The hasty impeachment of Paraguay’s President Fernando Lugo by the Congress on June 22 has brought back memories of the bad old days of Latin American history marked by coup d’états. This is the third overthrow of a democratically-elected president in the New Latin America, which had started its confident march on the path of democracy, seeking a new destiny in the twenty-first century. The previous cases were the ouster of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002 and Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. The difference in the case of Paraguay was the absence of two critical ingredients of a classic Latin American coup: military and the Big Brother from the north, the US. This one was a constitutional coup staged by an overwhelming majority of the elected representatives of both houses of the Congress. The lower house voted 76-1 and the senate 36-4.
The impeachment, however, is not surprising. It was being plotted from the very first day of Lugo’s assumption of office in 2008, after his historic victory over the mighty right-wing Colorado party which had ruled the country continuously in the previous sixty-one years. What was surprising was that the Colorado oligarchs had allowed Lugo, a leftist Bishop of the Poor, a political outsider and new comer, to win in the 2008 elections. Their overconfidence and underestimation of Lugo, coupled with the division within the party leadership, did them in.