Paraguay's ruling party tested

ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — For 60 years, Paraguay's Colorado Party has used political patronage — as well as fraud and violence — to remain in control of the country, longer than any other political party in the world that's still in power.

Now Fernando Lugo, 48, a country priest with no previous political experience, appears poised to bring that long run to an end.

Lugo won the endorsement of Paraguay's top six opposition parties July 18. If the coalition holds, he seems likely to wrest control of the country next spring from the Colorado Party, which has been seen as inseparable from the government.

Party chieftains

In Paraguay, party chieftains run everything from the power company to the police department. Receiving basic services often means asking the neighborhood Colorado office for help.

"The Colorado Party in its long history has run its government machine and run the electoral judicial system and used state properties for political campaigns, but it's a model that's worn out," Lugo said. "In 60 years, it didn't give a satisfactory response to the big social needs of the country."

With less than nine months to go before the vote April 20, Lugo's presidential victory is far from secure, however. Political coalitions such as the one that's backing him, known as Concertación, have fallen apart before on the eve of elections.

The Colorados, who control the country's electoral court and Supreme Court, also are expected to argue that Lugo's status as a priest bans him from holding elected office.

Lugo announced last December that he'd left the priesthood, but the Vatican hasn't officially released him from his duties.

Paraguay has long been known as a landlocked backwater and a haven for smugglers, Nazi war criminals and religious outcasts. With 6.7 million residents, it's one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere and one of the region's most economically divided. Nearly half the population lives in poverty.

Despite the dismal numbers, Sen. Martin Chiola, the Colorado Party's vice leader in the senate, said the party deserved credit for steering the country through a civil war, the Cold War and all manner of political turmoil. Colorado governments include the brutal 35-year rule of dictator Alfredo Stroessner.

Jobs to party members

For years, public-sector jobs went only to party members, which encouraged governments to build enormous bureaucracies that functioned as campaign machines, political columnist Alfredo Boccia Paz said. He estimated that some 200,000 people work in the public sector.

"They are like electoral soldiers for the Colorado Party," he said. "The lack of alternation in power, which is very important in a democracy, meant that no one challenged the structure of the party becoming the same as the state's."

Lugo's rise has been helped by his reputation as a political outsider who spent years championing social causes in the country's most impoverished district, San Pedro, in central Paraguay.

What Lugo would do as president is the subject of speculation. The Colorados have accused him of being a radical socialist. Some suggest he'd ally himself with regional leftist leaders, such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Bolivian President Evo Morales.

Lugo was vague about his agenda in the interview.

He suggests that discussing his ideology is a throwback to a different time.

"It's a discussion from the 1970s," he said. "We just need bread, and it doesn't matter whether it's from the right or the left hand."