Bishop on the brink in Paraguay

I´m in Asunción, Paraguay and to say the place is alive with a pre-election buzz would be in pretty bad taste. It was buzzingly lethal mosquitoes bringing dengue and yellow fever to the Latin American back water the past few months, that almost managed to knock the elections of the front pages. Although authorities say they have the outbreak under control, Paraguayans know that what their government says rarely coincides with the perception on the street.

However, the prospect of change is the reason why pilas, as Paraguayans call themselves, are looking to the upcoming ballot on April 20 with a kind of enthusiasm not often witnessed in this land-locked country, despite the ongoing public health scare.

People’s reason for the renewed interest in the democratic process is front running candidate Fernando Lugo. The one-time bishop of the San Pedro diocese is now the favoured candidate of Paraguay’s disenfranchised, of whom there are many. His popularity threatens to end the 61 years of hegemony of the Colorado party.

Paraguay is also the last country to decide it’s future after left-of-centre presidents came into power in the past three years across the region, with the notable exception of Colombia. Were Lugo to win the presidency it would mean a definitive shift from the Colorado Party’s traditional conservative and pro-US stance, and bring Paraguay more in line with it neighbours.

Lugo’s backers include a rainbow of political parties and movements. He unites the militant groups of landless peasants with the much more establishment Liberal-party, Paraguay’s second political force and just about everybody in between. Apart from the Colorado candidate, former education minister Blanca Olevar, Lugo only has one real rival in the elections.

That man is a former general Lino Oviedo, accused and convicted of plotting a coup. A tough-on-crime populist with his own power base, Oviedo was released from prison last year at the behest of the government, in what many saw as a bid by President Nicanor Duarte to divide the field and undermine Lugo’s chances.

Even so, according to journalist Alfredo Cantero, Lugo is still ahead by at least 5 point in the polls. Come election day though, the former bishop’s supporters fear the government will resort to fraud. Speaking at a rally in the aptly named town of Limpio (aptly named 'clean') on Sunday, Lugo said the Colorados had “used fraud to stay in power for the past 60 years.” He added that he saw no reason why 2008 should be any different. His supporters have often voiced on concern over the lack of impartiality of the electoral judges.

“The Colorado party will accept defeat is margin is big enough,” says Cantero, “but they’ll do everything in their power to stop that happening, ranging from fraud to threats and riots.”

Say Lugo does make it to the presidential palace, what does that mean for Paraguay. The question concerning many international observers is whether Lugo looks to business-friendly leftists such as Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva as examples or if he’ll go for a more populist variant of socialism such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. When I put the question to him a year ago, during a four-day trip through rural Paraguay, he answered with an evasive smile, “my inspiration is Jesus of Nazareth.”

Since then Lugo has often voiced his admiration for Lula and Bachelet, but always insists that Paraguay is “different,” and therefore needs a different approach. He has promised his rural supports land reform, but without specifying just how that would be brought about. Land distribution is Paraguay is extremely unequal, even by Latin American standards, and so some effort to break up the amassed wealth is certainly necessary. But whether Lugo would go for Chávez confrontational policy of stimulating squatters and mass annexation is far from certain. More likely he will take the route of Ecuador’s Rafael Correa who has reformed the system of inheritance tax to make for a more gradual redistribution.

The other big hurdle for a Lugo administration is energy. Unlike it’s neighbours to the south, Paraguay has plenty of it. The Itaipú dam is the world’s largest hydroelectrical plant, producing 20 percent of Brazilian demand. Paraguay can hardly tuck away a fifth of its 50 percent share in the energy and sells the rest to its partner Brazil. However, the Itaipú treaty, as negotioted by the Colorado dictator Alfredo Stroessner in 1973, forces Paraguay to offer Brazil its share at cost price.

Lugo believes the potential income from energy sales from the dam could bankroll dearly needed health and education reforms. But to do so will mean renegotiating the treaty with Brazil. In past dealings, most notably with Bolivia, Lula has already shown that he can be unbending when it comes to Brazils energy needs.