New Left-Center Alliance Hopes to Win Back Paraguay's Presidency.

AutorGaudin, Andres

More than five years after the progressive Frente Guasu (Guasu Front, FG) and its leader, the ousted former president Fernando Lugo (2008-2012), suffered the biggest political betrayal in Paraguay's post-dictatorship history, the leftist coalition is again teaming up with the centrist Partido Liberal Radical Autentico (Authentic Radical Liberal Party, PLRA). And just as it was in the lead-up to Lugo's election in April 2008, the aim of the partnership is to keep the rightist Partido Colorado (Colorado Party, PC) --the political arm of the country's last dictatorship (1954-1989)--from retaining power.

The first FG/PLRA alliance, led by Lugo and with a PLRA representative as his vice-president, was called the Alianza Patriotica para el Cambio (Patriotic Alliance for Change) (NotiSur, April 25, 2008). For the upcoming April 22 election, they're going by the name Gran Alianza Nacional Renovadora (Great National Renewal Alliance, GANAR), and the roles are reversed. GANAR's presidential candidate is PLRA leader Efram Alegre. His running mate is the progressive journalist Leonardo Rubm.

When asked to explain why the two sides would want to renew a pact that collapsed with Lugo's impeachment in 2012 (NotiSur, July 13, 2012), Rubm's answer is prompt: "That was a circumstantial electoral alliance, without a program for governing. This new agreement corrects those errors." Never mind that the PLRA allowed the coup to go forward and thus helped put the PC back in power; it is now ready to let bygones be bygones to win the presidency for the first time since its founding 130 years ago.

The PC, for its part, will be represented by an ultra-conservative candidate, Sen. Mario Abdo Bemtez, the son of the only minister (now deceased) who accompanied Gen. Alfredo Stroessner throughout his 35-year dictatorship. Rubm says that while in theory, "children shouldn't have to bear the burden of their parents' political past," in Bemtez's case, the candidate actually defends the worst aspects of the dictatorship, with its thousands of deaths and disappearances.

Current President Horacio Cartes, the beneficiary of the coup against Lugo (NotiSur,

May 10, 2013), tried to impose his own candidate, Santiago Pena, a former finance minister, but Pena was defeated soundly in an internal election held by the PC on Dec. 17. The president's record, furthermore, does little to favor Bemtez. And yet, GANAR doesn't expect it will be easy to beat the PC candidate. "The Colorados...

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