[The 2012 coup against Fernando Lugo cut short the only period of
left-wing rule in Paraguay’s modern history. But in elections next
year, the country’s progressives have their best shot in years at
unseating the corrupt, reactionary Colorado Party.]
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A DECADE AFTER LUGO WAS OUSTED, PARAGUAY’S LEFT HAS A CHANCE TO
REGAIN POWER  
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Norma Flores Allende, Laurence Blair
June 22, 2022
Jacobin
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_ The 2012 coup against Fernando Lugo cut short the only period of
left-wing rule in Paraguay’s modern history. But in elections next
year, the country’s progressives have their best shot in years at
unseating the corrupt, reactionary Colorado Party. _

June 22 marks a decade since Fernando Lugo, a leftist former bishop
who headed Paraguay’s only progressive government in living memory,
was removed in a rapid parliamentary coup., Antônio Cruz / Agência
Brasil

 

The sound of the helicopter announced the inevitable: the police were
back, this time ready to shoot to kill. After a tense standoff, the
bodies suddenly began to fall. It was a clash of machetes, horses, and
high-powered rifles on one side versus rusty old shotguns on the
other, while the women and children fled their tents. The red earth
witnessed a massacre of eleven campesinos and six police officers that
is still, ten years later, yet to be fully investigated.

The new issue of Jacobin is out now. Subscribe today
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June 22 marks a decade since Fernando Lugo, a leftist former bishop
who headed Paraguay’s only progressive government in living memory,
was removed in a rapid parliamentary coup
[[link removed]] in
the aftermath of this rural bloodbath. The killings of June 15, 2012,
came amid an occupation by landless farmers at Marina Kue, in
Curuguaty, eastern Paraguay. They were followed by more murders
[[link removed]] of
campesino leaders and a trial plagued by irregularities.

Conservative forces also used the botched eviction at Marina Kue as a
pretext to impeach Lugo, in proceedings that lasted barely a few
hours. Progressive governments across Latin America branded it a coup;
even conservative Chile and Colombia recalled their ambassadors.

Soft Coups

The events in Paraguay in 2012 followed what happened in Honduras
three years earlier, when another progressive president, Manuel
Zelaya, was removed. They inaugurated an era of “soft” coups and
lawfare across the region. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff cited
[[link removed]] Lugo’s
fate in 2015 before she too was unseated, in a rapid impeachment that
even her right-wing replacement later admitted
[[link removed]] was
a coup.

Events in Paraguay and Honduras inaugurated an era of ‘soft’ coups
and lawfare across the region.

The decade since 2012 has been grim for ordinary Paraguayans, with a
third of its people still living in poverty. Evangelical conservatives
have stifled any progress on reproductive and LGBTQ rights,
penetration of the country by violent transnational organized crime
has deepened, and the destruction of Paraguay’s natural world by
agroindustry is accelerating. The urban activists and indigenous and
campesino communities who resist face fierce repression.

In April 2023, the country will vote for a new president and congress.
The ruling conservative Colorado Party, which has been in power for
all but five years since the 1940s, is riven by factional infighting.
With Lugo out of the running due to term limits, an array of rivals on
the right, center, and left is hoping to take advantage.

If the opposition can overcome profound structural obstacles and
internal divisions to reclaim power, it can arrest these somber trends
and join a regional fightback of progressive forces. A decade after
the coup and less than a year out from the elections, the question is
whether Paraguay’s left can replicate Lugo’s electoral triumph
without him on the ballot.

No Peace, No Progress

Paraguay is no stranger to violence. Between 1864 and 1870, the War of
the Triple Alliance, formed by Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, almost
exterminated the local population. The next century was hardly better:
civil wars, revolutions, coups, and countercoups were punctuated by
another exhausting conflict, this time against Bolivia
[[link removed]].
Authoritarianism festered in the deep wounds of political instability.
The first Nazi party outside of Germany was founded in Paraguay in
1929.

Two military dictatorships, those of General Higinio Morínigo
(1940–48) and General Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989), ruled hand
in glove with the political party that governs Paraguay to this day.
The enduring hegemony of the Colorado Party, otherwise known as the
Asociación Nacional Republicana (ANR), has its origins in a bloody
civil war. In 1947, the Colorados emerged victorious, with Paraguay
now a de facto one-party state. The regime annihilated all opposition;
the Communist Party and leftists in general went into hiding, and huge
numbers of people were forced into exile, including most of
Paraguay’s intellectuals.

Alfredo Stroessner’s fall didn’t spell the end of the
authoritarian system he created.

Stroessner’s dictatorship, backed by the United States, trumpeted
the slogan “Peace and Progress.” The reality was a totalitarian
regime that lasted for thirty-five years — South America’s longest
dictatorship — while giving asylum to Nazis and Francoists,
murdering more than 400 people, and subjecting some 19,000 to torture.

A key legacy of the _Stronato_ for Paraguayan politics today are the
Colorado _seccionales_: local offices of the party that are still
present in practically every neighborhood of every town. They openly
provide handouts, medicines, jobs, public contracts, and sporting
events in order to buy votes and convene the physical and digital foot
soldiers known as _hurreros_.

This fierce social control, almost unique in Latin America, has
installed a clientelistic political culture that has co-opted the
small middle class and enriched those Tomás Palau
[[link removed]] dubs
the _empresaurios_: crony-capitalist oligarchs close to the regime
and its successors. Stroessner’s fall didn’t spell the end of the
authoritarian system he created. One popular anecdote
[[link removed]] holds
that the exiled dictator, seeing a photo of Paraguay’s first
post-transition cabinet, remarked, “I’m the only one missing.”

A Left on Life Support

If the Colorado Party is unusually dominant, Paraguay’s left suffers
multiple structural weaknesses — which are in turn hard to
disentangle from the legacy of authoritarianism — that set it apart
regionally. Mass public movements (and, to a lesser extent, armed
resistance) forced the military regimes of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay
to restore democracy and created a ready-made generation of
postdictatorship leaders on the Left (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
Rousseff, José Mujica) and center-left (Ricardo Lagos). In Paraguay,
by contrast, Stroessner was toppled only by a palace coup in 1989 led
by his son-in-law General Andrés Rodríguez, who was then legitimized
in a nominally free but unfair election.

Subsequent Colorado continuity has starved Paraguay’s progressive
forces of visibility, campaign finance, and government experience
beyond the truncated Lugo interregnum — which was enabled only by
the Colorado vote splitting between two candidates and by Lugo’s own
unique touch. According to Fernando Martínez, a Paraguayan political
scientist at the University of Buenos Aires, the Lugo “phenomenon”
rested on an unusual alliance between the rural Catholic faithful,
left-wing social movements, and the establishment Authentic Radical
Liberal Party (PLRA).

In Paraguay, the traditional parties co-opt college and even
high-school societies and leaders as a means of harvesting new cohorts
of voters.

“Lugo magically reaches the people, above all the poor and those far
away from the asphalt highways of the cities,” agrees Alfredo
Boccia, a political columnist. Paraguay’s left gained power in 2008
“via a shortcut,” he adds. Today that shortcut no longer exists.
Lugo represented a miracle but also a kind of curse. His personalized
victory deprived the Left “of a process of coordination, debate,
growth, and power-building that can’t be done overnight.”

South American universities have long provided a training ground for
antiestablishment movements and politicians. The Chilean social
democrat Gabriel Boric and his Communist communications chief Camila
Vallejo are only the latest examples. Yet in Paraguay, the traditional
parties co-opt college and even high-school societies and leaders as a
means of harvesting new cohorts of voters.

Political operators often take two or three successive undergraduate
degrees, says David Riveros García, an anti-corruption campaigner
[[link removed]],
“so they remain in the university to project political influence for
themselves or their party. It’s crazy, but it happens a lot.” When
bribes fail, repression is employed. Vivian Genes, an architecture
student and organizer at the Universidad Nacional de Asunción (UNA),
was jailed without trial
[[link removed]] last
year together with several other activists during massive protests
against Colorado corruption.

Nor does ethnicity provide an organizing framework for politics in
Paraguay as it does in neighboring Bolivia, where the indigenous
majority has consistently returned the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS)
to power since 2005. Most Paraguayans are mixed-race and speak some
Guaraní, a state-backed language; politicians pay lip service to the
country’s indigenous heritage. However, few people identify with
today’s marginalized indigenous communities, who number just 120,000
and are too dispersed geographically (and across nineteen distinct
peoples) to form a solid indigenous caucus.

Nascent indigenist parties need to come under the umbrella of the
larger left-wing movement, argues Mario Rivarola, a Mbyá Guaraní
craftsman and organizer with the Organización Nacional de Aborigenes
Independientes (ONAI [[link removed]]). “If
progressives don’t unite,” he adds, the Colorados “will keep
running Paraguay like always, from the far right and with extreme
corruption. There won’t be a political program for the poor or for
us indigenous people.”

Paraguay’s rate of union membership, at just 6.7 percent, is well
below those of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, or even the United
States.

While nearby countries have combative labor federations that set the
parameters of public policy, Paraguayan unions are weak and
fragmented. Paraguay’s rate of union membership, at just 6.7
percent, is well below those of Brazil (18.9 percent), Argentina (27.7
percent), Uruguay (30.1 percent), Bolivia (39.1 percent), or even the
United States (10.3 percent). The economy is short on manufacturing or
mining jobs. Seven out of ten workers work in the atomized informal
economy, selling _chipa_ on the roadside or serving rich households.
Just 0.6 percent of private sector employees are unionized.

According to research
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Ignacio González Bozzolasco, workers often report union-busting
efforts including intimidation by managers. Paradoxically, the low
threshold needed to form a sectorwide union (thirty people) means
bosses can easily dilute organized labor through pliable cutouts. As
Brazilian firms eagerly accept the 2014 invitation
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former president Horacio Cartes to “use and abuse Paraguay” and
its (not unrelatedly) cheap labor, recent years have seen an explosion
in the _maquila_ textile business. This low-skilled form of
industrialization along Central American lines is unlikely to produce
a figure like Brazil’s Lula, who cut his teeth in the
metalworkers’ union of São Paulo, or generate conditions for
sweeping strike actions like the ones that set wage floors in Uruguay.

The campesinos, peasant farmers typically without title to the land
they work, represent the most boisterous political sector, organizing
regular marches, occupations, and demonstrations, but suffer similarly
from disunity and repression. In the 1970s, Stroessner’s police
viciously broke up the Ligas Agrarias Cristianas, autonomous, utopian
campesino communes that had challenged the Colorado domination of the
countryside. Their modern-day inheritors, like the Federación
Nacional Campesina, Conamuri, and the Organización de Lucha por la
Tierra, help small farmers bravely reclaim public land illegally
occupied by agribusiness, despite facing stiffened
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punishments.

“At the level of social struggle and in electoral terms, in the last
twenty-five years the campesinos have been the main social group that
is offering transformative ideas,” says Najeeb Amado, secretary
general of the Paraguayan Communist Party (PCP). But corporate media
and the government are quick to tar such organizations with the same
brush as the Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo (EPP), a
miniscule guerrilla group
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in the north.

After the dashed hopes of the Lugo years, some rural movements are
ambivalent about electoral politics, and their power is ebbing as more
family smallholders are forced, often at gunpoint, to migrate to the
city or abroad. How much of a chance does the Left really have, Boccia
wonders aloud, in a country with an uprooted rural population and
lacking an urban proletariat of any real power?

Swallowing the Toad

The year 2023 may nevertheless provide a rare chink in the notorious
election-time “granitic unity” of the Colorados. The two dominant
rival factions within the party are currently at war. Former president
Horacio Cartes is not a Colorado by conviction 
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a landowner and plutocrat who joined the party barely a decade ago. On
the other hand, President Mario Abdo Benítez — the son
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Stroessner’s bag-carrier — represents a more statist,
traditionalist strand of _coloradismo_.

The two dominant rival factions within the Colorado Party are
currently at war.

However, analysts agree their differences are not really about
ideology but rather about a struggle for wealth and power. For months,
the Abdo Benítez administration has been briefing
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Cartes’s fortune may derive from a vast international
cigarette-smuggling and money-laundering operation in league with
narcotraffickers: a suspicion long shared by the US Drug Enforcement
Administration
[[link removed]] (DEA)
and multiple
[[link removed]] independent reports
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Cartes and his employees insist such claims are politically motivated
and that the reason the tobacco magnate has curtailed his trips abroad
is not fear of being jailed
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his close associate Dario Messer, but rather because he is tired of 
[[link removed]]traveling
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Term limits mean that neither Cartes nor Abdo Benítez can run next
year, and their paladins in the Colorado primary this December are
deeply uninspiring. Santiago Peña, the technocratic dauphin of
Cartes, was soundly beaten in the 2017 primary by Abdo Benítez. Hugo
Velázquez, the current vice president, is a Colorado lifer dogged
by corruption allegations
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his own.

The stakes for their rival patrons are so high that the loser this
December may run next year anyway, splitting the Colorado vote and
providing an opening for the Left, as in 2008. Even if the notorious
Colorado “embrace” materializes after the primaries, with the
party machine rallied behind one candidate, the winner will emerge
tarnished by all the mudslinging.

The challenge for the opposition, then, is to winnow down a field of
personality-centered figures into a unified ticket that can take
advantage of Colorado infighting. Within the growing centrist
Concertación alliance, pre-candidates include Soledad Núñez, a
bland thirty-nine year old who was housing minister under Cartes, and
Sebastián Villarejo, a former city councilman with the conservative
Patria Querida (PPQ).

The diatribes of congresswoman Kattya González against corruption are
popular on TikTok
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veer into reheated Stroessnerism on law and order and “family”
values. Yet the PLRA, Paraguay’s second political force after the
Colorados, will likely insist on once more imposing its staid leader
Efraín Alegre, who ran for president and lost in both 2013 and (more
narrowly) in 2018. The others will probably settle for top jobs in
cabinet and congress.

The leftist Ñemongeta por una Patria Nueva bloc has voted for
Esperanza Martínez of the Frente Guasú as its candidate. A doctor,
public health expert, and senator who massively expanded free medical
care as Lugo’s health minister, Martínez is a soft-spoken figure in
a strident political culture. But her appeal is obvious after the
pandemic laid bare the abysmal state of Paraguay’s hospitals due to
Colorado underfunding and pilfering.

For better or worse, a ticket with Alegre and Martínez seems likely.
It could prove a winning formula in 2023 — a similar arrangement
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within a few percentage points of victory in 2018 — but there are
risks. In Paraguay, presidential elections are won with a simple
majority from a single round of voting: the opposition only has one
shot. If a figure like González, the boorish, hat-trick-scoring
ex-goalkeeper José Luis Chilavert, or Euclides Acevedo — an
avuncular social liberal who was until recently foreign minister —
decides to run outside of the emerging Concertación-Ñemongeta
alliance, they will fatally split the opposition vote.

Lugo, now a senator for the Frente Guasú, will throw his weight
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Martínez and the Concertación_. _But the former churchman’s
blessing may be a mixed one. His image has been tarnished thanks
to sex scandals
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emerged when he was in office and the joint attempt
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Cartes to allow them both to run for a second term through a secretive
constitutional amendment, which led to protesters setting congress on
fire [[link removed]] in
March 2017.

Even if this awkward coalition is victorious, its leaders could
struggle to realize the meaningful changes that Paraguay’s people
sorely need, like redistribution of land, the big increases in taxes
and spending recommended even by the World Bank
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the IMF
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serious anti-corruption reforms, and bold moves on reproductive rights
and drug policy. “We all know that the Liberal Party is a right-wing
organization,” says Rivarola, who brands Alegre a “traitor” for
joining in Lugo’s ouster in 2012, “but we have to swallow the toad
and the viper a little to win a space in power to keep organizing. I
think people will join together against a clear enemy: the Colorado
Party.”

A Garden in a Soyfield

Awell-worn adage coined by the writer Augusto Roa Bastos holds that
Paraguay is an island surrounded by land. It lags behind its neighbors
in terms of rights and freedoms, and it is the only South American
country to maintain relations with Taiwan rather than China. But it is
not isolated from regional political currents. With Brazil likely to
return Lula to power this October, Paraguay may be the latest of its
neighbors to follow the leftward trend — part pink tide 2.0, part
anti-incumbency — sweeping South America.

To achieve this, the ungainly Concertación coalition, including the
Ñemongeta, will have to successfully unite Paraguay’s fractured
opposition to the Colorados. Bridging the gulf between the
beleaguered _campesinado_ and the squeezed urban middle classes, it
can emphasize how the Colorados have not only handed out more than
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million hectares of state-owned agricultural land to their cronies —
an area greater than Panama
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but are illegally occupying
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least a dozen public parks in Asunción, the capital, with their party
offices.

It can also harness fierce national pride in Paraguay’s heroic
resistance in the Triple Alliance and Chaco wars, emphasizing that
Colorado neoliberalism has left the country defenseless
against violent
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drug cartels, the abusive foreign landowners cutting down
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forests, and Brazilian diplomats seeking to cheat Paraguay out of
a fair price
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its abundant hydroelectric power.

Paraguay’s state hardly exists in many places except to provide
armed, uniformed enforcers for cattle and soybean barons.

Exposing government corruption may be an effective campaign tactic.
However, progressives should take care not to delegitimize public
spending itself, when Paraguay’s state hardly exists in many places
except to provide armed, uniformed enforcers for cattle and soybean
barons. The race will be tight, and independent international
observers will need to help the opposition to protect every vote.

A progressive Paraguay would be a kick in the teeth for Latin American
and international right-wingers who have long drawn inspiration from
its mix of laissez-faire economics and authoritarian governance:
witness the recent visit
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poll-leading Argentine libertarian Javier Milei, or the tide of German
anti-vaxxers and neo-Nazis who are colonizing
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countryside. It may also present a challenge to the United States,
whose expanding [[link removed]] embassy
in Asunción, argues the Communist Party’s Amado, illustrates
Paraguay’s long-standing role as a spearhead for North American
interests in the Southern Cone.

_NORMA FLORES ALLENDE writes for Paraguayan outlet Hína and
international media including Tidningen Global (Sweden)._

_LAURENCE BLAIR reports on Paraguay for international media including
the Guardian._

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