Foreign Policy in Focus.
On June 22, the Paraguayan Congress impeached President Fernando Lugo, a progressive who assumed office in 2008. Although technically legal,
Lugo’s removal threatens the very integrity of democracy in Paraguay.
It is the latest in a disconcerting series of attacks against
progressive governments in South America that highlights the
vulnerability of its nascent democratic institutions and calls into
question the trend of democratization in the region.
Lugo’s victorious election campaign was historic. It ended more than
60 years of dominance by the Colorado Party. This right-wing coalition
of landed and military elites used violence and coercion to dominate
Paraguay through the extensive state bureaucracy created by dictator
Alfredo Strossner, a Colorado strongman who ruled from 1954 to 1989. The
Party’s legitimacy gradually eroded through its land-grabs and
corruption scandals involving high-level officials. It was also implicated
in political assassinations, most notably that of Vice President Luis
Maria Argana in 1999, after which President Raul Cubas was forced to
resign and flee the country.
Lugo, a progressive who proposed numerous social reforms, was widely
known in Paraguay as the “bishop of the poor.” Pledging to fight
corruption, reduce poverty, and enact agrarian reform in a country where
38 percent of people live in poverty and 2 percent
of the population controls 75 percent of fertile land, Lugo won 41
percent of the popular vote in 2008, beating out the Colorado candidate
by 10 percentage points. Despite this electoral success, the
conservative legislature and the tenuous coalition of center-right
parties that helped bring him to power systematically frustrated Lugo’s progressive efforts at reform.
