Hugh O'Shaughnessy: Lugo confounds his critics

[Judi Lynn]

Lugo confounds his critics
Paraguay's president, Fernando Lugo, has survived for a year, and pulled off a gold-plated deal with Brazil
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Hugh O'Shaughnessy
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 15 August 2009 11.00 BST



Fernando Lugo, president of the poor but proud South American republic of Paraguay, has just surprised – astonished – the wiseacres this month by surviving one whole year in office.

When he was inaugurated on 15 August last year, the commentariat, some of his own supporters in Asunción included, were already writing off his chances ever before his donned the red, white and blue presidential sash and started his new job.

He had no real political track record. Here was a lamb entering the den where the lions of the Republican National Movement, known to all as the Colorados or Reds, had ruled since 1947, killing and eating lambs whenever it took their fancy. A year or two before the Chinese Communist party came to power the Colorados' man General Alfredo "El Rubio" Stroessner had been hard at work defending his patch, most of it scrubby wilderness, from Marxism-Leninism in the interests of liberty and the Free World. When his friend Dwight Eisenhower publicly thanked him for his noble efforts the rest of the Free World didn't disagree – at least not audibly. Nobody worried about the death rate among Paraguayan lambs. El Rubio, "Blondie", son of a Bavarian immigrant, held power for nearly four decades undisturbed nearly till the coup d'état in which his son-in-law, also a general, dispatched him into exile in Brazil.

How could Lugo win against the incumbents' political machine, spying, listening and quietly active in their red-painted party premises in even the most distant village? Impossible, was the received wisdom. He had no experience. For a decade he had been bishop of San Pedro, the country's poorest diocese, for God's sake. Then he gave it all up for politics and upset the pope.

But on 20 April last year what seemed a three-legged horse stormed to a landslide victory as the electorate gave a final shudder of rejection of the Colorado. There was a wave of popular enthusiasm for a man with a programme of reform.

The commentariat gulped as the expected scenario started wobbling. But the elected leaders of the region's new left crowded into Asunción to see the installation of their comrade-in-arms and cheered when he started his acceptance in Guaraní, the language most Paraguayans prefer over Spanish. The defeated Colorado incumbent refused to appear to hand over the sash and voters giggled at his pettiness.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/15/lugo-paraguay-anniversary-itaipu

[Peace Patriot]

1. Great article! And the writer nails it, in the conclusion...

"Then a month ago Fernando Lugo played the political ace he had warned his adversaries about. He pulled off a gold-plated deal with President Lula of Brazil over Itaipú, the world's most productive hydroelectric scheme, which the two countries share. A brave decision by the Brazilian leader means Paraguay's finances will be transformed and Latin America's giant begins at last to pay a decent price for the electric power that the Paraguayans cannot possibly consume themselves and have to sell to their Brazilian neighbours. At last there will begin to be not just bread but even some butter on Paraguayan tables and, as some of us always thought would happen, Lugo has ended up immensely popular.

As Rowan Williams would doubtless confirm, no one who has done a decade of really dedicated hard work as a bishop should ever be thought of as a political ingénue. And Lugo's survival and success has blazed forth among the nations the ancient truth of the Prophet Orwell – never believe anything until it is officially denied."

-------------------------------

This is the key to events in South America--and most especially to the success of the vast leftist democracy movement: This new leftist leadership of the South (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala) is sticking together. They have each other's backs (as Bushwhack plots in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela have shown); and--critically important--they are engaged in intense economic planning and cooperation with goals of social justice and local control of resources and finance. They are smart. They understand that their collective economic power is potentially very great, and they have exercised it in two exemplary events, this one, and the Bushwhack-instigated, white separatist coup attempt in Bolivia, last fall, whereby Brazil and Argentina used their economic clout--as Bolivia's chief gas customers--to help end that civil war. The white separatists in Bolivia's gas/oil rich provinces wanted to secede from Bolivia, and take Bolivia's main resources with them. Brazil and Argentina said, "Good luck finding customers in landlocked Bolivia!" Thus ended the insurrection.

Well, it wasn't quite that simple. Michele Batchelet of Chile called a meeting of UNASUR--the new South American "common market"--and said it really loud. Meanwhile, Batchelet was negotiating access to the sea for Bolivia with the Morales government, and Brazil and Venezuela were putting up funding to build a new highway, from Brazil's Atlantic coast, across South America to the Pacific, through Bolivia (which will turn Bolivia into a major trade route). The leftists are in control of things now, and social justice, peacefulness, democracy and cooperation are the new South American agenda.

Our corpo/fasicsts are not happy with this, we can be sure--and appear to be planning a second oil war, this time in South America. At the least, they want to corral the Caribbean--Venezuela's coastal Carribbean oil reserves, and probably Cuba's, and maybe even Brazil's. Lulu said that the Bushwhack's reconstitution of the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean is a threat to Brazil's oil. (Everybody south of the border knows that it is a threat to Venezuela.) It was Brazil--not Venezuela--who proposed a "common defense" in the context of UNASUR.

The danger to Fernando Lugo and the people of Paraguay may be that, now that the leftist tide has benefited Paraguay, the fascists will want to control those profits. The left builds; the right loots. And if the Bushwhacks succeed in dragging the region into an oil war, all of the leftist democracies and their leaders will be in peril. It is a peril of which they are all well aware. Can they head it off? Damn, I hope so. And this is yet another good sign that they can.

[Peace Patriot]

2. I hope somebody else will kindly recommend this important article for.

I recommended it, but then apparently hit the un-recommend without meaning to. Now it won't let me undo it.

[clixtox]

4. I could not be happier to rec this thread! N/T

[EFerrari]

3. Love it! That the opposition is fatuous and over confident helps, too.

:)