Howdy from the struggling young democracy called Paraguay! We just elected a new vice-president! But wow, is there history and a story behind that!
For 53 years, the Colorado Party (yes, that's the name, and they aren’t a bunch of people from Colorado!) has ruled Paraguay. Including in that is nearly 30 years of a vicious dictator’s rule, General Alfredo Stroessner. Then, in 1989, the dictator was overthrown in a military coup. The military coup then gave way to democratic elections, implementing democratization of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. And the Colorado Party candidates, the same party that the dictator was a member of, were elected to power! But these officials were definitely from a different wing of the Colorado party.
In recent years, there has been some very tough economic times in this country. The current unemployment rate is measured to be somewhere between 14-30%. But despite these tough times, the Colorado’s have been able to stay in power.
Recently, there has been a bit of feuding within the Colorado Party. In March of 1999 in what is called the March of Paraguay, the vice-president of the country, Luis Argaña, was assassinated on the street here in Asunción. Accused of masterminding his assassination were a strong political player named Lino Oviedo and the President of Paraguay, Raul Cubas! All of them were members of the same party, the Colorados, but obviously didn’t get along! Sort of like if Clinton decided he didn’t like Gore anymore and had him killed! Well, Oveido and Cubas had to flee the country and the president of the Congress, Luis Macchi, was appointed president. He was never elected to a national office, he was just next in the line of succession (sort of like how Gerald Ford become president of the US!). And he is very unpopular. His current job approval rating is 11%!
Oh, and along the way the country has had three attempted coups in the last four years. You can still see the holes where the tanks fired on the beautiful pink legislative hall in the May, 2000 coup attempt that I told many of you about right before the end of the school year!
So, here we are electing a vice-president. The Colorado’s are running the son of the assassinated vice-president. His name is Felix Argaña. And the Liberal party (which isn’t really too liberal by US standards) is running a former pediatrician, Cesar Franco. The voting occurred on Sunday, August 13. And about 8:00 that night, when they realized how very close the vote was, they decided that they would not announce any more results until all the votes were counted. And recounted! At that point in time, Franco, the Liberal, had 47.77% and Argaña, the Colorado, had 46.93%. According to the papers, that comes down to a difference of 9651 votes out of 1,144,000 votes cast!
And what is really incredible is that the international observers who are here to be sure the voting was fair, no cheating, say that this is the cleanest election they’ve ever seen in South America! Pretty incredible in a country that has the reputation of being the most corrupt in South America! I mean, you can buy anything on the black market here. In many locations here, if you buy a CD, it’s a bootlegged copy! I’ve seen musical instruments here that have famous name brands on them, but you can tell almost immediately that they are fakes! People don’t pay their taxes here because they know there money will just go to pay for the corrupt politicians. And its much cheaper to pay a bribe than to apy all of your taxes! Chevrolet has even taken to putting bumper stickers on the vehicles they sell here that say ‘Yo Soy Legal’ (I’m legal), because so many stolen Chevy’s come into the country and are sold illegally!
But it sounds like we had a clean election!
So, as I write this newsletter, its been nearly a week and a half since the election and we still have no official results announced! They count and recount. The country feels confused, emotions swirling around. Both of the political party’s sponsor victory parades. The tension is building, you can feel it! And when the results are finally announced, someone will not be happy! You sort of sit here and wonder what will happen. Will the losers accept the results? Most people say yes, they will!
But through it all, it is incredible to realize that I am in a country that is fighting to retain its democracy. That believes in the power of voting and an educated electorate (we are supposed to have the highest literacy rate in South America). Perhaps very similar to the USA in the late 1780s after we had been independent for about ten years and under the Articles of Confederation. Then dropped that governmental structure for the Constitution that has now survived for over 200 years.
What an incredibly exciting place to be at a time like this!
PS Since writing this news letter, they have announced that the Liberal candidate, Franco, did win. Paraguay has 16 departmentos (states), and he only won in 6 out of the 16. But his margin of victory in those 6 was enough to allow him to win in the total count. The six he won in were mainly in rural parts of the country where the economy and unemployment is at its worst. The final vote count was 598,781 for Franco and 588,002 for the Colorado candidate, Argaña. That’s a diffenence of only 10,779 votes out of the 1,186,783 votes cast, less than 1% difference. Wow, every vote really does count!