Thu12Jul - LONDON - Paraguay coup explained

[Disco_Destroyer]

PARAGUAY: EMERGENCY PUBLIC MEETING!
Behind the “Express Coup D’Etat” -
What Does it Mean for Paraguay & the Region?

Thursday July 12, 6.30-8.30pm
At the ‘Discus’ Room, Unite House, 128 Theobalds Road, London, WC1X 8TN
Please circulate widely – come & show your support for democracy & social progress in Latin America!


Speakers to include:
· Ricardo Medina, member of the Front for the Defence of Democracy in Paraguay (GB), radio journalist, correspondent of Radio Fe y Alegria (Paraguay), researcher of the National Archives of Political History of Richmond & collaborator of the academic journal Latin American Research Review.
· Richard Gott, writer
· Jeremy Corbyn MP
· Tony Burke, Assistant General Secretary, Unite the Union
· Francisco Dominguez, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign
· Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition (pers cap)
· Plus a short film showing & more to be confirmed


Called by the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. Supported by Unite the Union with thanks to Thompsons Solicitors.



Please register in advance if possible to info@venezuelasolidarity.co.uk and sign up plus invite people on Facebook here




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[TonyGosling]

Covert US Op: The Paraguayan Coup
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31741
by Bill Van Auken - Global Research, July 3, 2012
World Socialist Web Site

The so-called constitutional coup that ousted Paraguay’s elected President Fernando Lugo on June 22 is another indication of the mounting class tensions that are gripping Latin America and the world as a whole, making democratic forms of rule under capitalism ever more unsustainable.

There is every reason to believe that the hurried impeachment of Lugo—forced through both houses of the Paraguayan parliament in barely 30 hours after he was charged by the two traditional parties of the country’s ruling oligarchy—was carried out with the indispensable complicity of US imperialism.

A former Catholic cleric and proponent of Liberation Theology, Lugo was elected in 2008, promising to combat corruption and promote “socially responsible capitalism.”

Without any party of his own, he came into office on the back of a coalition that joined a combination of left-nationalist groups, peasant and indigenous associations with the Liberal Party, a right-wing instrument of the Paraguayan oligarchy, which had been tolerated as a tame opposition under the 35-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. It was Lugo’s vice president, Liberal Party leader Fernando Franco, who donned the presidential sash after supporting the impeachment of his former running mate.

Committed to the defense of private property and with all the real levers of power remaining in the hands of the Liberals and Stroessner’s Colorados, who ruled the country for six decades before the 2008 election, Lugo was able to carry out little in the way of reforms, while he adapted himself continuously to Paraguayan reaction.

Nonetheless, the ruling oligarchy as well as the transnational agricultural interests found his presidency intolerable, fearing that it was generating false expectations among the masses of Paraguayan workers and oppressed. In particular there was concern that masses of landless peasants, receiving nothing in the way of genuine agrarian reform from the government, would take matters into their own hands. In a country where 2 percent of the population controls more than 75 percent of the land, and where much of this land was expropriated from its owners and handed out to favored Colorado politicians under the Stroessner dictatorship, there is ample reason for such fear.

The principal pretext for the impeachment was a massacre unleashed by Paraguayan security forces as they attempted to evict some 100 peasant farmers occupying the land of a wealthy former Stroessner-era Colorado politician. Eleven peasants and six policemen were killed, while scores more were wounded and arrested. The right-wing parties in the Paraguayan Congress blamed Lugo not for gunning down peasants, but for failing to carry out more thorough repression.

The parallels between the June 2012 coup in Paraguay and the June 2009 coup that toppled the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, are obvious. In both cases, the political representatives of oligarchical ruling classes threw out presidents who had postured as “lefts,” bitterly opposing even the paltriest reforms as intolerable infringements upon their wealth and power. And in both cases legal and constitutional statutes were twisted to serve wholly antidemocratic ends.

While in Zelaya’s case, troops stormed the presidential palace and hustled the pajama-clad president onto an aircraft that flew him into exile, such methods proved unnecessary in the case of Lugo, who meekly and publicly accepted his impeachment, only joining protests after the fact. In Paraguay as in Honduras, however, the real violence will undoubtedly unfold in the aftermath of the coup, directed against the country’s workers, peasants and students.

The social structures of the two countries also share much in common, with Paraguay the second poorest country in South America and Honduras the second poorest country in Central America and with social inequality driven to unprecedented levels, in large measure due to the penetration of transnational capital.

And both countries have been the focus of attention of the US military and intelligence apparatus, which shares intimate connections with its local counterparts. Security forces in both countries have been trained and advised by the Pentagon and would not support the overthrow of an existing government without its approval.

In Honduras, Washington has installed its largest military base in Latin America. And, in the period leading up to Lugo’s removal from office, US generals were reportedly involved in negotiations for securing a strategic base with the same right-wing politicians who organized Lugo’s impeachment.

In August of last year, ABC Color, Paraguay’s main right-wing daily, reported that Deputy Jose Lopez Chavez, the head of the Commission on Defense of the lower house of the Paraguayan Congress, reported meeting with a group of US generals visiting the country to discuss the installation of an American base in Paraguay’s thinly populated Chaco region. Lopez Chavez is a leader of a dissident faction of the Colorado Party headed by former coup leader and retired general Lino Oviedo and one of the organizers of the parliamentary coup.

While Lugo had sought to placate Washington and allowed US special forces troops into the country to train Paraguayan troops in “counter-terrorism” tactics and “advanced military operations in urban terrain,” he balked at a large-scale exercise proposed by the Pentagon for 2010. A secret US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks reports that embassy officials had sought to “vigorously engage” government ministers and Paraguayan military commanders to force acceptance of the operation, known as “New Horizon.” The cable accused Lugo of getting “cold feet” and of seeking to curry favor with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in order to get a better deal on oil imports.

Other secret cables dating back to 2009 released by WikiLeaks carry titles such as “Paraguayan pols plot parliamentary putsch” and “Lugo impeachment rumors are back.” They indicate that the US embassy was intimately familiar with—and undoubtedly secretly involved in—the conspiracies being hatched by the Paraguayan right.

The Paraguayan coup, following the coup in Honduras and the expanding US involvement in the “drug war” in Mexico and Central America, is another indication that with American capitalism confronting powerful economic rivals in China and Europe, the Obama administration is turning ever more openly to counterrevolutionary conspiracies and military force in the drive to reassert US hegemony in Latin America.

The events in both Paraguay and Honduras have proven once again that working people in Latin America cannot defeat imperialist intervention and the oppression by native ruling classes outside of the independent political mobilization of the working class in struggle for socialism. In both countries, counterrevolutionary operations were facilitated by the political subordination of the workers, peasants and oppressed to capitalist politicians—Lugo and Zelaya—who were in turn under the thumb of right-wing bourgeois parties.

Bill Van Auken is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Bill Van Auken

[TonyGosling]

Jul 4, 2012
THE ROVING EYE
Welcome to 'democraship'
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NG04Ak05.html

Let's start with a bomb. Over 10 days ago a new brand of coup d'etat took place in Paraguay against elected president Fernando Lugo. It was virtually unnoticed by global corporate media.

Anything unexpected? Not really. A March 2009 cable from the US Embassy in Asuncion, revealed by WikiLeaks, [1] had already detailed how oligarchs in Paraguay were busy devising a "democratic coup" in congress to depose Lugo.

At the time, the US embassy noted political conditions were not ideal for a coup. Key among the plotters was former president Nicanor Duarte (2003 to 2008), severely bashed by progressive South American governments for having allowed US Special

Forces in Paraguayan soil to conduct "educational courses", "domestic peacekeeping operations" and "counter-terrorism training".

This US Special Forces drive was happening decades after "one of our b******", notorious dictator-general Alfredo Stroessner (in power from 1954 to 1989) had allowed the set up of a giant US-owned semi-clandestine landing strip near the Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay Triple Border - later to become part of the war on drugs, and then the war on terror.

So it's a no-brainer which was the first government to recognize last Friday's coup plotters in Paraguay: the United States of America.

Forget about sharing our cake
Progressive Egyptians are now realizing new democracies take years, sometimes decades, of co-existing with the nightmare of dictatorship. It happened, for instance, in Brazil - now universally lauded as a new, global powerhouse. During the 1980s and 1990s, some form of institutional re-democratization was going on. But for years Brazil really did not turn into a full democracy - economically, socially and culturally. It took a long 17 years - until president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva first came to power in 2002 - for Brazil to start on the road of becoming less outrageously unequal than its rapacious ruling classes always wanted it to be.

The same historical process is now at work in both Egypt and Paraguay. Both countries suffered dictatorships for decades. When a dictatorship seems to be on its death throes, only political parties linked - or mildly tolerated - by the ancien regime find themselves in the best position to profit from the long, tortuous transition towards democracy. These countries then become what Brazilian political scientist Emir Sader has dubbed "democraships".

This applies to the Liberal Party in Paraguay and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In the Egyptian presidential election, we had a former Hosni Mubarak crony against an Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) cadre. It remains to be seen whether the Orwellian SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) in Egypt will allow this new "democraship" to turn into a real democracy, and to what extent the Ikhwan is fully committed to the notion of democracy.

Paraguay was already in a more advanced stage than Egypt. Yet four years after a democratic presidential election, congress was still dominated by two dictatorship-friendly parties, Liberal and Colorado. It was a piece of cake for this bipartisan oligarchy to gang up and take Lugo down.

A medium-rare impeachment, please
Lugo was evicted by a coup disguised as an impeachment, processed in only 24 hours. Regime change practitioners in Washington must have been ecstatic; if only we could do that in Syria ...

This simulacrum had to be concocted by what is the most corrupt senate in the Americas - and that's a huge understatement. Lugo was found guilty of incompetence in dealing with a very murky story linked - inevitably - with an issue that is absolutely key all across the developing world: agrarian reform.

On June 15, a group of policemen and commandos about to enforce an eviction order in Curuguaty, 200 kilometers from Asuncion, close to the Brazilian border, was ambushed by snipers infiltrated among farmers. The order came from a judge protecting a wealthy landowner, Blas Riquelme, not by accident a former president of the Colorado party and a former senator.

Through legal shenanigans, he had taken possession of 2,000 hectares that actually belonged to the Paraguayan state. These lands were then occupied by landless peasants, who for some time had been asking the Lugo government to redistribute them.

The School of the Americas Watch has already documented how enormous tracts of land in Paraguay were actually stolen from farmers and "donated" to military and upper-class cronies during those decades under the Stroessner dictatorship.

The result in Curuguaty was 17 dead - six policemen and 11 farmers - and at least 50 wounded. It simply doesn't make sense; the elite members of the eviction force, a hardcore unit named Special Operations Group, were trained in counterinsurgency tactics in Colombia - under the right-wing Uribe government - as part of the US-concocted Plan Colombia.

Plan Paraguay, for its part, was very simple; absolute criminalization of every peasant organization, forcing them to leave the countryside for transnational agribusiness.

So this was, essentially, a trap. Paraguay's rabid right-wingers - joined to the hip with Washington, for example trying to prevent, by all means, Venezuela's entrance into the Mercosur common market - were just waiting to pounce on a regime that had not, yet, affected its interests, but had opened up plenty of spaces for social protest and popular organization.

Lugo, a former bishop elected in 2008 with large rural support, might have seen it coming, but he did nothing to stop it. Compared with his power to mobilize people in the streets, he had minimum support in Congress: only two senators. Over 40% of Paraguayans live in the countryside, but they are hardly mobilized. And 30% live under the poverty line.

The "winners" in Paraguay had to be the usual suspects: the landowning oligarchy - and its concerted campaign to demonize farmers; multinational agribusiness interests such as Monsanto; and the Monsanto-linked media (as in the ABC Color daily, which accused ministers not acting as Monsanto stooges of being "corrupt").

Agribusiness giants such as Monsanto and Cargill pay virtually no taxes in Paraguay because of the right-wing controlled Congress. Landowners don't pay taxes. Needless to add, Paraguay is one of the most unequal countries in the world; 85% of land - like 30 million hectares - is controlled by the 2% composing the rural aristocracy, a great deal of them involved in land speculation.

Thus their Miami Vice-style mansions in Uruguay's hip Punta del Este resort or, for that matter, Miami Beach; the money, of course, is in the Cayman islands. Paraguay is de facto ruled by this cream of the 2% mixing agribusiness with the neoliberal financial casino.

And by the way, as Martin Almada, a top Paraguayan human-rights activist and alternative Nobel Peace Prize winner, has noted, this concerns Brazilian landowners as well. The wealthiest soya bean producer in Paraguay is a "Braziguayan", double nationality holder Tranquilo Favero, who made his fortune under Stroessner.

A coup on the rocks, please
The Union of South American Nations (Unasur) treated what happened in Paraguay for what it is; a coup. Same with Mercosur. The contrast with Washington's position couldn't be more glaring. Coup plotter Federico Franco is a darling of the US Embassy in Asuncion.

Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela and Ecuador won't recognize the coup plotters. Venezuela cut off oil sales to Paraguay. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has proposed the expulsion of Paraguay from both Unasur and Mercosur.

Paraguay is already suspended; this means coup plotter Federico Franco was prevented from attending a key Mercosur meeting last week in Mendoza, Argentina, when the temporary Mercosur presidency would be handed over to Paraguay. The Paraguayan oligarchy - under Washington's orders - was blocking Venezuela's entrance in Mercosur. Not anymore; Venezuela becomes a full member by the end of the month.

Yet South American progressive governments must be very careful. If Paraguay is expelled from both Unasur and Mercosur, it will inevitably ask Washington for commercial and military help. That could translate into a nightmare - US military bases in Paraguay.

Paraguay's oligarchs, the media they control, and last but not least the reactionary Catholic church hierarchy, calculate they will extend their power when elections take place in April 2013.

Lugo was in fact facing a Sisyphean task - trying to steer a weak state, with minimum income from taxes (less than 12% of GNP), and under severe pressure by powerful transnational lobbies and comprador elites. This, by the way, is the structural reality of a great deal of Latin America - and, roughly, one might add, of Egypt.

On a geopolitical level, what progressives everywhere - from South and North America to the Arab world - should worry about is how, since the June 2009 coup against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, Latin America is being turned into a giant laboratory testing all sorts of "democratic" coup d'etat mutations.

Paraguay is one such mutation. Another one was the failed coup against Ecuador's Rafael Correa in September 2010. All these coups are against progressive governments who privilege social advances.

Not by accident, Correa, who was almost evicted by a coup, said that if it succeeded this time in Paraguay it would "open a dangerous precedent" in the whole region.

And in terms of poetic justice, nothing beats Correa - the target of a coup - currently studying the possibility of offering political asylum to Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks revealed, among other things, how the Paraguayan elite was plotting their own coup.

In Egypt, a military coup happened even before a presidential election. Progressive Egyptians who actually led the Arab Spring must be extremely alert; Paraguay is showing how the rocky road towards democracy may end up in a "democraship".

Note: 1. See here


Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

[TonyGosling]

Seven ways of reporting on a coup: the overthrow of Paraguayan president Lugo

http://wallofcontroversy.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/seven-ways-of-report ing-on-a-coup-the-overthrow-of-paraguayan-president-lugo/
There is one person whose important opinion has been strangely absent during the last few weeks of turmoil in Paraguay: that person being, of course, Fernando Lugo himself. On Thursday [July 12th] Lugo broke his silence giving an exclusive interview on Russia Today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXIsvCjgZv0

RT: Mr. President, right after you were voted out of office, you spoke as if you were resigning of your own accord. You also looked as if you weren’t quite yourself. Later we saw a more energetic Lugo, like the one we see now. So why did you fail to be as convincing in your resistance to the coup in those first hours?
FL: I saw people out in the square. They wanted me to go because of the ministers. I knew that a new massacre was being prepared. I am a convicted pacifist. I didn’t want to see any Paraguayan lose their blood as a result of violence. That is why we went along with this illegal and unfair process. It was a politically-charged trial disguised as a constitutional process. As one MP said, it all looked like a circus designed to depose a democratically-elected president.

Weekend Edition July 13-15, 2012
[]
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/13/return-of-the-coups/
From Honduras to Paraguay



Return of the Coups

by GABRIEL ROSSMAN

On June 22, the Paraguayan Congress impeached President Fernando Lugo, a progressive who assumed office in 2008. Although technically legal, Lugo’s removal threatens the very integrity of democracy in Paraguay. It is the latest in a disconcerting series of attacks against progressive governments in South America that highlights the vulnerability of its nascent democratic institutions and calls into question the trend of democratization in the region.

Lugo’s victorious election campaign was historic. It ended more than 60 years of dominance by the Colorado Party. This right-wing coalition of landed and military elites used violence and coercion to dominate Paraguay through the extensive state bureaucracy created by dictator Alfredo Strossner, a Colorado strongman who ruled from 1954 to 1989. The Party’s legitimacy gradually eroded through its land-grabs and corruption scandals involving high-level officials. It was also implicated in political assassinations, most notably that of Vice President Luis Maria Argana in 1999, after which President Raul Cubas was forced to resign and flee the country.

Lugo, a progressive who proposed numerous social reforms, was widely known in Paraguay as the “bishop of the poor.” Pledging to fight corruption, reduce poverty, and enact agrarian reform in a country where 38 percent of people live in poverty and 2 percent of the population controls 75 percent of fertile land, Lugo won 41 percent of the popular vote in 2008, beating out the Colorado candidate by 10 percentage points. Despite this electoral success, the conservative legislature and the tenuous coalition of center-right parties that helped bring him to power systematically frustrated Lugo’s progressive efforts at reform.

The Impeachment

Lugo was impeached on grounds of “malfeasance” after 17 people were killed in a clash between police and landless squatters protesting land inequality. This legal formality, however, obscures the fact that Lugo’s ouster, long-desired by those who opposed his democratic reforms, was politically motivated.

A leaked 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable claimed that the “shared goal” of General Lino Oviedo and ex-President Nicanor Frutos, both Colorado party members, was “to change the current political equation, break the political deadlock in Congress, impeach Lugo and regain their own political relevance.” The cable, which was classified as “secret,” includes this prophetic sentence: “Oviedo’s dream scenario involves legally impeaching Lugo, even if on spurious grounds.”

South American governments from all across the political spectrum immediately condemned Lugo’s abrupt removal (he was given less than 24 hours notice and just two hours to defend himself). Mercosur suspended Paraguay and refused to recognize the new government. Venezuela unilaterally halted all fuel shipments to Asuncion. Brazil and Mexico withdrew their ambassadors, as did Colombia, whose president, Juan Manuel Santos, is a staunch conservative. Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner publicly called Lugo’s impeachment a “coup d’état.”

Regional Trend?

The removal of Lugo is particularly disturbing because it is the latest in a series of actions against progressive populist governments in Latin America. In a 2009 coup, democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who had raised the national minimum wage despite strong opposition from the business elite, was removed at gunpoint. In 2010, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa was tear-gassed, assaulted, and held captive by insurgent police officers in an attempted coup that ended in a shootout.

An international fact-finding team arrived in Asuncion on Monday to collect information on the events leading up to the impeachment, Lugo’s satellite government, and the major players in the recent events. The U.S. State Department said it was “quite concerned” about the rapidity of Lugo’s impeachment. The United States is unlikely to take a more definitive stance until the OAS team submits its report in the coming days.

One thing is certain: few people want a repeat of what happened in Honduras. Since the 2009 coup, political dissidents have been assassinated, minorities have been targeted, and violence and disorder have ensued. Honduras now has the world’s highest homicide rate.

The fact-finding mission’s report should elucidate the details of a political upheaval that remains opaque. So far, there is no indication that any outside powers played a role in the coup.

The impeachment’s rapidity and the vote’s unprecedented margin (in the House of Representatives, the vote was 73 in favor and 1 against impeachment) suggest that Lugo’s impeachment was not a response to his “malfeasance” surrounding the killings by the police. It was coordinated and politically motivated, likely by domestic landowning and business elites, with powerful allies in Congress, who opposed Lugo’s progressive agenda and preferred a return to the right-wing Colorado party.

Ironically, the state that has benefitted the most from Lugo’s ouster may be Venezuela. Venezuela was selected to replace Paraguay in Mercosur after Paraguay’s membership was suspended.

Gabriel Rossman is an intern with Foreign Policy in Focus, where this essay originally appeared.