PARAGUAY: TOM HENNIGANin Asunción on the populist ex-bishop who is leading a campaign for reform
A FORMER Catholic bishop in dispute with Rome will attempt to break the grip on power of the world's longest-serving ruling party when Paraguay votes in presidential elections on April 20th.
In what is his first foray into politics, Fernando Lugo, still known to Paraguayans as Monsignor Lugo, even though he has quit the priesthood for politics, is hoping to become the first opposition politician to take power peacefully since the country's independence in 1811.
To do so he must defeat the National Republican Association, the nationalist party that has ruled Paraguay through dictatorship and democracy since 1946. Known as the Colorados, or Reds, after the colour worn by its supporters, the party is notorious for corruption and vote-rigging and for creating a crony state dominated by party insiders.
Lugo is hoping to capitalise on rising anger at the increasingly flagrant impunity with which elected Colorado officials break the law and enrich themselves amidst deepening poverty in what is one of South America's agricultural powerhouses.
According to the government's own numbers, 320,000 Paraguayans fell into extreme poverty last year alone, raising the percentage of the population living in misery from 15 to 21 per cent, despite the economy expanding at a rate of about 4 per cent.
Up to a million of Paraguay's 6½ million inhabitants are estimated to have abandoned the country in search of a better life elsewhere. Those who can afford it buy a ticket to Spain, those who cannot get the bus to Argentina.
To break the Colorados' hold on power, Lugo has forged most of the usually fractious opposition into a broad front campaigning as the Patriotic Alliance for Change. It includes parties from the traditional conservative opposition right across the political spectrum to the extreme left.
He has been able to do this because he is seen as a neutral broker whose background is from outside politics. "I am atypical," he says. "I don't come from the usual political channels or any of the political parties." Ordained in 1977, Lugo was for 10 years the Catholic bishop of San Pedro, a town in the heart of Paraguay. There he earned the nickname "bishop of the poor" for his work organising landless peasants in one of the country's poorest regions. He moved into politics in 2006 after being invited by opposition leaders to help lead an emerging anti-Colorado coalition. He agreed and resigned from the priesthood in December 2006, saying: "From today on, my cathedral will be the nation."
The Vatican denied Lugo's request for laicisation and experts in canon law say he is now essentially in a state of rebellion against Rome. The 56-year-old candidate said he would press on regardless but still considers himself very much part of the Catholic Church.
His alliance has a six-point plan that includes land redistribution for landless peasants, emergency social assistance for those in poverty and ending Colorado control over state institutions such as the courts as well as breaking up Colorado-run monopolies in the economy.
But it is his image as a humble man of the cloth rather than his policies that is central to Lugo's popularity among voters. "Of his personal qualities, one that is very important is his honesty," says Rafael Filizzola, the former mayor of Asunción, who is now backing Lugo's campaign. "In this country there are very few politicians who can say they have had nothing to do with corruption. This is very important."
The Colorados have launched a vicious smear campaign to try and undermine Lugo's campaign. President Nicanor Duarte Frutos has accused one of the parties backing Lugo of being behind a plot to poison him and has tried to insinuate that Lugo is linked to the murky kidnapping and murder of the daughter of a former Colorado president in 2004, blamed on left-wing extremists.
It is part of a strategy to portray Lugo as a communist firebrand who wants to emulate Hugo Chávez's populist experiment in Venezuela. Lugo, though, insists that he is a moderate whose role is to be the "glue" that holds the opposition together. "If I was more to the left or more to the right I wouldn't be able to realise this convergence of so many parties and movements that at times are antagonistic," he argues.
His chances of winning have been boosted by a bitter dispute within the Colorado party. Its candidate is Blanca Ovelar, who, if she won, would be the country's first woman president.
She was only selected after a highly disputed primary which was marred by fraud and she suffers from being viewed as the candidate of the current president, who opinion polls show is Latin America's most unpopular ruler. But despite this Lugo's campaign is calling for a heavy foreign observer presence during voting lest the Colorados use fraud to extend their six-decade run in office by another five years.