| Feb 3, '89: the democratic revolution March 28, '99: a perverse parliamentary gang strikes Origins In the same way the Indian America suffered the effects of the Spanish-Portoguese colonialism, and later the Creole America did under the English, our present Latin America still faces the negative influences of North American and other neocolonialist groups. These influences along with the residual Soviet legacy, remain to obstruct our genuine self-determination movements. All the political, social and economic phenomena that happen in our country should be analyzed within this context, to fully understand its history and prospective future. Our current reality has to be referred to the long struggle for national sovereignity we've been sustaining since independence in 1811. Then, one can explain the brutal aggression perpetrated against Paraguay for its unique economic emancipation attempt developed with success since 1811 until the imperialist Triple Alliance War (1865/70) that interrupted the first Latin American autonomous revolution. (1) The National Party (Partido Nacional) sole political organization existing in the country after the holocaust (1865/70), emerged out of the civilian and military confluence of the paraguayan resistance's survivors. (2) It ruled Paraguay from 1874 until 1904 (since Sept. 11, 1887, as the National Republican Party). In between, we had the Liberals' appearance under the name of the Democratic Center - Liberal Party (Centro Democratico - Partido Liberal) on July 10, 1887, as a splinter group of the National Party. The remaining, as its original branch incarnating the mainstream of the prewar progressive policy, then vindicated such identity by adopting the full name: National Republican Party - Colorado Party (Partido Nacional Republicano - Partido Colorado) on Sept. 11, 1887. (3) Therefore, although seemingly contradictory to those unaware of our past, we paraguayans accept the term conservative for the Colorado Party just in the sense of being this, the major carrier of our ancestral selfsufficient tendency, in itself profoundly revolutionary. But the bottom line here is that our two principal political communities came to light stemming from a common source: the Reconstruction's umbrella -the National Party- based on the country's strategic interests opposing the Allies' occupation forces and neocolonialism, our invisible enemy since 1870. The legionnaires' complex that as a result of the defeat, equally affected both parties from their beginnings, later through dialectical process -and the paraguayans' vitality- became sublimated into a ghostly residue. (4) Another intervention had to come about: the disgraceful 1904's anglo-argentine backed mercenary revolt with the support of the Liberal Party, in order to stop the miraculous reconstruction which was going on. (5) One symptom of the recovery was that: "from 1870 to 1910, Paraguay made more intellectual progress than in the previous three centuries". (6) |
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