POLITICS-PARAGUAY: Ex-General’s Fate in Brazilian Hands

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 12 2000 (IPS) - The fate of former Paraguayan army chief Lino Oviedo now depends on Brazilian justice authorities, who ordered his imprisonment and will ultimately rule on Asuncion’s request for his extradition.

The decision will be in favour of extradition and will be emitted within 10 days, commented Brazil’s justice minister José Gregori. He said the Federal Superior Court will announce its ruling after consulting with the foreign ministries of both countries.

The Paraguayan government accuses Oviedo of participating in the assassination of vice-president Luis María Argaña on March 23, 1999.

Asuncion also says he is responsible for the attempted military coup last month, on May 19, but the former general has denied involvement, claiming he is being falsely accused by his political enemies.

“General Oviedo will remain under arrest” while the Superior Court waits for “the government of Paraguay to present the necessary documentation for an extradition trial,” reported the Foreign Relations Ministry.

Arrested Sunday evening by Brazil’s Federal Police in Foz de Iguazú, a city on the border with Paraguay, Oviedo was transferred to Brasilia Monday to await the legal ruling.

Among the items found when he was arrested in an apartment rented by a friend were a 38-calibre revolver, nearly 3,000 dollars, and 10 cellular phones – most likely used to communicate with his supporters in Paraguay.

Oviedo’s Brazilian attorneys, Joaquim Alves Bastos and Inemar Pena Marinho, said they would try to win his release with a petition of habeas corpus.

The police accuse the former army chief of using false documents and illegally carrying a firearm. But he is in prison on the order of the Superior Court, which called for his arrest at the request of Paraguayan justice authorities and as a preventive measure in the extradition proceedings.

Oviedo had been given a 10-year prison sentence in Paraguay for an attempted coup d’etat in 1996 against then-president Juan Carlos Wasmosy. He was thus unable to run for president in the 1998 elections, but his popularity helped assure the victory of his ally, Raúl Cubas, who ordered Oviedo’s release once he took office.

The assassination of Argaña – who had been a bitter rival of Oviedo and Cubas – unleashed an institutional crisis that led the former general to seek asylum in neighbouring Argentina. Cubas, meanwhile, resigned from the presidency and sought refuge in Brazil. The president of Congress, Luis González Macchi, then succeeded to the national presidency.

Oviedo, Cubas, González Macchi, Wasmosy and Argaña all belong to the Colorado Party, which has governed Paraguay uninterrupted since 1948. The party’s internal disputes have provoked the chain of political crises affecting Paraguay since the fall of the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship in February 1989.

The animosity between Oviedo and Argaña, who had served as president of the Supreme Court of Justice during the Stroessner regime, dated back at least to 1992.

The military official, who commanded the army’s first division, said that year he would take up arms to oppose any eventual victory of Argaña as presidential candidate of the Colorado Party.

The tallying of the votes during the party’s internal elections was suspended when Argaña was said to have the lead. The vote was restarted after a crisis in which the US embassy intervened, ultimately handing Wasmosy the Colorado Party’s presidential candidacy.

Last December 9, one day before the new government in Argentina took office, Oviedo – living in exile in the southern region of Patagonia – went into hiding, supposedly in the Paraguayan interior. He granted some press interviews, apparently from a ranch in Paraguay, in which he stated he had the popular and political support to take power whenever he considered it convenient.

The Paraguayan authorities, however, reported several weeks ago that Oviedo was most likely in Brazil. The search for the former army leader intensified following the failed coup attempt in Asuncion in May.

The Brazilian government hopes the threat Oviedo presents for the political stability of neighbouring Paraguay will be neutralised in the current process.

The Brazilian government responded to Oviedo’s two coup attempts with warnings that a rupture in the institutional order in Paraguay would mean the nation’s automatic exclusion from the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), based on a democratic clause approved by all members of the bloc – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

As a prisoner held in Paraguay, the popular former general could constitute an even greater danger for a fragile democratic system. But the decision is not in the hands of the Brazilian government, nor does it depend on political considerations, but only on the legal assessment of the Superior Court.

Brazil is still home to Paraguayan political exiles Cubas and Stroessner.