A History of Paraguay
By Baruja, Paiva & Pinto
Chapter 18

Prisoner Oviedo happens to be Colorado’s party by the preference ruler, the engineer Raúl Cubas Grau,a member more than the circle of the macro companies of Itaipú, and with strong bow and fineries with Wasmosy. There emerged a tremendous preoccupation. If Wasmosy absolutely didn’t attend the governmental gesture of own interests, this last one presented an image too similar to it and with the future appreciation of an obvious continue of the previous one

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This was latent in the sectors, electors, and critics that lamentably were an absolute minor in the country. The candidate to vice president whom accompanied him was Dr. Luis María Argaña, given by the interior successors to be the President’s candidate. Argaña was one of the most genuine and loyal representative of strosnism, resisted by a sector that was important in the party. With an excluding speech, reactionary, offensive, almost cavern, he didn’t gain anything else but the rejection of the urban cities; but achieved an important approach to the great electoral mass, appealing the blind fanatism by a great spectrum of the population not urban, familiarizing the polarized postures and appealing to what they wanted to believe in him, the turn of the better times ( ). Like that, some of his expressions were: “Still if the party’s candidate was Donald Duck, we have to vote for the colorados”, “To those that don’t agree (with the directives) with the party will be thrown out”, “The worst of the colorados is still better than the other party”, “There will always be January 13” (the date of conspiracy revolt that increased power in the Colorado party).

But the tangible reason is that the opposition, starting from an ample electoral alliance where almost every representative from the opposition, did not achieve to agglutinate a sufficient electoral mass to interest the society. Various errors emerged from the proposal of the opposition. Under popular profile, with an absence with a total analytic capacity of the electorate, drained of selective capacity, under the Strossner government; they erroneously planted the fight, and resoundingly lost. In the elections on May 10, 1998, this electorate chose to crack the Colorado party, dismantling in 3 antigenic fractions, giving 54% of their votes. It was all clear. The country’s citizens were not electing. They were voting. Without a jury, without a valid reason, this gave him a confidence of the government’s party; in the midst of the cautious votes (public workers) more the extraordinary electoral weight of the country’s interior, to the other people’s political swings of the capital, by lack of efficient communication

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Meanwhile, the country sank insensitively towards the precipice. The question that emerged was: Why did they vote again for this party? They stole incommensurably from the state. It explained by saying that there was no conscience between them. Neither did the opposition do much to change this part of the history. The little attractive and confidence figure of the opposite candidate, Dr.Domingo Isabelino Latino Figueredo, worn away, resisted and repelled by big electorate sectors, saw resoundingly lose his aspirations, without receptive capacity and conviction.

A sample more than the tremendous harm to the Paraguayan society by the stronista regime was that actually there didn’t exist politics with open popular essence, overall in the opposite sector. The opposition is paying severe consequences even though in the mid century of persecution, death and exile. The opponents maintained confronting the regime, within the confines of the republic, including the exterior, it allowed them for various year of authoritarianism was that they could economically solvent in an autonomous form, starting from the persecutions; they could auto finance themselves, maintaining to stay away from the tentacles of the dictator. So that way, that in the actual life, surprised by the opposition, with figures with a net of intellectual level and good conditions, with personalities that emerged from spheres that were most well off with very little bows with the popular class. It cannot be pretended an appreciation with the left tendency to these affirmations, but it is evident, that being Asunción, the official capital, the only opposition that couldn’t completely and absolutely fall under the political manipulation and alienation with the regimen’s ideology, from her these figures were form. The restlessness and critiques that was the capital, maintained in the midst of the meager but latent (for the dictatorship) surged of information, and site of the few boundaries of intellectuals maintained stoic from the dictator’s bullying. The leaders in the interior, without any protection, simply were exterminated by the regime during the hardest persecution years.

The tangible reason by all these situations that blossomed over the country was that the Colorado party was in a profound crisis, and the irresolute fragmentation between the politics and the corporate groups between so many years were disappearing more to the party. With this irresolute crisis, they couldn’t propose responses to the valid solutions. They didn’t plant concrete and defined proposals. Their principal exponents were sent to a delicate and interminable fight without any solution.

The eternal interest groups, from the stronism groups, they couldn’t come up with tangible solutions, because their solution was in direct collision with each other. The Colorado doctrine was conscious of them. The party kept pressed, cautious, used and abused in fine antagonists. With a tremendous docile electoral and malevolence in the interior, it was excessively pernicious that these factual groups, owners of the tremendous economic capacity to be continuing to captivate its electors.

Like that were the majority of the visible heads in the political party in Asunción, that lacked the fundamental element to conquer the town, in where the mayor affinity in its sentiments, in its likes, in its dreams, to its traditions. With more arrangement with good voluntaries, they couldn’t undo from this bulky burden of supporting the act of being away from the daily realities in the republic’s interior, where it really was radical in the electoral weight. Much of these politics didn’t have any idea how to talk in the modern language, the guaraní. A lot of the Colorado party’s actual exponents also suffered the same lack but in that case, the motive was distinct. These politics, the doctrinaires, belonged to the strongest circle of power, and for the most part, they were cradles that belonged to the surroundings that maintained for long years of dictatorship, in which, it also made it go apart from the city. But the Colorado party’s advantage was the tremendous alienation in the country, starting from the libertades, which were not able to lift up their heads but still maintained in the power that was corrupt and inapt

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This simple situation maintained because of the irrational fanatism, divided between ignorant and the public workers, another important electoral elections with little salary, with insignificant benefits with a social assistance was continuing to this perverse conception of the civic life. And in the field, the people, ignorant of their realities with little information, used, manipulated, and mistreated, propped up the power. It was obvious that this point was one of the most terrible inheritances to the insisting dictatorship.

Cubas’ Presidency:

Cubas ascended on August 15, 1998. Oviedo who had the real power was set free from prison and Cubas was barely in charge. From there, the country collapsed. The Judicial Power gave power to the President to fulfill emanated sentences. This was denied to accept, compromising to the republic’s same institutional life. The Congress, with an important fraction of officialism in opposition to Cubas, cheered that it produced an institutional break by the President’s arbitrary determination, impelled a political jury to dismiss it.
Taking a risk in his position, Oviedo, having only Cubas as his protector, wanted to change his situation as much as the President himself. Launching a candidate of the Colorado party in 1999, they manipulated the Justicial Electoral (Judicial branch) and the military spheres, promoted attacks to member of the Supreme Court, members of the Parliament, trying to send terrorists toward all the oppositions of their party, and also attacked the same republic institutions. In the midst of the messianic speech, violent and threatening, they instigated their party members for a popular revolt, a civil war, and a strategy for better communication planting the Supreme Court members’ renunciation, and the Parliament’s dissolution, the two powers that made up the executive power.

All this scaling of violence openly instigated by oviedismo (beyond the UNACE movement ) ended the vicepresident Dr. Argaña’s assassination. This horrifying situation ignited the citizens that in the previous times they saw the fearless Oviedo and his people announced the violence with a sad phrase: “We will make the rivers run with blood if they don’t accept our existence.” Oviedo, believing that from Argaña’s death there would be an incontrollable revolt, creating a civil war; where it pretended that Cubas would have a possibility to decree an exception that would dissolve the congress and the negotiations to obtain judicial whitening. A big error, the citizens narrowed rows before they attempted the size and without considering positions in favor, they demanded the destitution of the President to the Congress.

A multitude met in the Congress seat, conformed by the youth and the citizens, that before the eventual congretional dissolution, or for possible attacks on the building by Oviedistas, they formed a human mass to defend it. It was on March 23, 1999.

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