Portion below; whole thing here:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/34161.html
Public discontent with both the Colorados and the state of the country has fueled the party's misfortunes this year, polls show. Conflicts within the party also have crippled its electoral machinery.
Slightly smaller in area than California, this land-locked country is South America's second poorest, with about a third of its residents living in poverty.
The country also is known as a haven for fugitive Nazis, smugglers and drug traffickers, and it ranked in the 25th percentile of the world's most corrupt countries in an index compiled last year by the watchdog group Transparency International.
For poor Paraguayans such as Trifina Escobar, a housewife in the capital of Asuncion, more than 60 years of Colorado rule is to blame, and she said that many of her poor neighbors planned to vote for Lugo this Sunday.
"We are in bad shape, and we need change," the 59-year-old said. "We have people who don't eat, who are poor, poor, poor, people who live in tents.
"But Paraguayans are so stupid that if you give them just some sugar during election season, they stop being Paraguayans. They vote against their interests."
Lugo has captured disillusioned voters by playing up his story as a former bishop who worked for years in the country's poorest state and entered politics only after he was invited to speak at a massive anti-government rally in March 2006.
The 58-year-old declared his candidacy last year after he left the priesthood, and he's led in the polls ever since. He leads a coalition of parties, the Patriotic Alliance for Change that spans the ideological spectrum.
In a Friday press conference, he said that he'd try to renegotiate unpopular energy treaties with neighboring Brazil and Argentina and redistribute land more equitably to peasant farmers. He said that Paraguay, under his leadership, wouldn't "fall into submission to any other bigger country."
Seizing on such positions, critics have speculated that Lugo would ally himself with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other leftist governments that have denounced U.S. influence in the region. As a bishop, he was a proponent of the Roman Catholic Church's leftist Liberation Theology wing.
Lugo rejected such speculation, saying, "We believe in our own project with our own policies."
No comments:
Post a Comment