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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-05-09 12:28 AM
Original message
Paraguay's president replaces military brass amid coup rumors
Paraguay's president replaces military brass amid coup rumors
November 4, 2009 8:57 p.m. EST

(CNN) -- Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo on Wednesday ordered the replacement of top military commanders, a day after publicly dismissing rumors circulating the capital about a military coup.

The announcement came from the armed forces themselves, not the president's office.

In his capacity as commander-in-chief, Lugo named replacements for the heads of the army, air force and navy, according to a statement from the armed forces.

One day earlier, Lugo had addressed -- and dismissed -- reports of a possible coup.

"In recent days rumors have surfaced about the placement of bombs, new kidnappings, assaults, coup d'etats," Lugo said at a news conference Tuesday.

More:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/11/04/paraguay.president.fernando.lugo/index.html
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rabs Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-05-09 01:37 AM
Response to Original message
1. Kidnapping sparked latest round of coup rumors


http://www.abc.com.py/files/image/32/32752/4ae0605e8e9a8_400_!.jpg?
Zavala

On Oct. 14 a wealthy and highly respected rancher named Fidel Zavala was kidnapped and is being held for a reported $5 million ransom.

The family initially requested that police, the media and government investigators maintain silence, which they did.

After the kidnapping became public knowledge, Lugo's government was blamed.

It is still not known who grabbed Zavala; common criminals, leftist rebels from a rag-tag group called the PPE (Paraguayan People's Army), a rightwing group, narco traffickers, paramilitaries and so on.

The upshot is that Lugo's enemies are using the kidnapping to foment trouble for him.

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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-05-09 03:23 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. Right wingers exploit EVERY possible situation to try to harm democratically supported Presidents.
Very underhanded, sneaky, unpleasant people, ALWAYS.

Here's a 7 minute video which has images, aerial video, information about this crime:
Journalistic innovation in the digital age: a case from Paraguay

The newspaper ABC Color recently conducted a workshop on digital journalism so its journalists could learn to integrate new tools into their reporting. The training was planned and conducted by investigative reporter Mabel Rehnfeldt.

The training has already produced results: a digital special report about the recent kidnapping of cattle rancher Fidel Zavala. The seven-minute report, containing photos, digital maps, and other information, explains how the kidnapping took place and the role played by a rebel group called the Army of the Paraguayan People.

This is the first multimedia report to appear in a digital newspaper in Paraguay. In 24 hours, the video was viewed more than 6,000 times.
http://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/?q=en/node/5645
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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-05-09 03:33 AM
Response to Reply #1
3. Here's a good example of what you mentioned about the opposition:
Paraguay: Addressing the Growing Security Concerns
Friday, October 30th, 2009 @ 20:46 UTC
by Belen Bogado

Two former presidential candidates, two current Senators, and some businesspeople have been calling for an impeachment of President Fernando Lugo for his inability to provide security to the country. However, it has been the recent kidnapping of Fidel Zavala, a cattle rancher who has been captive since October 15 and whose kidnappers a political maneuver by the opposition.

Zavala was kidnapped by the Paraguayan People's Army (EPP for its initials in Spanish), a terrorist group believed to the continuation of the Patria Libre political party. The EPP is also said to have been advised by Colombia's FARC in 2004 in the kidnapping and murder of Cecilia Cubas , daughter of former President Raúl Cubas.

Liberal senator Alfredo Jaeggli said Lugo should face an impeachment because he is not fulfilling his functions as president by not providing security to Paraguayan citizens. The impeachment idea is also supported by Pedro Fadul and Lino Oviedo, both former presidential candidates and Senator Julio Cesar Velázquez.

What places Lugo in an even more difficult position is that the President has been linked to members involved in Cubas' case, to the point that Cecilia’s mother, Mirta Guzinsky, launched a video during the 2008 presidential campaigns asking citizens not to vote for Lugo . The video has now been revived within the online Paraguayan community through collective emails with the subject line: “What if Mirtha Gusinsky was right?” Lugo was the Bishop of San Pedro department in 2004 when he said he had not heard anything about the kidnap, even though the Cubas case was on every single media utlet in the country at that point.

More:
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/10/30/paraguay-addressing-the-growing-security-concerns/

http://www.howtogetridofstuff.com.nyud.net:8090/wp-content/uploads/how-to-get-rid-of-vomiting.jpg http://eecue.com.nyud.net:8090/img/images_pic-medium-22497-vomiting_in_front_of_the_club_is_cool.jpg http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2008/02/funny-pictures-cat-on-vomiting-person.jpg

How much can people take from these sleazy right-wingers? Their sleaziness makes decent people sick.
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-05-09 11:45 AM
Response to Original message
4. Your USAID-NED tax dollars at work!
This is how the Reagan genocidists got rid of Carter--promising weapons to the mullahs in Iran if they would only retain their US hostages through the 1980 election. CBS did a countdown clock with every 'news' broadcast--101 days of captivity, 102 days of captivity (I think it got up to over 400 days). 'Why aren't you doing something, President Carter? Why are these mullahs still holding US hostages? You are weak!'--was their message and that of Reagan's henchmen, the same who were traitorously dickering with the mullahs, and who would soon be organizing genocidal slaughters in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, including the infamous Iran-Contra war (which they funded by selling arms to Iran!)

This looks quite similar. They try to box in a good president, using black operations and intense psyops, with the corpo-fascist media as willing partners. The Reaganite and Bushwhacks, and the fascists in South America, really don't have new ideas. They repeat old patterns over and over again. Frankly, I think they have taken Rumsfeld's "Office of Special Plans" and transported it to South America (because that's where the easy oil is), and maybe have done some USAID-funded 'trainings' in these methods, to employ local operatives to their purpose. Paraguay, of course, doesn't have any oil. But its new leftist government is allied with the leftist democracy movement that has swept the region, led by oil rich countries like Venezuela and Brazil, and one of the abiding tenets of that revolution is that the oil should be controlled by local governments and used for the benefit of the people--anathema to our corpo-fascists. Lula da Silva, for instance, who applied this principle to Brazil's new big oil discovery, has also been very helpful to Paraguay's new leftist president, Fernando Lugo, by pressing Brazilian companies to allow a renegotiation of Paraguay's hydroelectric contracts, which had been very unfair to Paraguay. US corpo-fascists very much want to defeat this accord among South American countries, first of all to regain US global corporate predator control of South America's oil, and they are trying various "divide and conquer" strategies, for instance, efforts to break up the alliance between Lulu and Chavez. Lulu and others were told that they must "isolate" Chavez. That didn't work, so now our corpo-fascists seem to be going for picking off the smaller weaker countries, like Honduras and Paraguay.

Fernando Lugo, like Rafael Correa in Ecuador, kicked the US military out of Paraguay. The Pentagon really wants that station in the heart of South America back, to spy on and plot against surrounding leftist governments. The Paraguayan rightwing government was permitting US soldiers to freely stomp around in the country--a very worrisome circumstance when the Bushwhacks were funding/organizing the white separatists in eastern Bolivia (adjacent to Paraguay) in 2008. When Lugo was elected in Paraguay, overturning 61 years of rightwing rule, Bolivia's president Evo Morales sent him this message: "Welcome Axis of Evil!" Though there are local players who stand to benefit from the overthrow of their democracies, and whose names we see attached to the psyops "Big Lie" propaganda in the press, it's all one struggle, as the best South American leaders have come to see it. The bullshit in Paraguay is the same as the bullshit in Honduras, and the bullshit in Bolivia last year, and the bullshit in Ecuador earlier last year, and the bullshit in Venezuela back in 2002. It is bullshit that has largely been funded and organized here.

The local fascists in Paraguay want to reap the profit from the hydroelectric contracts that Lugo re-negotiated, with Lulu's support. The local fascists in Bolivia want to reap the profit from the gas contracts that Evo Morales re-negotiated (doubling Bolivia's gas revenues from one billion to two billion dollars per year, and committing most of it to benefit the poor majority). And the same in Venezuela--Chavez has a fair share of the oil revenues flowing to Venezuela's social programs. The fascists want to reverse those flows into their own pockets. That is their motivation--greed--a motive that is easily used by corpo-fascists like Exxon Mobil and Monsanto to end up with most of the profits. That is what they did before. That is what they are plotting to do again.

This bullshit in Paraguay is part of that plot. It is a big stakes US/corpo-fascist game for destroying, or subverting/corrupting, democracy, and restoring the fascists to power, who will sell their countries resources and its labor force for dirty coin.
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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-05-09 10:23 PM
Response to Reply #4
5.  Apparently the Pentagon and CIA people are controlling ALL foreign policy, in the end.
They may allow the Presidents a little leeway in situations which don't alter their greater plans to leave the illusion of an elected President in charge of national policy.

It's going to be up to the rest of the world's people to unite to make their own destiny and be prepared to fight not only the fascists who seize control of their governments with coups, etc., but also to defend themselves against the operations by our shadow government.
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