PARAGUAY: Last Hope for Postponement of Elections Lies in Floods

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Carlos Montero

ASUNCION, May 4 1998 (IPS) - The Paraguayan government’s last hopes for a postponement of next Sunday’s elections lie in the massive flooding which has led to the evacuation of 30,000 people.

The government has declared the departments of Neembucu, Alta Parana and Itapua in a state of disaster, due to the overflowing of the Paraguay and Parana rivers. Seven thousand of the 8,000 inhabitants of the city of Alberdi, in the southern department of Neembucu, have been forced to leave their homes.

The possibility of evacuating the entire department of Neembucu, including Pilar, the provincial capital, is being discussed, although the governor is opposed to the idea.

Ironically, the floods have brought the deeply split ruling party new hopes for a suspension of Sunday’s elections.

The Colorado Party has been divided since Lino Oviedo, a sworn enemy of President Juan Carlos Wasmosy and party leader Luis Maria Argana, won the party’s internal elections and was named presidential candidate. The situation became even more complex when Oviedo was disqualified as a candidate last month after the Supreme Court of Justice upheld a 10-year sentence handed down by a military tribunal in March.

The Colorado Party – which has been in power for 50 years – was ahead in the polls until Oviedo was disqualified. The former general, sentenced for heading an attempted military rebellion in April 1996, has been in prison since December.

At the request of Colorado Party leader Argana, the president of the Episcopal Conference, Oscar Paez, asked the Superior Tribunal of Electoral Justice to postpone the polls for seven days due to the flooding, in order to avoid irregularities.

Several polling stations are under water, which has boosted the Wasmosy administration’s hopes that a national emergency could be declared, which would entail a suspension of the elections.

Argana is seeking time for his party to get on a footing of “equal conditions” with the opposition.

The constitution authorises a one-week postponement of the elections, which must be held at least 90 days before the new government takes office on Aug. 15.

Jose Luis Chea, the head of a mission of 40 observers sent by the Organisation of American States (OAS), said that only the Superior Tribunal of Electoral Justice had the authority to reschedule the elections.

The election campaign ends Tuesday. But the results of the latest opinion polls – which can no longer be published, due to the proximity of the elections – indicate that the opposition Democratic Alliance is in the lead.

Local analyst Carlos Martini said the outcome of the elections would depend on the 20 percent of voters who will be driven to polling stations by party militants, the 20 percent who were still undecided according to the latest polls, and the obstacles presented in rural areas by the heavy rain.

The governing party – whose official name is the National Republican Association – has reportedly earmarked 900,000 dollars for election day transportation and travel expenses.

Sixty-five percent of voters in this country of five million live in rural areas. Most of them are indigenous people who speak Guarani, who have traditionally backed the Colorado Party.

But the National Peasant Federation, which has held five mass demonstrations demanding agrarian reform since the Wasmosy administration took office in 1993, called for people to cast a “protest vote” by depositing blank ballots.

The publicity of the Democratic Alliance ticket – comprised of presidential candidate Domingo Laino of the centrist Authentic Radical Liberal Party, and his running-mate Carlos Filizzola of the social democratic ‘Encuentro Nacional’ – has targeted disgruntled Colorado Party voters.

Since Oviedo was disqualified, the leadership of the ruling party has been trying to pull its divided supporters together behind the new presidential candidate, Raul Cubas.

Cubas, a local business tycoon, was originally candidate to the vice-presidency. That position is now occupied by Argana, who sat on the Supreme Court of Justice during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89).

But tension has been running high within the governing party, especially since Cubas resisted Wasmosy’s participation in the campaign.

The magnate also raised hackles among the country’s military leadership by announcing that if were elected president, he would pardon Oviedo. The military chiefs are afraid that if Cubas invites Oviedo to become part of the new government, the former general will take reprisals against those who dishonourably discharged him from the army.

Some observers say that if the Colorado Party wins the elections, the Wasmosy administration and the party leadership will go to the courts to challenge Cubas’ candidacy and put Argana in the presidency.

Oviedo supporters, meanwhile, accuse Wasmosy of seeking a triumph for the opposition, to which he was forced to turn in order to govern due to the lack of support from his own party. Analysts point out that a Democratic Alliance triumph would mean the president would not have to seek legal loopholes to prevent a Colorado Party candidate rejected by the military chiefs from taking office.

Raquel Marin, Oviedo’s wife, labelled Wasmosy a “traitor who has infiltrated the Colorado Party.” At a rally held, suggestively, in the town named ‘Coronel Oviedo’ on Sunday, the former general – in a taped message – urged his followers “to squash the Alliance,” and called for Wasmosy’s resignation in leaflets that were distributed.

But analysts say even a week-long suspension of the elections would not resolve the problems presented by the flooding, because as the National Emergency Committee has warned, more rain is predicted.

In the capital, the Paraguay river has risen above the critical level of eight metres, and within the next two months the total 20,000 people affected in Asuncion could rise to 50,000, because the rains seen in the past six months have been equivalent to the average usually registered in two years.

Laino closed his election campaign with the message that “after 50 years of corruption, we have reached a crossroads: we can either stick with them [the Colorado Party] on the way towards an even worse disaster, or we can change with the Alliance.”

Foreign Minister Guido di Tella from Argentina – one of Paraguay’s partners in the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), along with Brazil and Uruguay – said “it is interesting that the results of the election are shrouded in uncertainty, which is inseparable from democracy.”

Wasmosy personally ensured Argentine President Carlos Menem that “the elections will take place as scheduled,” said di Tella.

Paraguay’s Deputy Foreign Minister Leila Rachid said last week during the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the OAS in Colombia that “never again” would there be military juntas in Paraguay, which has “an unyielding commitment to democracy.”