Paraguay elections (April 22, 2018)
Apr 19, 2018 19:52:39 GMT
East Anglian Lefty, Devil Wincarnate, and 4 more like this
Post by Hash on Apr 19, 2018 19:52:39 GMT
I haven't freshened up on my Paraguayan history and recent political happenings in quite a while but Paraguay is holding its general election - for president, Congress, Mercosur parliament, governors and local assemblies - this Sunday, April 22.
Paraguay is South America's backwater and something of a basket case,which exists to make Argentina and Brazil feel better about themselves, often overlooked. It has a fascinating, but deeply deeply depressing, history (and I study Colombian politics!). It certainly has had no shortage of, uhm, colourful leaders (and a fuckload of coups) -- Francia, López father and especially son (who should probably be a top contender for 'worst ruler ever') and more recently paedo chainsaw-loving psychopath Alfredo Stroessner. Paraguay has been an imperfect and unstable democracy since the early 1990s.
INSTITUTIONS
The President is elected to a five year term by simple majority in a single-round election, with a lifetime ban on reelection. The obligatory recent attempts to amend the constitution to allow for reelection ended badly for all involved, with angry rioters setting fire to Congress in 2017.
The bicameral Congress is made up of a 45-member Senate and 80-member Chamber of Deputies. The Senate is elected in a single national constituency, while the lower house is elected in 18 multi-member constituencies corresponding to the departments and Asunción (the capital), with district magnitude varying from 1 to 20 in this year's apportionment.
Paraguay is one of the most corrupt countries in the Americas, its judiciary is widely criticized and politicians regularly disregard or break the constitution and the law (a time-honoured tradition). Although comparable statistics are hard to come by, Paraguay is generally presented as one of the poorest countries in South America (but poverty, at least according to national statistics, has dropped significantly in the past 20 years). That being said, it does appear to be gradually moving past its historical status as the continental basket case, in part due to having the highest rates of economic growth in South America (4.5% in 2018) and low inflation.
POLITICAL BACKGROUND
Paraguay has a had a two-party system since the nineteenth century, despite the rise (and fall) of several new forces since the 1990s. It is one of the few Latin American countries in which the traditional parties of the 19th c. have survived, which probably helps explain why Paraguay is still the way it is. These two parties are: the right-wing conservative National Republican Association (ANR)-Colorado Party, and the centre-right 'liberal' Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA), both of which were founded within months of one another in 1887. Both have essentially been controlled and dominated by the oligarchic and authoritarian political/economic elite, which has retained most political and economic power in the country, even post-1989. Neither party has ever really bothered with coherent ideology, and today the ideological and policy differences between both parties are very limited and the quality of policy discussion is extremely poor. Historically, these parties didn't come to power through elections but rather through military coups and 'revolutions' -- in fact, the first democratic/electoral transfer of power from one party to another was in 2008.
The Colorados governed from 1887 to 1904, the Liberals from 1904 to 1936 and again from 1937 to 1940, and the Colorados governed between 1948 and 2008, including 35 years under the despotic authoritarian Stroessner regime (1954-1989). Prior to Stroessner, the long duration of single-party rule did not come with political stability: intra-party factions and clans fought amongst themselves through military coups and uprisings. They left behind them, in every case, a bleak record of mass corruption, violence, incompetence, mismanagement, instability (with some brief exceptions) and complete disinterest if not outright hostility towards any sort of genuine reforms which might have addressed the massive inequalities (most notably in land distribution).
After Stroessner was overthrown in a military coup backed by disgruntled Colorado factions in 1989, the Colorado Party retained power in democratic elections in 1993, 1998 and 2003. In Paraguay's democratic transition, the party which had been one of the two pillars (with the military) of the Stroessner regime (Stronato) and functioned much as the Communist Party does in Cuba, retained power -- and has also remained, by far, the strongest party in the country with a massive membership (a third, if not more, of the electorate are said to be members) and it has also retained most of the habits of the Stronato, particularly illicit activities (Paraguay is notorious for being a safe haven for Nazis, smugglers, drug traffickers and other pleasant criminals).
In 2008, the Colorado Party was defeated by Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo, the left-wing "bishop of the poor". supported by an alliance of convenience between minor and irrelevant left-ish parties and the PLRA. Lugo's victory owed more to his ill-fated alliance with the right-wing PLRA and major internal divisions in the ruling Colorado Party after a divisive presidential primary than to any groundswell of left-wing support -- the left in Paraguay having always been among the weakest on the continent (even weaker than in Colombia!), in part because Stroessner enjoyed having leftists dismembered alive. Lugo had an ambitious agenda, including land reform (which has been 'an issue' basically since the 1810s, but the kind of issue which nobody wants to do anything about), but he had little political power (facing a Congress dominated by right-wing parties) and he ended up being an ineffective disappointment. Very much an intruder in a stranger's house, Lugo's opponents - which included his erstwhile Liberal allies - wasted little time in finding an excuse to remove him from office, and once they found one in 2012 (a botched police operation to evict landless farmers occupying a latifundio, in which peasants and police died -- tellingly, the authorities only seem to give a fuck about the dead police officers), he was quickly impeached for "poor performance" (which is, fabulously, a perfectly legal and constitutional reason for impeachment!) and replaced by his Liberal VP, Federico Franco.
Franco, despite being shunned by most of the regional community for coming to power through controversial means, was unusually competent - in some regards - given the country, although also rather corrupt.
In 2013, the Colorado Party returned to power with the 'outsider' political novice businessmen Horacio Cartes, who defeated PLRA candidate Efraín Alegre by a sizable margin. Cartes was a political 'outsider' with no historical political credentials in the Colorado Party, but he comes from a powerful business background: he is the founder and still co-owner of Grupo Cartes, a leading business conglomerate whose portfolio notably includes Tabacalera del Este, Paraguay's largest cigarette manufacturer and one of the biggest companies in the country (and also the main manufacturer of contraband cigarettes sold on the black market in Brazil). Since becoming president, Cartes' business group has acquired a number of newspapers and radio stations. In 1985, Cartes was accused of being part of a currency fraud ring and fled the country for four years before returning to spend a few months in jail before being cleared of the charges. In 2000, police seized a plane carrying cocaine and marijuana on his ranch (he said it made an emergency landing). In 2010, Cartes was linked to a money laundering operation tied to drug trafficking in a DEA-ATF joint investigation. His political opponents, including internal rivals in the Colorado Party, regularly refer to him as a contraband smuggler. He has had poor relations with factions of the Colorado Party, beginning when he appointed a cabinet of technocrats who - like him - had little political connection to the old party.
Adding to the charm, Cartes is also virulently homophobic, but then again, basically everyone is in Paraguay, where being a paedo dictator is better than being gay. In 2013, Cartes basically said he'd shoot himself in the balls if his son was gay.
As president, Cartes has put on a pretty convincing show to foreigners (read: foreigners with lots of money) as a 'business-friendly' reformist who has pushed through various fiscally orthodox reforms to attract foreign investment, maintain 'fiscal responsibility' and increase transparency and accountability. He has regularly boasted the benefits of his country to foreign investors, selling it as an ideal 'booming' emerging, up-and-coming country with low taxes, minimal regulation and cheap utility costs. A rather thorough 2016 piece by Bloomberg about him goes into a bit more details, and quotes him as telling Brazilian investors in 2014 to "use and abuse Paraguay" (it's really great for a country's president to talk about his country as some would about a prostitute). However, he hasn't been so popular at home, despite the 'booming' economy, because of corruption scandals, criminality and his 2017 attempt (blatantly unconstitutional) to amend the constitution to run for a second consecutive term. His faction of the Colorado Party teamed up with Fernando Lugo's left-wing party (Lugo is a senator since 2013), dissident Liberals and a decrepit old right-wing party to allow for reelection, but faced opposition from the rival faction of the Colorados and the opposition Liberals. After riots led to Congress being torched, Cartes withdrew his plans for reelection -- but he is now running for Senate as the top candidate on the Colorado list, and maintains that 'constitutional reform' is necessary.
CANDIDATES
There are, basically, two major candidates.
Mario "Marito" Abdo Benítez (ANR-Colorado): Former President of the Senate (2015-16). 'Marito' is the 46-year old son of Mario Abdo Benítez, paedo Stroessner's infamous private secretary and the leading member of the dictator's inner circle, the ghoulish cuatrimonio de oro. Abdo Benítez father, who died in 2013, is often described as a Stroessner loyalist and the top 'hardliner' in the former dictator's inner circle, opposed to any liberalization of the regime and even prepared to support Stroessner's loathed homosexual son Gustavo as a potential successor. Marito's mother is the niece of former military officer Rodolfo 'Popol' Perrier, who ran the regime's harem of underage girls. Marito, like other rich kids of the regime, studied in the United States (he studied political marketing as Post University, a private for-profit university in CT) and is wealthy thanks to daddy's ill-acquired dirty money. He owns two construction companies, which have obtained public contracts with the central government and municipalities. He has been active in politics since 2004, and in 2006 he founded an internal faction with his childhood friend 'Goli' Stroessner (the dictator's grandson) and named after Stroessner's slogan (Peace and Progress). Marito now tries to avoid the topic of Stroessner, but he was very emotional when the dictator died in 2006 and he has more recently said that while the human rights stuff wasn't great the Stronato brought great order and progress to the country -- which is a pretty standard view among the Colorado Party in general. Elected to the Senate in 2013, he was one of the leaders of the anti-Cartes dissidence within the Colorado Party, allied with controversial/arch-corrupt long-time Colorado senator Juan Carlos 'Calé' Galaverna (described as the éminence grise or 'Rasputin' of Colorado politics), among others. Marito opposed Cartes' attempt to change the constitution in 2017 and was extremely critical of the president - speaking of him like you would expect an opposition leader to speak, notably calling him a contraband smuggler. In the 2017 presidential primary, Marito defeated Santiago Peña, Cartes' young technocratic finance minister (a long-time Liberal who only joined the Colorados in 2016), delivering a major rebuke to the incumbent. However, to avoid a repeat of 2008, Cartes and Marito have patched things up in the name of 'party unity' and, late in the campaign, have appeared together in campaign events. Marito and his people have begun singing the praises of a man that they, until just a few months ago, basically considered to be Pablo Escobar.
Efraín Alegre (GANAR): Former public works and communications minister (2008-2011). Efraín Alegre (55) is a Liberal career politician, who served two terms as deputy (1998-2008), one term as senator (2008-2013) and was public works minister (2008-2011) under Fernando Lugo, until he was dismissed from cabinet. Efraín Alegre was the PLRA-led coalition's presidential candidate in the last election, in 2013, in which he finished about 9 points behind Cartes. Alegre's 2013 campaign is largely remembered for buying the adhesion of the right-wing UNACE party after that party's founder, insane lunatic putschist general Lino Oviedo, was killed in a helicopter crash and the PLRA thereafter acquired UNACE's support by having the Liberal government buy land from UNACE senator Jorge Oviedo Matto (no relation to Lino Oviedo, but basically just as crazy and also very, very, very creepy). This year Efraín Alegre is the candidate of a broader opposition alliance which includes the PLRA, Fernando Lugo's Frente Guasú (actually a coalition of minor left-wing and far-left parties), the ostensibly left-wing Progressive Democratic Party, the old and weakened National Encounter Party, the old Febrerista Revolutionary Party (basically the sad remnants of the February 1936 revolution), the left-wing movement Avancemos País and a tiny socialist party. In other words, it is basically a repeat of the 2008 alliance which elected Lugo, except that places have been switched around: the Liberals lead it, while a Lugo ally is Efraín Alegre's running-mate (Leo Rubín).
Both candidates are essentially centre-right with few ideological differences, which don't really matter since policy discussion in Paraguayan politics is - even by Latin American standards - basically a joke and candidates usually run with completely unrealistic platforms which pretend that Paraguay is Singapore or Chile rather than just fucking Paraguay. Both support judicial reform through a constitutional assembly (a setup which would also allow reelection to be discussed, although both candidates oppose it), broadly pro-business economic policies and some semblance of bare-bones tax reform (Paraguay's tax system is archaic and regressive; it created a very low personal income tax only in 2012 but basically only for the very rich) to increase revenues. Alegre seems to be a bit more nationalistic and populist, speaking about 'energy independence' and sounding marginally more leftish by mentioning stuff like universal access to healthcare.
The newspaper ABC Color has pretty good details on all candidates for all offices: elecciones.abc.com.py/presidentes
Paraguay is South America's backwater and something of a basket case,
INSTITUTIONS
The President is elected to a five year term by simple majority in a single-round election, with a lifetime ban on reelection. The obligatory recent attempts to amend the constitution to allow for reelection ended badly for all involved, with angry rioters setting fire to Congress in 2017.
The bicameral Congress is made up of a 45-member Senate and 80-member Chamber of Deputies. The Senate is elected in a single national constituency, while the lower house is elected in 18 multi-member constituencies corresponding to the departments and Asunción (the capital), with district magnitude varying from 1 to 20 in this year's apportionment.
Paraguay is one of the most corrupt countries in the Americas, its judiciary is widely criticized and politicians regularly disregard or break the constitution and the law (a time-honoured tradition). Although comparable statistics are hard to come by, Paraguay is generally presented as one of the poorest countries in South America (but poverty, at least according to national statistics, has dropped significantly in the past 20 years). That being said, it does appear to be gradually moving past its historical status as the continental basket case, in part due to having the highest rates of economic growth in South America (4.5% in 2018) and low inflation.
POLITICAL BACKGROUND
Paraguay has a had a two-party system since the nineteenth century, despite the rise (and fall) of several new forces since the 1990s. It is one of the few Latin American countries in which the traditional parties of the 19th c. have survived, which probably helps explain why Paraguay is still the way it is. These two parties are: the right-wing conservative National Republican Association (ANR)-Colorado Party, and the centre-right 'liberal' Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA), both of which were founded within months of one another in 1887. Both have essentially been controlled and dominated by the oligarchic and authoritarian political/economic elite, which has retained most political and economic power in the country, even post-1989. Neither party has ever really bothered with coherent ideology, and today the ideological and policy differences between both parties are very limited and the quality of policy discussion is extremely poor. Historically, these parties didn't come to power through elections but rather through military coups and 'revolutions' -- in fact, the first democratic/electoral transfer of power from one party to another was in 2008.
The Colorados governed from 1887 to 1904, the Liberals from 1904 to 1936 and again from 1937 to 1940, and the Colorados governed between 1948 and 2008, including 35 years under the despotic authoritarian Stroessner regime (1954-1989). Prior to Stroessner, the long duration of single-party rule did not come with political stability: intra-party factions and clans fought amongst themselves through military coups and uprisings. They left behind them, in every case, a bleak record of mass corruption, violence, incompetence, mismanagement, instability (with some brief exceptions) and complete disinterest if not outright hostility towards any sort of genuine reforms which might have addressed the massive inequalities (most notably in land distribution).
After Stroessner was overthrown in a military coup backed by disgruntled Colorado factions in 1989, the Colorado Party retained power in democratic elections in 1993, 1998 and 2003. In Paraguay's democratic transition, the party which had been one of the two pillars (with the military) of the Stroessner regime (Stronato) and functioned much as the Communist Party does in Cuba, retained power -- and has also remained, by far, the strongest party in the country with a massive membership (a third, if not more, of the electorate are said to be members) and it has also retained most of the habits of the Stronato, particularly illicit activities (Paraguay is notorious for being a safe haven for Nazis, smugglers, drug traffickers and other pleasant criminals).
In 2008, the Colorado Party was defeated by Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo, the left-wing "bishop of the poor". supported by an alliance of convenience between minor and irrelevant left-ish parties and the PLRA. Lugo's victory owed more to his ill-fated alliance with the right-wing PLRA and major internal divisions in the ruling Colorado Party after a divisive presidential primary than to any groundswell of left-wing support -- the left in Paraguay having always been among the weakest on the continent (even weaker than in Colombia!), in part because Stroessner enjoyed having leftists dismembered alive. Lugo had an ambitious agenda, including land reform (which has been 'an issue' basically since the 1810s, but the kind of issue which nobody wants to do anything about), but he had little political power (facing a Congress dominated by right-wing parties) and he ended up being an ineffective disappointment. Very much an intruder in a stranger's house, Lugo's opponents - which included his erstwhile Liberal allies - wasted little time in finding an excuse to remove him from office, and once they found one in 2012 (a botched police operation to evict landless farmers occupying a latifundio, in which peasants and police died -- tellingly, the authorities only seem to give a fuck about the dead police officers), he was quickly impeached for "poor performance" (which is, fabulously, a perfectly legal and constitutional reason for impeachment!) and replaced by his Liberal VP, Federico Franco.
Franco, despite being shunned by most of the regional community for coming to power through controversial means, was unusually competent - in some regards - given the country, although also rather corrupt.
In 2013, the Colorado Party returned to power with the 'outsider' political novice businessmen Horacio Cartes, who defeated PLRA candidate Efraín Alegre by a sizable margin. Cartes was a political 'outsider' with no historical political credentials in the Colorado Party, but he comes from a powerful business background: he is the founder and still co-owner of Grupo Cartes, a leading business conglomerate whose portfolio notably includes Tabacalera del Este, Paraguay's largest cigarette manufacturer and one of the biggest companies in the country (and also the main manufacturer of contraband cigarettes sold on the black market in Brazil). Since becoming president, Cartes' business group has acquired a number of newspapers and radio stations. In 1985, Cartes was accused of being part of a currency fraud ring and fled the country for four years before returning to spend a few months in jail before being cleared of the charges. In 2000, police seized a plane carrying cocaine and marijuana on his ranch (he said it made an emergency landing). In 2010, Cartes was linked to a money laundering operation tied to drug trafficking in a DEA-ATF joint investigation. His political opponents, including internal rivals in the Colorado Party, regularly refer to him as a contraband smuggler. He has had poor relations with factions of the Colorado Party, beginning when he appointed a cabinet of technocrats who - like him - had little political connection to the old party.
Adding to the charm, Cartes is also virulently homophobic, but then again, basically everyone is in Paraguay, where being a paedo dictator is better than being gay. In 2013, Cartes basically said he'd shoot himself in the balls if his son was gay.
As president, Cartes has put on a pretty convincing show to foreigners (read: foreigners with lots of money) as a 'business-friendly' reformist who has pushed through various fiscally orthodox reforms to attract foreign investment, maintain 'fiscal responsibility' and increase transparency and accountability. He has regularly boasted the benefits of his country to foreign investors, selling it as an ideal 'booming' emerging, up-and-coming country with low taxes, minimal regulation and cheap utility costs. A rather thorough 2016 piece by Bloomberg about him goes into a bit more details, and quotes him as telling Brazilian investors in 2014 to "use and abuse Paraguay" (it's really great for a country's president to talk about his country as some would about a prostitute). However, he hasn't been so popular at home, despite the 'booming' economy, because of corruption scandals, criminality and his 2017 attempt (blatantly unconstitutional) to amend the constitution to run for a second consecutive term. His faction of the Colorado Party teamed up with Fernando Lugo's left-wing party (Lugo is a senator since 2013), dissident Liberals and a decrepit old right-wing party to allow for reelection, but faced opposition from the rival faction of the Colorados and the opposition Liberals. After riots led to Congress being torched, Cartes withdrew his plans for reelection -- but he is now running for Senate as the top candidate on the Colorado list, and maintains that 'constitutional reform' is necessary.
CANDIDATES
There are, basically, two major candidates.
Mario "Marito" Abdo Benítez (ANR-Colorado): Former President of the Senate (2015-16). 'Marito' is the 46-year old son of Mario Abdo Benítez, paedo Stroessner's infamous private secretary and the leading member of the dictator's inner circle, the ghoulish cuatrimonio de oro. Abdo Benítez father, who died in 2013, is often described as a Stroessner loyalist and the top 'hardliner' in the former dictator's inner circle, opposed to any liberalization of the regime and even prepared to support Stroessner's loathed homosexual son Gustavo as a potential successor. Marito's mother is the niece of former military officer Rodolfo 'Popol' Perrier, who ran the regime's harem of underage girls. Marito, like other rich kids of the regime, studied in the United States (he studied political marketing as Post University, a private for-profit university in CT) and is wealthy thanks to daddy's ill-acquired dirty money. He owns two construction companies, which have obtained public contracts with the central government and municipalities. He has been active in politics since 2004, and in 2006 he founded an internal faction with his childhood friend 'Goli' Stroessner (the dictator's grandson) and named after Stroessner's slogan (Peace and Progress). Marito now tries to avoid the topic of Stroessner, but he was very emotional when the dictator died in 2006 and he has more recently said that while the human rights stuff wasn't great the Stronato brought great order and progress to the country -- which is a pretty standard view among the Colorado Party in general. Elected to the Senate in 2013, he was one of the leaders of the anti-Cartes dissidence within the Colorado Party, allied with controversial/arch-corrupt long-time Colorado senator Juan Carlos 'Calé' Galaverna (described as the éminence grise or 'Rasputin' of Colorado politics), among others. Marito opposed Cartes' attempt to change the constitution in 2017 and was extremely critical of the president - speaking of him like you would expect an opposition leader to speak, notably calling him a contraband smuggler. In the 2017 presidential primary, Marito defeated Santiago Peña, Cartes' young technocratic finance minister (a long-time Liberal who only joined the Colorados in 2016), delivering a major rebuke to the incumbent. However, to avoid a repeat of 2008, Cartes and Marito have patched things up in the name of 'party unity' and, late in the campaign, have appeared together in campaign events. Marito and his people have begun singing the praises of a man that they, until just a few months ago, basically considered to be Pablo Escobar.
Efraín Alegre (GANAR): Former public works and communications minister (2008-2011). Efraín Alegre (55) is a Liberal career politician, who served two terms as deputy (1998-2008), one term as senator (2008-2013) and was public works minister (2008-2011) under Fernando Lugo, until he was dismissed from cabinet. Efraín Alegre was the PLRA-led coalition's presidential candidate in the last election, in 2013, in which he finished about 9 points behind Cartes. Alegre's 2013 campaign is largely remembered for buying the adhesion of the right-wing UNACE party after that party's founder, insane lunatic putschist general Lino Oviedo, was killed in a helicopter crash and the PLRA thereafter acquired UNACE's support by having the Liberal government buy land from UNACE senator Jorge Oviedo Matto (no relation to Lino Oviedo, but basically just as crazy and also very, very, very creepy). This year Efraín Alegre is the candidate of a broader opposition alliance which includes the PLRA, Fernando Lugo's Frente Guasú (actually a coalition of minor left-wing and far-left parties), the ostensibly left-wing Progressive Democratic Party, the old and weakened National Encounter Party, the old Febrerista Revolutionary Party (basically the sad remnants of the February 1936 revolution), the left-wing movement Avancemos País and a tiny socialist party. In other words, it is basically a repeat of the 2008 alliance which elected Lugo, except that places have been switched around: the Liberals lead it, while a Lugo ally is Efraín Alegre's running-mate (Leo Rubín).
Both candidates are essentially centre-right with few ideological differences, which don't really matter since policy discussion in Paraguayan politics is - even by Latin American standards - basically a joke and candidates usually run with completely unrealistic platforms which pretend that Paraguay is Singapore or Chile rather than just fucking Paraguay. Both support judicial reform through a constitutional assembly (a setup which would also allow reelection to be discussed, although both candidates oppose it), broadly pro-business economic policies and some semblance of bare-bones tax reform (Paraguay's tax system is archaic and regressive; it created a very low personal income tax only in 2012 but basically only for the very rich) to increase revenues. Alegre seems to be a bit more nationalistic and populist, speaking about 'energy independence' and sounding marginally more leftish by mentioning stuff like universal access to healthcare.
The newspaper ABC Color has pretty good details on all candidates for all offices: elecciones.abc.com.py/presidentes
