Horacio Cartes' victory returns Partido Colorado to power in Paraguay.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
As if the political parties and candidates had been merely performing a screenplay, Paraguay's April 21 presidential election played out according to the script, as the pollsters and analysts had predicted. The traditional Partido Colorado (Asociacion Nacional Republicana, PC), without new leaders and with the old vices that tied it to the most diverse forms of corruption, returned to power with the election of Horacio Cartes for a five-year term (NotiSur, Jan. 18, 2013, and March 29, 2013). The 56-year-old Cartes, a wealthy businessman and political neophyte, voted for the first time in his life in this election.
Efrain Alegre, the candidate for the Partido Liberal Radical Autentico (PLRA), came in second. He and Cartes were the two ideologues of the coup (NotiSur, July 13, 2012) that ousted democratically elected President Fernando Lugo on June 22, 2012. The progressive movement, which ran Lugo as its candidate in 2008 to end 61 years of Colorado hegemony (NotiSur, April 25, 2008), finished its short-lived moment of glory divided into two factions that together received barely 9% of the vote.
Corruption has thus been reinstalled at the center of the country's political scene, and the president-elect is the principal actor in that drama that corrodes and denigrates the country.
Denunciations of corruption began with the electoral campaign. Cartes and Alegre traded accusations of the worst economic crimes: drug trafficking, smuggling, tax evasion, money laundering. On April 10, 11 days before the election, the Senate ousted its president, Jorge Oviedo of the Union Nacional de Ciudadanos Eticos (UNACE).
He was accused of trading his party's support for the PLRA candidate in exchange for the state's purchase of 5,742 hectares of his family's land. The government of de facto President Federico Franco, of the PLRA, paid US$11.5 million for land reportedly not worth more than US$8 million.
On April 17, the Senate suspended one of its members, Colorado Sen. Silvio Ovelar, for 60 days after he was filmed negotiating the vote buying with two PLRA leaders. On behalf of Cartes, he offered to pay them the equivalent of US$25 for each PLRA member they persuaded to vote for the PC.
The same day, a street vendor of herbal medicines and the mother of six children said that she had sold her vote "to Cartes' people, because with the 100,000 guaranies [US$25] that they paid me, I can feed my children twice."
In that context, former Costa Rican President...
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