leftist, populist tendencies, Fernando Lugo, surprised almost everyone in Paraguay, and no doubt President Bush, by winning the national presidential election, ousting the Colorado Party for the first time in 61 years. There is talk that among other things, Lugo is thinking of returning Paraguay to the community of nations, by signing some of those extradition agreements.

If he does that Bush may be stuck having to hide behind his rump squad of Secret Service agents down at the Crawford Ranch, hoping they can keep the process servers from Brattleboro and Marlboro, VT, with their war crimes arrest warrants, at bay.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/33192

[silverweb]

7. Thank you!

I'm visiting family on the "other coast" right now and am without my own computer, so I'll be semi-out of touch for a while. But I will check in when I can and will follow this situation with great interest.

:hi:

[Judi Lynn]

3. Here's a campaign ad which was used by Fernando Lugo for his Presidential campaign.

It's accessible at the bottom of this page after a short article by an American who met him:

http://www.kvsmith.com/1/2008/04/an-election-wil.html

[Judi Lynn]

4. Until now, almost the ONLY way to get a job in Paraguay was to belong to the Colorado Party!

I just found this out, in reading this article:

The Paraguayan Right


The current political landscape of the Paraguayan right is shaped significantly by the 35-year dictatorial rule of General Alfredo Stroessner, a mustachioed man described by Graham Greene as looking like “the amiable well-fed host of a Bavarian bierstube,” who maintained power through a mixture of brutal repression, corruption and cronyism. After 61 years, the Colorado Party, which Stroessner was a part of, has had the longest continuous run in power of any political party in the world.<5>

Stroessner’s reign dominated the second half of the last century in Paraguay, and casts a dark shadow into this one. Originally elected in 1954 to fill a vacancy, Stroessner was “re-elected” seven times through a state-of-siege law in the constitution and with the aid of the military and the Colorado Party. The Colorado Party had already ruled Paraguay from 1947 until 1962, as a one-Party state in which all other political parties were illegal.<6> It also served in tandem as one of the "twin pillars" supporting the Stroessner regime (the other pillar being the military).<7> Stroessner collaborated with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the military junta in Argentina to orchestrate a regional crackdown on political opponents through a mixture of kidnapping, torture and murder. In 1989, the transition to democracy pushed the hard-line Stronistas out of power. Though a new constitution created in 1992 established a democracy and new legal protections of rights, the Colorado Party has continued its rule over Paraguay.

The Colorado Party’s vast system of clientelism – offering public jobs to people to gain political support – is entirely reliant on state programs and public services. It is effective because of the country’s high unemployment rate: one of citizens’ few prospects for employment is through the Colorado Party, whether in such positions as a road construction worker, teacher or mayor. Though many citizens view the Party as corrupt and ineffective, supporting it often means receiving a salary. The Colorado Party employs some 200,000 people, 95% of whom are members of the Party.<8>

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1218/44/

[Judi Lynn]

5. Wow! No wonder Mengele, Eichman, and Klaus Barbi all loved Paraguay, after WWII, and Bush appears to

have bought property there, and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, owner of the Washington Times, and beloved of the American right-wing calls it home, owning vast tracks of land right above the Guarani Aquifer, the largest source of fresh water in the Western Hemisphere! It's just their kind of place. From the same article:

In Paraguay especially, the expansion of the soy industry has occurred in tandem with violent oppression of small farmers and indigenous communities who occupy the vast land holdings of the wealthy. Most rural Paraguayans cultivate diverse subsistence crops on small plots of ten to twenty hectares, but do not have titles to their land or receive assistance from the state.<24> The Colorado Party administration has represented the soy growers in this conflict by using the police and judicial system to punish campesino leaders. To this effect, protests have been criminalized, and campesino leaders have been linked to delinquency, kidnappings and a supposed guerilla movement linked to the Colombian FARC.<25> A report compiled by the Paraguayan-based human rights organization SERPAJ concluded “that with public forces in its hands, the alliance of the Public Prosecutor, and the Supreme Court as a guarantee of impunity, has created a campaign of massive repression of the campesino sector, in order to facilitate and guarantee the expansion of genetically modified soy in the country.”<26>

Since the 1980s, national military and paramilitary groups connected to large agribusinesses and landowners have evicted almost 100,000 small farmers from their homes and fields and forced the relocation of countless indigenous communities in favor of soy fields. More than 100 campesino leaders have been assassinated; only one of the cases was investigated, resulting in the conviction of the assassin. In the same period, more than 2,000 others have faced trumped-up charges for their objections to the industry.

The vast majority of Paraguayan farmers, however, have been poisoned off their land either intentionally or as a side effect of the more than 24 million liters of hazardous pesticides dumped by soy cultivation in Paraguay every year. When farmers saw their animals die, crops withering, families sickening and wells contaminated, most packed up and moved to the city.<27>

The devastation caused by agro-industries created some of the most grave human rights violations since Stroessner’s reign. Press reports say that when crops are fumigated "school classes are often cancelled on days of crop spraying on the field twenty meters away because the children faint from the smell." Since 2002, the deaths of five small children in rural areas have been documented.<28>

A report produced by the Committee of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the United Nations stated that “the expansion of the cultivation of soy has brought with it the indiscriminate use of toxic pesticides, provoking death and sickness in children and adults, contamination of water, disappearance of ecosystems and damage to the traditional nutritional resources of the communities.”<29> A social investigation carried out last year found that, in the four departments where soy production is the highest, 78% of families in rural communities near soy fields showed a health problem caused by the frequent crop spraying in the soy fields, 63% of which was due to contaminated water.<30>

As opposition to the soy industry builds among farmers and human rights groups, presidential candidates are posturing themselves either against soy expansion or in favor of it. Lugo’s promise of land reform addresses this issue.<31> Playing up the populist rhetoric of Colorado Party, presidential candidate Blanca Ovelar has said that as president she will change agro-legislation and fight against the development of a “soy fatherland.”<32> At the same time, the majority of Lugo’s base is made up of farmers who have been hurt by the industrial soy companies.

As the election nears, the Duarte administration has made particularly vicious attacks on the political rights of social organizations. In February and March of 2008, three candidates of the Patriotic Socialist Alliance Party were arrested for visiting land occupied by campesinos, a political leader of the Tekojoja Popular Movement was assassinated under unclear circumstances, and the media published articles about supposed guerrilla connections to two campesino organizations with candidates in the upcoming elections.<33> According to a recent article in LaSojaMata.org written by social analysts based in Paraguay, “As the election nears, greater acts of violence and criminalization are generated against critical sectors and the opposition.”<34>

On Wednesday, April 9, a drive by shooting seriously injured radio commentator Alfredo Avalos, and killed his partner, Silvana Rodríguez.<35> Avalos is a leader in the leftist movement Tekojoja, which is part of the coalition supporting Lugo. The attack took place in the town Curuguaty in the Canindeyúby state which is 250km northeast of the capital, Asunción. Journalist Dawn Paley <36> wrote that the Paraguayan news outlet Jaku'éke <37> explained "death threats to the Alliance Campaign are being followed through." Lugo told Reuters <38> that this violence was "in keeping with the fear campaign led by those who are afraid of losing power." Paley reported that Carrillo Iramain, an organizer in Canindeyúby, said "there are constant telephone messages, indirect messages and direct threats happening in these final days . This is an area where fear rules." According to Reuters, this is the second politically motivated murder of a Tekojoja organizer in two months.<39>

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1218/44/

[Judi Lynn]

6. Non-fascists will find this video creepy. Only 2 minutes 41 seconds long:

Dr. Mengele, Stroessner , and Uncle Sam

In the 1960's and 1970's escaped Nazi war criminals and racist right wing American missionaries teamed up in Paraguay. Their unholy assignment was to ethnically cleanse the Aché Indians from their ancestral home in Paraguay's Chaco jungle for their host that nations brutal Dictator General Alfredo Stroessner.

http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DbJCslh8MTD0

This is not wildly informative, obviously, but it drops some "facts" which should be checked when someone gets some time.

I'm interested in finding out if it's true Stroessner was actually trying to sterilize indigenous Paraguayans. I tend to believe it just may be true, considering the obsession they had with their own conviction of their own "superiority." When I get some time I'm going to look into it.

Also, I feel the need to know which U.S. President it was who slipped 350,000 rounds to Stroessner while pretending it was for some other purpose.