Are Trump's troubles the result of a "soft coup"? (1 of 2)

I first recall coming across the term "soft coup" (golpe suave or golpe blando) in connection with the impeachment of Paraguay's President Fernando Lugo in 2012. This report from Aljazeera gives an account of the outster of Lugo, Paraguay's Forgotten Coup 12/26/2013. The article is accompanied by this video report, People & Power - Paraguay's Forgotten Coup 12/25/2013:

An earlier report closer to the event from Aljazeera's Inside Story also describes the ouster and whether it should be considered a coup, Paraguay: Impeachment or political coup? 06/25/2016:

El Universal (Ecuador) gives credit to Gene Sharp for coining the "soft coup" term back in 1973. (Un politólogo de EE.UU. planteó el término de ‘golpe de Estado blando’ 12.06.2014)

Sharp is a political scientist whose name is not so well-known in the United States as it seems to be in Latin America, where the left generally regards him as the designer of a regime change strategy commonly used by the United States to undermine governments it considers inconvenient or otherwise undesirable by using means other than overt force. This CNN reports celebrates him, Gene Sharp: A dictator's worst nightmare by By Mairi Mackay 06/25/2012.

I've seen the term "soft coup" also applied to the overthrow of the Honduran government in 2009. But that one also had military involvement: "In 2009, a group of Honduran politicians and military officers staged a coup and removed then-President Manuel Zelaya from office and from the country." (Tracy Wilkinson, A Honduran coup comes full circle Los Angeles Times 04/27/2017)

Not incidentally, the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed clear diplomatic approval of both the Honduran and Paraguayan coups, "soft" or not. The Administration also showed sympathy for the "soft coup" in Brazil in 2016 against President Rousseff. (This Confirms It was a Coup: Brazil Crisis Deepens as Evidence Mounts of Plot to Oust Dilma Rousseff Democracy Now! 05/25/2016; Ben Norton, “Parliamentary coup”: Impeachment of Brazil’s President Rousseff hands power to corrupt, unelected right wing Salon 08/31/2016; Genaro Oliveira, Brazil's 'soft coup' is not the end of a lively democracy New Zealand Herald 09/01/2017)

The circumstances of Rousseff's ouster fully justify Genaro Oliveira's characterization, "From whatever side it's viewed, the impeachment process was never about seeking justice or upholding democracy. It has always been a judicial farce masking a nasty power dispute between elite political factions."

I don't have a problem using the "soft coup" term to describes Lugo's removal from office in Paraguay in 2012 and Rousseff's in Brazil in 2016. Because both were politically and democratically illegitimate actions that nevertheless took place within established legal procedures. The actions resulted in a significant change in the national government leadership and its policies in a way that fairly obviously ran contrary to the democratic decision of free elections.

I have some reservations about how far the usage of the "soft coup" idea can go. On the one hand, it usefully distinguishes between coups accomplished by force and violence and those which achieve an illegitimate change of government without the use or imminent threat of violence. On the other hand, we could have an interesting discussion about the extent to which the implicit or explicit threat of violence is at work even in the case of the "soft coups." And while it's arguably preferable to achieve illegitimate aims through nonviolent means, the consequences of a "soft coup" could be every bit as destructive as a more traditional version in which the military rolls tanks into the street and demands that the legal government resign.

Whether or not we consider Honduras 2009 as "soft" or not, the change of government took place without armed clashes between pro- and anti-government forces. But this description makes it sound a lot like the traditional military coup, "In the first military coup in Central America since the end of the cold war, soldiers stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Tegucigalpa, early in the morning, disarming the presidential guard, waking Mr. Zelaya and putting him on a plane to Costa Rica." (Elisabeth Malkin, Honduran President Is Ousted in Coup New York Times 06/28/2009) But the upshot of the coup in practice has been a vast increase in criminal violence in Honduras, which has increased pressure for Hondurans to flee to Mexico and the United States.

It's also important to remember that military coups typically have major cooperation among civilian politicians and private players. Two examples that come readily to mind are the coup in Chile in 1973 and that in Argentina in 1955.

And a "soft" coup can also have problematic international assistance. (Helene Cooper and Marc Lacey, In a Coup in Honduras, Ghosts of Past U.S. Policies New York Times 06/29/2009)

Now the term "soft coup" is turning up in discussion of President Trump's pretty certainly impeachable offenses. In this MSNBC 11th Hour report, a Wall Street Journal reporter uses the term, Eli Stokols: Donald Trump Is Facing Something Like A Soft Coup D'état 05/19/2017:

Eli Stokols uses the term in a seemingly descriptive way to talk about how Trump critics internal to his Administration as well as the press and external political critics are undermining Trump's Presidency over the Trump-Russia scandal. But "coup" obviously carries an implication of illegitimacy.

Legitimacy is a critical factor here. And by any sensible perspective, there are substantial reasons to believe that there are serious instances of wrongdoing that may well amount to the kind of "high crimes and misdemeanors" that would justify impeach of the President under the Constitution.

The drama (and melodrama) of the Trump-Russia scandal has eclipsed the issue of violating the emoluments clause that was much discussed during the transition. (Mark Joseph Stern, High Crimes and Misdemeanors Slate 01/04/2017) But given how the Trump Family Business Administration approaches the business of the Presidency, that in itself is a substantial problem that should be formally and thoroughly investigated. Just this weekend, we had the odd coincidence of Saudi Arabia committing $100 million to a fund established by First Daughter Ivanka Trump, during the same foreign trip in which Saudi Arabia agreed to a $110 billion arms deal with the US. (Jen Hayden, On same weekend as record-breaking arms deal, Saudis announced $100 million donation to Ivanka fund Daily Kos 05/21/2017) Admittedly, $100 million is less than one percent of the amount of the arms deal. But I'm pretty sure it's big enough to count as an emolument if it otherwise meets the technical requirements of the term. Ivanka's husband also played an important role in arranging the arms deal. (Mark Landler et al, $110 Billion Weapons Sale to Saudis Has Jared Kushner’s Personal Touch New York Times 05/18/2017)

Trump's defenders insist there is no "evidence" of serious misdeeds by Trump. But that begs the questions of whether there are concerns substantial enough for Congressional and criminal investigation of some of these major incidents. While it's true that we don't have the full documentation for the intelligence community's January report on Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee in the public record, it's hard to see how any government would make every detail of such a finding publicly available. But it's certainly reason for Congress and investigative agencies to understand it thoroughly. And if the four intelligence agencies whose consensus that report represented just concocted the conclusions, that would be something that urgently needs to be uncovered, as well!

And it sounds highly likely from what is in the public record that Trump himself was involved in obstruction of justice in the Trump-Russia investigation, especially with the firing of FBI Director James Comey. And Trump's first National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was working as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey last year. And given the warnings we know that Trump and his transition team received from senior officials about Michael Flynn before Trump named him as National Security Adviser makes it look reckless at the very best to appoint him to that post with the top-level security clearance that comes with it.

Given Trump's flagrant lack of concern about conflicts of interest, it will not surprise me in the least that we'll eventually learn at lot about dubious financial entanglements of the Trump family business with Russian interests.

In Part 2 tomorrow, I'll look at left and right versions of the "soft coup" framing on Trump's Constitutional problems.

The art of the "soft coup": Why funny business in small Latin American countries can turn out to matter - a lot

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff spoke today denouncing the impeachment proceedings the pro-oligarchy opposition is pressing against her as an "attempted coup d'etat" while asking her supporters to not fall for provocations and to maintain legality. After all, she is defending the established democratic institutions against an illegitimate use of the impeachment mechanism to nullify the results of democratic elections.

This method of removing an elected government with which the right was unhappy through abuse of existing institutions had a test run in Paraguay in 2012. Natalia Ruiz Diaz reported in Impeachment of Paraguayan President Sparks Institutional Crisis Inter Press Service 07/23/2012:

The Paraguayan Congress removed President Fernando Lugo from office Friday in an impeachment trial that lasted only a few hours.

The move, formally based on the constitution, triggered an institutional crisis for the fragile democracy in this South American country, and has been rejected by the rest of Latin America.

Lugo accepted the summary decision, which cannot be appealed, although he likened it to a coup and said the law had been “twisted.”

Vice President Federico Franco will complete Lugo’s term, which ends in August 2013.

Calls from the rest of the region, from Washington to Buenos Aires, for the proceedings to be carried out with guarantees for due process, fell on deaf ears. Nor was a mission of UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) foreign ministers, who arrived Thursday, successful in mediating the crisis.

While thousands of demonstrators gathered outside Congress to protest the impeachment of Lugo, a former Catholic bishop considered a moderate leftist, UNASUR studied the possibility of refusing to recognise the Franco administration, and members of the mission described the impeachment as a coup.

Latin America is thus facing a new institutional crisis, after the June 2009 coup in Honduras, where then President Manuel Zelaya was ousted and flown out of the country in a military coup backed by Congress.

After accepting the decision, Lugo said in a speech that “Today it was not Fernando Lugo who was removed from power; it was Paraguayan history, Paraguayan democracy that have been deeply hurt.” [my emphasis]

The Obama Administration, with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, was sympathetic to both the military coup in Honduras and the "soft coup" in Paraguay. Despite the improvement of relations with Cuba, the Obama-Hillary policy toward Latin America has been a conservative one. That hasn't always given the highest priority to conserving democratic institutions.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is one of the main US-based and government-supported organizations that promotes "soft" regime change in various countries. Right Web's article of 03/02/2012 on the National Endowment for Democracy explains:

The private, congressionally funded NED has been a controversial tool in U.S. foreign policy because of its support of efforts to overthrow foreign governments. As the writers Jonah Gindin and Kirsten Weld remarked in the January/February 2007 NACLA Report on the Americas: "Since [1983], the NED and other democracy-promoting governmental and nongovernmental institutions have intervened successfully on behalf of 'democracy' — actually a very particular form of low-intensity democracy chained to pro-market economics — in countries from Nicaragua to the Philippines, Ukraine to Haiti, overturning unfriendly 'authoritarian' governments (many of which the United States had previously supported) and replacing them with handpicked pro-market allies."

NED works principally through four core institutes: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDIIA or NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), and the Center for International Private Enterprise—representing, respectively, the country's two major political parties, organized labor, and the business community.

Funded almost entirely by the U.S. government, NED claims on its website to be "guided by the belief that freedom is a universal human aspiration that can be realized through the development of democratic institutions, procedures, and values. Governed by an independent, nonpartisan board of directors, the NED makes hundreds of grants each year to support pro-democracy groups in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, and the Middle East."

The NED publishes together with Johns Hopkins University a quarterly Journal of Democracy. The October 2013 (24:4) number carried an article by Leiv Marsteintredet, Mariana Llanos and Detlef Nolte defending the soft coup against Paraguay's elected left-leaning President, Paraguay and the Politics of Impeachment:

The international response, spearheaded by the leaders of the South American left, was swift condemnation. Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner called the events a “soft coup,” and the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela likened them to the coup that had deposed Hondu-ran president Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Others spoke of a “parliamentary” or “institutional” coup, and decried a growing neo-golpista trend in Latin America. Claiming a breach of the democratic order in Paraguay, the regional trade organization Mercosur (Southern Cone Common Mar-ket) and the political and economic alliance Unasur (Union of South American Nations) both suspended Paraguay until after the April 2013 election. Less negative responses came from the United States, Cen-tral America, Europe, and the Organization of American States (OAS), which did not suspend Paraguay but expressed concern and sent a diplo-matic mission to investigate the incident.

They try to normalize the 2012 impeachment: "The Lugo case is an example of a phenomenon known as the 'interrupted presidency,' or 'presidential breakdown,' which has become the main form of presidential instability in Latin America."

I suppose at one level the "soft coup" approach to illegitimate regime change is an improvement of sorts over the military coup approach so popular among Latin American rightists and their American sponsors during the Cold War. But the unwillingness of the ruling oligarchy's to allow democratic institutions to operate freely - Argentina from 1955 to 1973 is a good example - also undermined stability and constitutional government so that military coups became more attractive to antidemocratic elites as solutions to crush popular dissent against political repression and destructive "free-market" economic policies designed for maximum benefit of international corporations.

Marsteintredet et al seem awfully glib about the overturning of democratic election results in Paraguay, which experienced one of the longest-lasting dictatorships in Latin America, that of the infamous Alfredo Stroessner from 1954 to 1989.

The note, "There were strongly negative international reactions to what was, after all, the legal (even if unwise) deposition of a president." (my emphasis)

PR is a bit less tricky a task for nominally "legal" coups, as opposed to defending military ones.

One of the goals of the Obama-Hillary policy is to weaken international institutions like UNASUR which the US does not dominate. Because they can be inconvenient for Washington, American coporations and rent-seeking vulture fund speculators:

Justified or not, the sudden suspension that Mercosur and Unasur slapped on Paraguay [after the soft coup] forced other actors to respond not only to the situation in Paraguay, but also to the South American organizations’ response to the situation. Indeed, Unasur was making a move to displace the OAS as South America’s “go-to” group on matters of security, con-flict mediation, and the defense of democracy. While Unasur responded to the Lugo impeachment within a week, the [US-dominated] OAS took more than two weeks to assess matters and opt against suspending Paraguay. The OAS instead sent an observer mission to help the country prepare for the 2013 elections, foster political dialogue, and keep OAS member states in-formed. The U.S. government backed this decision, and some Central American countries also criticized the decisions taken by Unasur and Mercosur. Although critical of the haste that marked the impeachment process, the OAS noted that things had been done in accord with Paraguay’s constitution. Furthermore, the OAS pointed out, Lugo himself had accepted the outcome, at least at first.

Obama and Hillary supported the soft coup, in other words. Marsteintredet et al describe why independent organizations are dubious from the point of view of soft-coup advocates and apologists:

Nonetheless, Unasur’s and Mercosur’s speedy actions left the OAS standing by the roadside. How a critical episode is defined and inter-preted at the outset is key, for this determines what actions will be taken in regard to the country in question. Unasur showed that when it comes to South American political developments, it can and will act more quickly than either the OAS or the United States. Moreover, the Paraguayan crisis made it plain that presidential summits produce deci-sions faster than does OAS-style diplomacy. The degree of self-interest that was at work in Mercosur and Unasur’s decision making raises some concerns about what the sidelining of the OAS may mean for future ef-forts to defend democracy in the Western Hemisphere. These concerns are substantiated by the contradictory behavior and double standards of governments — Argentina’s and Ecuador’s come to mind—that cry out in defense of democratic rule in South America while not always playing by the rules of liberal democracy at home (when it comes to press freedom, for instance).

US and Latin rightist accusations of inadequate "press freedom" against Cristina's government in Argentina were mainly based on the law she got passed limiting monopoly control of media corporations. Current President Mauricio Macri set it aside just after taking office via emergency decree.

This paragraph from the conclusion reads like a lessons-learned evaluation suggesting ways rightwing parties can make more effective use of the soft coup approach to regime in the future. And also the kind of propaganda spin that can be put on it for American audiences who still may be squeamish about all this democracy stuff:

Lugo’s impeachment and the international reactions that it generated highlight the political motives that can underlie the use of legal instruments. Paraguay’s Congress used the impeachment as a vote of censure for Lugo’s failings in government. Lugo’s fall can be explained by a purely political, albeit parliamentary, logic: A weak president lost the confidence of most of his country’s national legislators. In presidential regimes, such a loss of confidence should not result in an interrupted presidency, but it can lead to deadlock between the legislative and executive powers. Lugo’s impeachment, however, like several other cases of interrupted presidencies, demonstrates that without legislative support presidents can find themselves hard-pressed to survive, much less govern. We believe that this pattern of governmental instability increases the importance of presidential leadership in the construction and maintenance of a governing coalition, preferably based on a negotiated political agenda. Today, a governing coalition is imperative not only to implement the president’s agenda but also, perhaps, to keep the president in office.

In other words, left-leaning politicians and parties elected on a popular program of rejecting neoliberal economic policies and not kowtowing to the whims of the moment in Washington need to be, you know, pragmatic and agree to implement the neoliberal, submission-to-Washington program. Otherwise, gosh, those soft coups are kind of unfortunately. But, you know, by "a purely political, albeit parliamentary, logic" they're just dandy! As long as they serve American interests, of course.

Yes, things that happen in small countries like Honduras and Paraguay can have big implications for larger countries like Argentina and Brazil.

New President in Paraguay

Paraguay has a newly-elected conservative President, Horacio Cartes of the Partido Colorado who is scheduled to take office August 15. As Martin Granovsky puts it, "Paraguay fue siempre para el Partido Colorado. Muchas veces por elecciones." ("Paraguay was always for the Colorado Party. Many times by elections.") (Un vecino distinto llegó al barrio Página/12 22.04.2013) The party's official name is Asociación Nacional Republicana-Partido Colorado (ANR-PC).

This past Sunday's election followed after ten months of the liberal party Presidency of Federico Franco, who took the office in what was widely regarded as a political coup against the center-left President Fernando Lugo, bringing on sanctions from the Southern American Mercosur trade bloc. The left-leaning govenments of Brasil and Argentina had regarded Lugo as a welcome but ineffectual partner in the region.

Those two neighbors of Paraguay are relieved to have a straightforwardly legitimate government in place. Though Cartes himself has a reputation as a tobacco smuggler and money launderer.

This picture from the Partido Colorado website shows Cartes in the center, looking very much like a good-ole-boy politician from a Southern US state:

Newly elected Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes (center)

Gravonsky notes that a previous Partido Colorado President, Nicanor Duarte Frutos, was also a conservative but had good relations with the left-leaning governments of Venezuela, Brasil and Argentina. Both Argentina and Brasil get significant amounts of electric power from Paraguay, including a joint Paraguayan-Argentine facility, Yacyretá, which provides 15% of Argentina's electric power.

Aljazeera English reports on the election in Inside Story Americas - Paraguay: A victory for corruption? 04/23/2013:

(Update: Adrienne Pine makes an important point starting around 14:45 that the coup against President Lugo in 2012 looks to have been modeled on the one in Honduras in 2009, both of which the Obama Administration greeted quietly but favorably.)

An accompanying news article of the same name, Paraguay: A victory for corruption? 04/23/2013 reports:

Many on the left have argued Lugo's ousting amounted to a coup, after his reform programme was blocked by opposition from landowning elites and agribusiness interests.

Cartes won out over his main challenger, Efrain Alegre whose centre-right Liberal party took power following Lugo's removal.

Cartes is a tobacco magnate and one of the country's richest men, owning banks, a sports team and soybean farms.

In the past he has been arrested over allegations of currency fraud, investigated for alleged tax evasion and accused of drug trafficking by the US.

He owns more than 20 companies, which include a bank, agricultural estates, tobacco plantations and a soft drink bottler.

They quote Nikolas Kozloff saying, "This is ... a really horrible outcome; the Colorado Party supported Alfredo Stroesner dictatorship, which engaged in a persecution of non-violent protesters, supported Nazi war criminal, drug smuggling, persecution of indigenous peoples ... " And Kregg Hetherington presents this assessment:

The Colorado Party runs itself very much the way it has in the sense of the late 19th century … although this is a very negative outcome … this is not at all surprising … the real surprise in Paraguay was in 2008 the election of someone who was not Colorado, but no one really expected even at that time, that that was likely to hold, so this is very much business as usual both for the party and for the electorate in general.

Reuters reports on the new President in: Daniela Desantis and Hilary Burke, In Paraguay, a rich conservative must tackle poverty 04/21/2013 and by the same reporters. They present him as a "political novice who never voted before 2009." And he apparently plans to apply a neoliberal agenda to cut public services and attract private capital. Which is not likely to help much with this situation:

Cartes himself has acknowledged that, to be successful, he must also cater to Paraguay's poor masses. Poverty runs near 40 percent and per-capita gross domestic product was just $5,413 in 2011, the second-lowest in South America behind only Bolivia, according to International Monetary Fund data.

The country of 6.6 million has long been one of the region's most politically unstable, with a fragile economy dependent on agriculture. The last elected president, Fernando Lugo, was impeached last year following civil unrest.

This Spanish-language report from TV Pública argentina of 06/23/2012 relates a violent incident in that "civil unrest" in a conflict over land reform in Paraguay last year, which was used by the conservative Partido Colorodo opposition in their political coup unseated President Lugo via impeachment, Paraguay: Operación masacre:

That report illustrates the extreme maldistribution of wealth in Paraguay with figure that 2.6% of property owners control 85.5% of the usuable land, in a country heavily dependent on agriculture.

The Buenos Aires Herald reports (Horacio Cartes wins comfortably in Paraguay 04/22/2013):

Cartes has been mentioned in two US diplomatic cables published online by Wikileaks.

The first refers to “Operation Heart of Stone,” a transnational investigation carried out by the US which focused on the disruption and dismantling of a drug-trafficking and money-laundering enterprise operating in the Tri Border Area (TBA) of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. The cable directly mentioned Horacio Cartes as a “designated Consolidated Priority Organizational Target.”

In a 2009 investigation, according to the cable, through the utilization of a US DEA undercover personnel, agents “infiltrated Cartes’ money-laundering enterprise, an organization believed to launder large quantities of United States currency generated through illegal means, including through the sale of narcotics, from the TBA to the United States”.

The second cable discusses an investigation into Dr Angel Gabriel González Cáceres, Paraguay’s director of SEPRELAD, the Secretariat for the Prevention of Money-Laundering.

This cable says that Gonzalez had a direct personal role as Central Bank president in white-washing (“blanquear”) funds for Horacio Cartes and his Banco Amambay, noting that 80 percent of money-laundering in Paraguay moves through that banking institution.” The cable also cited González’s strong ties to the Colorado Party.

Tags: horacio cartes, paraguay

Paraguay: coup by impeachment?

That what it seems to be, a similar event to the ouster of the government in Honduras in 2009, in which Paraguay's President Fernando Lugo was impeached and removed from office on the charge that he had performed his Presidential duties badly. The real political conflict grows from Lugo's partisanship on behalf of poor farmers demanding land reform against landowners in a country where the concentration of land ownership is extreme.

Aljazeera English's Inside Story Americas feature reports on the situation in Paraguay: Impeachment or political coup? 06/25/2012:

Aljazeera also reports on it in Latin American leaders reject Paraguay 'coup' 06/24/2012:

Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez, Ecuador President Rafael Correa and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Saturday said they would not recognise the government of newly-installed leader Frederico Franco, who was sworn in by the same senate which, minutes before, had voted out Lugo.

Argentina's foreign ministry said in a statement later on Saturday that it was withdrawing its ambassador to Paraguay, while Brazil said it was calling in its ambassador to Paraguay for consultations over the impeachment, adding democracy is essential for regional integration.

Federico Franco, the Paraguay's newly sworn-in president, has reached out to Latin American leaders to minimise diplomatic fallout and keep his country from becoming a regional pariah.

Natalia Ruiz Diaz reports for Inter Press Service, Pressure from the Region Could Be Decisive in Paraguay’s Crisis 06/25/2012:

Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay called their ambassadors home for consultations, and the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc decided not to invite the new Paraguayan government to the Jun. 28-29 summit in the Argentine province of Mendoza.

Franco complained that the neighbouring countries had gone too far, and argued that the impeachment procedure was carried out in accordance with the constitution.

Lugo, a moderate leftist, was impeached on five charges of malfeasance in office, in the wake of a deadly clash between landless farmers and police when the former were being evicted from land that they had occupied. Six police and 11 peasants were killed in the incident.

Organisation of American States Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza and many other leaders in the region said the impeachment trial, in which Lugo was given just two hours to defend himself, violated due process.

The five charges were that Lugo was politically and criminally responsible for the bloody Jun. 15 clash in which 17 people died in Curuguaty in northeastern Paraguay; that he signed, without consulting Congress, a Mercosur democracy clause that allegedly restricts national sovereignty; that he failed to curb growing insecurity and crime; that he instigated and facilitated occupations of land; and that he held a political rally in a military barracks.

Mark Weisbrot asks What will Washington do about Fernando Lugo's ouster in Paraguay? Guardian 06/22/2012:

The politics of the situation are clear enough. Paraguay was controlled for 61 years by the rightwing Colorado party. For most of this time (1947-1989), the country was ruled by dictatorship. President Lugo, a former Catholic bishop from the tradition of liberation theology who had fought for the rights of the poor, was elected in 2008, but did not win majority backing in the Congress. He put together a coalition government, but the right – including the media – has never really accepted his presidency. ...

Lugo's election was one of many across South America – Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador – in which left governments were elected over the past 14 years, changing the political geography of the hemisphere. With that, came increasing political unity on regional issues – especially in confronting the United States, which had previously prevented left governments from coming to power or governing.

Daniela Desantis and Guido Nejamkis, Paraguay under pressure from neighbors after President Lugo ousted MSNBC/Reuters 6/24/2012:

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez has called the move a coup and warned that South American trade bloc Mercosur could take measures against Paraguay. In theory, that could include suspension from the group, which also brings together Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.

Brazil on Saturday called its ambassador in Paraguay home for consultations. It "condemned" Lugo's removal because he was not able to defend himself properly, "compromising a fundamental pillar of democracy."

Brazil is Paraguay's top trading partner and Latin America's biggest economy. Its stance will likely carry the most weight but it says it will seek consensus within the UNASUR group of South American nations rather than act unilaterally.

Sergio León in La derecha paraguaya conspira contra Lugo desde 2009 Público 25.06.2012 describes how the entrenched Colorado Party had been looking for an excuse to oust Lugo practically from the day he was elected.

A near-term resolution of the conflict doesn't appear likely at the moment. Lugo is calling for peaceful demonstrations on his behalf. But he and his supporters don't seem to hold out much hope that the Parliament will reverse its decision. (Lugo responsabilizó a Franco por las eventuales sanciones contra Paraguay Página 12 27.06.2012)

Lugo was inaugurated as President August 15, 2008. Following are videos of his swearing-in and his inaugural address, including a portion in the native guaraní language.

El juramento de Fernando Lugo:

Lugo discurso 2:

Lugo discurso 3:

Lugo discurso en guaraní:

As this report from the time notes, Lugo usará contra corruptos réplica de la espada de Simón Bolívar que le regaló Chávez Última Hora (Paraguay) 16.08.2012, Lugo came to office promising to "luchar contra los que robaron al pueblo" ("to fight again those who rob the people"). Apparently he took that task a bit too seriously for the liking of the Paraguayan One Percent.

Tags: fernando lugo, paraguay