counterclockwise

Well, Paraguay’s election day has come and gone. This has been the closest fight in the presidential race that Paraguay has seen in living memory. The dominant Colorado party’s candidate, Blanca Ovelar, though a loser in the popular vote, is the first woman to ever have a serious chance at the presidency here. I wish I could say that this is truly a progressive sign that machismo is finally ceding to modernity. But the reality is, she’s mainly a passive stand in for the country’s current president, Nicanor Duarte-Frutos.

Term limit laws prevent Nicanor for running under his own name. During his presidency, he tried and failed to amend the constitution to let him hold onto power, which was a profoundly unpopular move. Paraguay has a long, tortuous history with dictators-for-life and is still recovering from forty years of oppression at the hands of a megalomaniac by the name of Stroessner. So Nicanor, thwarted but not deterred, fell back to Plan B: appoint a tractable cabinet secretary to take his place.

Large factions of the Colorado party, including the vice president, did not take this move very well. The Colorado primary elections were acrimonious. Party unity was at its lowest ebb in years.

In previous decades, the Colorado candidate has had the guaranteed vote of every beneficiary of the government’s pork, graft, and dole (40% of the working population, by some estimates). There’s very little private industry here. Most services are provided by government bureaus. And the government bureaus are largely staffed with loyal Colorados, right down to the office errand runners and contractors. Disloyalty can cost a Paraguayan his irreplacable job. Conspicuous disloyalty can extend the penalty to his sons and brothers. So an extremely high level of outrage has to build before the Colorado machine breaks down under its own corruption.

The underdog opposition party, the Liberales, were actually a few points ahead in the pre-election polling. Their candidate is a popular guy by the name of Lugo. He’s not necessarily the best guy from an American perspective, but the Paraguayans could do worse. If that were all there were to it, I’d say he has just won this election. The problem is, Lugo was ordained a Catholic bishop.

Now in Latin America in general, being Catholic is more of a prerequisite for holding political office than a handicap. Paraguay is no different. But Paraguay’s constitution does mandate the separation of church and state. The separation laws here are toothless compared to those in the US (Prayer in public schools? Not just allowed, but compulsory) but they do prevent clergymen from holding positions of secular power.

Any Lugo supporter can tell you that the candidate is no longer acting as a Catholic bishop, that he has essentially abdicated his authority with the Church. And any Jesuit can tell you that Catholic ordinations just don’t work that way. When Lugo took his vows, there was no escape clause permitting him to leave if it became politically inconvenient. As with the Italian Mafia, once you are a made man of the cloth you cannot be unmade. At least, not by anything short of excommunication. In short, Lugo can’t disentangle himself from his staff and mitre without committing political suicide.

A few months back, in what looks at first glance like an extremely noble gesture of largesse, President Nicanor gave Lugo permission to run for office anyway. This sounds generous of him on the radio news, but is actually a shrewd display of gamesmanship. Nicanor can no more legalize Lugo’s candidacy than I can gift the Grand Canyon to him. As he demonstrated during his bid to overcome term limits, the president doesn’t have the authority to rewrite the constitution no matter how much he holds his breath and stamps his feet.

Nicanor and his advisors were quite aware that even though Lugo could pull off the upset and win this thing, they’d retain the ability to promptly haul him before the supreme court of Paraguay. Even if the justices weren’t all loyal Colorados down to the last man, Lugo would have a weak case. Now it remains to be seen if the Colorados will actually do this, or whether they’ll just take the loss as a done deal.

Nicanor’s permission is also a particularly deft act of political revenge against the supreme court. The same justices who shot down Nicanor’s last, frantic attempts to grab power are now going into the unenviable position of having to rule against the likeable, Catholic candidate who won the popular vote, and all for reasons that the average Paraguayan sees as befuddling technical quibbles.

You know, I only wish Nicanor’d been half this competent in actually running the country.

The Guaraní word of the week is rugua, meaning deep or internal. The Colorados typically do better out in the country because they are better able to mobilize campesinos from Paraguai rugua - the interior, the campo, the boonies, the back of Paraguay’s beyond. On election days the buses bring citizens of the hinterlands in to the polling places from dawn to dusk, but there’s no mistaking the party affiliation of each coach.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 9:32 am and is filed under Guaraní, Pictures, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.