A campaign poster in Asunción, Paraguay, reads "With your vote, we'll eliminate this plague," and features mosquitoes with the faces of President Nicanor Duarte Frutos and presidential candidate Blanca Ovelar.
If you think the verbal sparring between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is getting nasty, you should try out politics in Paraguay, where there seems to be no limits to what you can call your opponent.
The Colorado Party is defending its 61 years in power, which makes it the longest-ruling party in the world. This Sunday, however, the party runs a serious risk of losing as former bishop and presidential candidate Fernando Lugo leads the polls going into the vote.
So the Colorados have unleashed the insults and called Lugo a kidnapper, a killer and a traitor to God, among other choice names. In Catholic Latin America, it doesn't get any worse than that last insult, especially for a former priest.
An explanation: The Colorados have accused Lugo of being in on the kidnapping and killing of the daughter of former President Raúl Cubas. Of course, no one has proved any of this, but no matter - make the accusation and then run with it. A golden oldie. The Colorados have even run TV ads of the slain woman's mother tearfully accusing Lugo of being in cahoots with the kidnappers and predicting ruin for Paraguay if the kidnapping priest wins.
About the other opposition candidate, former general and ex-Colorado Lino Oviedo, the party uses the words coup plotter and, oh yes, cold-blooded killer.
Again, an explanation: The popular ex-general was jailed for plotting a 1996 coup but released last year in the thick of the campaign season because, many speculate, the Colorados thought he could run for president and sap votes from Lugo. The opposite has happened, however. Oviedo has become a loose cannon and gone on the attack against the ruling party, drawing many dissident Colorados to his camp.
Then there's this poster I spotted yesterday in the capital of Asunción. It supports Lugo and his allies while depicting Colorado Party heavyweights President Nicanor Duarte Frutos, presidential candidate Blanca Ovelar and someone else I don't recognize as mosquitoes flying into a cloud of bug spray. "With your vote, we'll eliminate this plague," the poster reads.
Seeing it immediately brought to my mind the notorious Rwandan government radio broadcasts that exhorted people to go out and kill members of the rival tribe, whom the broadcasts called "cockroaches." As many as a million people ended up dying in the 1994 genocide.
Nothing like that is predicted to happen here, of course, but many fear some violence will break out if the election is close or if fraud is alleged. The out-of-control tone of the campaign isn't helping.
But maybe, this is par for the course here. It's my first time covering an election in Paraguay so it could be that people here exorcise their political animosities every five years and move on.
I certainly hope so. In which case, may the best the traitor to God, coup platter or mosquito win.
I am from Paraguay, but I am as many of us in the economic exile. I was very patriotic, until I realized how the men in power used that word to brain washed people. I used to think only nice remarks of my country, but one day I got to live an intercultural experience and although physically I went back menthally, emocionally I was gone for good. People who aren't from Paraguay and once has the chance to experience the country and the way paraguayans are often say "I hated when I got here with all my heart, I had no choice... and I hated more with all my soul when I had to leave, I had no choice". Because reality is more than fiction, where all theories come to die. I could explain the country, but I'd have to write a book, and some books were written where they talk about the phenomenon. Try "At the tomb of the inflatable pigs" Gilmette. Satire didn't need to be writen there as an imagination, you just have to live through. Of course, it hurts reading about it from far away, but the acknowledge that you belong to that, that "it" is your roots then it kind of settle down as a pill hard to swallow. So, I can see through this article describing the truth of what goes on. The political fight is dirty, but the only alternative we knew about was a dictatorship that lasted 34 years, and then it was worse, everything was by decreed from the dictator: it was like hell, 42 degree celcius, the government says it was 34, all the radio stations like 10 of them, one tv channel state owned, and 3 newspaper will repeated. No choices. AIDS? no thanks. Nobody had it says the government. Pre-Election polls "The excelentisimo plenipotenciario General de Ejercito Don Alfredo Stroessner will win by margin of 97%" And that was it.
So, I am in the outside, looking inside through this Internet: happy not to be there and sad not to be there.Same dualism. Like any paraguayan. They say hope is the last thing you lose. So with only a hope that things change I look at this election as a chance to go back to a Paraguay I would love to see, but something tells me, that like to many paraguayan hope is a luxury we lost a long time ago.
Posted by: Dunhill | April 18, 2008 at 08:15 AM