PARAGUAY: PRESIDENT FERNANDO LUGO'S TROUBLES CONTINUE.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
By Andres Gaudin
Amid a growing wave of coup rumors and harassed by the rightist opposition, large rural landowners, and even a faction of the co-governing Partido Revolucionario Liberal Autentico (PRLA) of Vice President Federico Franco, Paraguayan President Federico Lugo is going through increasingly difficult days. Press coverage has been inundated with the specter of his removal by impeachment. Every day, the media repeat statements by political leaders who accuse the president of "instigating a class struggle," calls from landowners exhorting their colleagues to arm themselves to defend their properties, threats of lawsuits from women who say they have children by Lugo from clandestine romantic relationships (see NotiSur, 2009-05-01) while he was a Catholic bishop (with the president's niece making an accusation not as a victim but as a witness), and even never-proven accusations of ties to alleged guerrilla groups that Lugo is supposedly financing and arming. Despite the abundant accusations, the press also constantly claims that Lugo is an authoritarian president who threatens freedom of the press. In this context, the president replaced the military leadership and said that, if the coup plan succeeds, Franco hopes to succeed him.
The destabilization campaign began when various opposition leaders said that they were negotiating to find the two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress needed to approve an impeachment process (see NotiSur, 2009-07-31). In a statement printed in the local press and by international news agencies, Mario Abdo Benitez, vice president of the Asociacion Nacional Republicana (ANR, Partido Colorado)--which governed for the 60 years prior to Lugo's election and even publically supported the bloody dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989)--said that Lugo "should resign because he is responsible for various extortion kidnappings and because, using Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's example, he is arming civilian commandos under the pretext of acting in defense of the less-fortunate classes." Abdo Benitez offered no proof of his allegations.
In statements reproduced by Radio Nederland, Alfredo Boccia, a columnist for the Asuncion daily Ultima Hora, said, "Beyond the trial that the press has engaged in from the outset and that legislators are now trying to formalize, Lugo's popularity has suffered from the paternity scandals." He added, "If the impeachment initiative succeeds, Paraguay will be plunged into...
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