MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Paraguay: The next leftist of the block

With God's blessing, Lugo ready to take office

Next August 15 a major event will be taking place in one of South America's poorest and most forgotten countries: Paraguay.

Bishop Fernando Lugo will be taking the presidential oath, but even more significant the Partido Colorado which has had a hegemonic domination of the country's politics for the last six decades has accepted defeat and will take refuge in the elected Congress and whatever remnants of power it has in the bureaucracy.

Landlocked and in the direct sphere of Brazilian influence, the evolution of President Lugo's "leftist" administration should not signify great surprises as long as he keeps to the pragmatism of its large, almost oppressing neighbor. The Economist has dedicated two articles to the event which follow: "The next leftist of the block" and "The bishop of democracy". WHEN Alfredo Stroessner, South America's last dictator, was pushed out of office by a coup in 1989 it seemed that Paraguay had achieved a velvet revolution. It turned out to be made of velour. State terror and torture ended, and five tons of secret-police files documenting their practice appeared. But the Colorado Party, the creole fascist outfit that was the instrument of Stroessner's rule, remained in power. That will finally change on August 15th when Fernando Lugo, the victor of last April's presidential election, takes office. Almost two decades after Stroessner's fall, Paraguay's transition to democracy may at least mean something. But it will not be easy for Mr Lugo. He is a former missionary who embraced a school of theology that blended Marx with St Peter. He spent more than ten years as bishop of San Pedro, one of the poorest regions of Paraguay, peopled by Guaraní Indian peasant farmers and landless laborers. He backed invasions of large rural estates by radical movements, becoming known as the "bishop of the poor". He ran for president at the head of a coalition including the centrist Liberal Party and a dozen small far-left groups. Though he won handily, he got only 42% of the vote and he may not command a legislative majority. As a priest he was a radical, but as president he may have to be pragmatic. His choice of ministers was a balancing act, mixing centrists, leftists and reformers such as the finance minister, Dionisio Borda. He has said that he will not renew Paraguay's expiring agreement with the IMF; he also wants to attract private capital to state companies. Mr Lugo has promised to improve health and education. The trickiest issue he faces is land, which remains the main source of wealth. Stroessner handed out vast tracts of state land to his cronies. Even by Latin American standards land ownership remains highly unequal. According to one guess, 1% of the population owns 77% of the farmland. To complicate matters further, in recent decades Brazilians have bought up many smallholdings and turned them into vast soya farms, which have become the mainstay of the economy and of government revenues. Land invasions have sometimes been met with violence: in the past three years, a dozen peasant leaders have been murdered by gunmen hired by landowners. Mr Lugo says he will carry out an agrarian census to find out who owns what. He has also called for patience, noting that the constitution guarantees private property but also the right of all Paraguayans to a piece of land. Just where Mr Lugo will fit in the spectrum of Latin America's leftist presidents is not yet clear. His foreign minister, Alejandro Hamed, has expressed sympathy for Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. Mr Lugo himself has expressed admiration for Chile's Michelle Bachelet, a more moderate socialist. Under Mr Lugo, Paraguay may open diplomatic relations with China, ending its current link with Taiwan. But it is Mr Lugo's relationship with Brazil that is likely to have the most impact on his presidency. The two countries share the Itaipu hydroelectric dam (still the world's largest until China's Three Gorges is completed). Paraguay uses less than a tenth of Itaipu's electricity; under a treaty, it sells the rest of its half share of the power to its neighbor at a price which is well below spot prices in Brazil. Mr Lugo said that he wants to renegotiate the treaty, but he has recently sounded more conciliatory. He will also have to deal with the still-powerful Colorados. Membership of the party has long been a condition for obtaining a job in the public sector. Many government workers have professed their loyalty to the new president, presumably in the hope of keeping their jobs. But the party's leaders may make common cause with some of their past foes in smaller parties to try to thwart Mr Lugo. Whatever the problems ahead, a successful handover of power will in itself be a novel achievement for Paraguay and so would sound and honest public administration. And there are some refreshing aspects to this priest-turned-politician. Unlike some of his peers elsewhere, he does not seem to see a new constitution as the road to earthly paradise, nor has he said he wants a second term before starting his first. He says that after five years in office he wants to return to working as a parish priest. Whether the Vatican, which only grudgingly accepted his resignation as a bishop, let alone the Paraguayan people, will allow him to is another matter. The bishop of democracyA welcome for another left-wing leader; but expect the pendulum to start swinging to the right APART from featuring in a couple of novels by Graham Greene, Paraguay has rarely attracted the attention of outsiders. It is a poor, sweltering, landlocked tract of South America with only 6 million people, many of Amerindian descent. But it enjoys a sad distinction: for the past 61 years it has been in the grip of the world's longest-ruling party, the Colorados, first under the klepto-cratic dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner and then under his only slightly less grasping civilian acolytes. It is not surprising that it took a man who might have walked off the pages of a Greene novel to end Colorado misrule. Fernando Lugo, who takes office on August 15th, was at the time he won the presidential election in April still technically a Catholic bishop (the Vatican has since accepted his resignation). He is a bearded, sandal-wearing liberation theologian, a campaigner for the poor and for land reform. He is also a political novice who heads a disparate coalition whose span extends from the centre to the hard left. Mr. Lugo takes his place in a cohort of left-wing leaders who have come to power in Latin America in the past few years. So expect much comment in the next few days to the effect that the region is moving irrevocably and uniformly towards socialism and away from the influence of â€"or if you prefer, domination byâ€" the United States. The reality is more complex. First, the centre-right still holds sway in some places, such as Mexico, Colombia and Peru. And, second, the differences between the region's left-wing leaders are more important than the similarities. Although neither leader says so publicly, there is little in common between Hugo Chávez's autocratic military socialism in Venezuela and the pragmatic social democracy of Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Mr Lugo's brand of leftism might well be closer to Lula's than to that of Mr Chávez, but he will be his own man. There are some common threads in the stories of how these left-wing leaders have come to power. They include widespread poverty, deep inequalities of income and the economic difficulties that the region suffered a decade ago (which, though partly due to external events, eroded faith in the centre-right leaders then in office). Yet the left would be mistaken in imagining that it has a permanent lease on power. That is because another factor behind the recent success of the Latin American left is the fresh vigor of democracy in a region where dictatorship was once common. Democracy cuts many ways politically: Latin American voters, like those elsewhere, will punish governments that disappoint. The past few years of rapid economic growth have helped incumbent governments of all sorts. The next period looks tougher. To make matters worse for the incumbents of the left, the two issues now uppermost in Latin American minds are inflation and crime, which both tend to move votes to the right. That gives the centre-right an opportunity to regain groundâ€"though the conservatives will need to arm themselves with credible policies both to reduce poverty and to promote equality of opportunity. The political tide may turn in elections next year for president in Chile and for Congress in Argentina. So welcome Mr Lugo, because Paraguay desperately needs change and a democracy worth the name. But expect Latin America's political pendulum to start swinging.