Elections in Paraguay: The political party in Latin America that lost only one presidential election in 76 years

One of the most implacable machines of power in Latin America will be put to the test this Sunday.

The Colorado Party, the conservative political force that has ruled Paraguay almost continuously since 1947, faces a tough challenge that day in a one-round election pitting its presidential candidate, Santiago Peña, against several opposition candidates.

Winning at the polls is a specialty of Paraguayan Colorados: they’ve been doing it for decades.

Its supporters attribute that success to the popularity of the party and the performance of their governments. Their critics point out that they have won by suppressing rivals under a military regime, by fraud, or by using the state to win votes in a democracy.

In fact, the only time this party has officially lost a presidential election in the last 76 years It was when ex-bishop Fernando Lugo was elected at the head of an opposition coalition, in 2008.

Lugo was impeached four years later in a devastating political process promoted by the Colorado Party, which returned to power in the next election.

But now another figure is jeopardizing Colorado’s dominance in power, analysts say.

This is not an opposition leader, but someone from the party itself: former president Horacio Cartes, to whom the United States “extraordinary corruption undermining democratic institutions”.

“Replaced the State”

Founded in 1887 and also called the National Republican Association (ANR), the Paraguayan Colorado Party is a dinosaur of Latin American politics.

At a time when other traditional parties in the region are dying out, the Colorados in Paraguay still hold the presidency under the current mandate of Mario Abdo and control the state apparatus that permeates all of society.

A key to this story was the military regime of Alfredo Stroessner, the party-affiliated general who ruled the country with an iron hand between 1954 and 1989.

Stroessner seized power after the 1947 Civil War, when the Colorados returned to the government they had lost decades earlier and a series of conspiracies and coups hatched by men from the party erupted.

During his three-and-a-half-decade rule, Stroessner staged rigged elections every five years that he swept, banning opposition parties, detaining or torturing thousands, and leaving hundreds missing.

So, the boundaries separating the party from the state became increasingly blurred. According to experts, public job exchanges for Colorado mass memberships became the norm.

“In Stroessner’s day you had to join the Colorado Party if you wanted to go to college, and if you wanted to join the military you had to join the Colorado Party,” Paraguayan historian Fabián Chamorro tells BBC Mundo.

“For example, if your father or mother died, you would not resort to social action; you resorted to the red section: political posts in the neighborhoods that served to help the neighbors,” he says. “In other words, the red part replaced the state.”

“What a strange phenomenon”

Another peculiar fact of the Colorado Party is that, despite the abuses and rampant corruption of the military regime, managed to stay in power after the overthrow of Stroessner in a 1989 coup led by his in-laws and right-hand man, General Andrés Rodríguez, also a “colorado”.

Party belonging was passed down from Colorado’s older generations to the newer ones, a feeling some liken to family allegiance to a football club.

“That’s why Colorado is such a strange phenomenon,” explains Chamorro. “It doesn’t matter who the candidate is, it doesn’t matter what their resume is or if they’re a criminal, (…) the identity ballot goes there, without any problem.”

This historian, who is affiliated with Colorado and says he’s fighting to “change it from the inside out,” adds that heVote buying continues to this dayeither in areas of the country’s rural interior, or in poor neighborhoods on land prone to flooding from the Paraguay River, on the outskirts of Asunción.

“There they go, they put you in a car, they take you to vote, you vote and they give you money,” says Chamorro. “All the moves do, but the Colorado Party is the one that moves the most money by having the fabric of the state.”

Colorado Senator Enrique Riera claims so “There is a prebendary and patronage culture in all parties during the time they were in power”.

“They are remnants of the culture of the dictatorship, because the governments in the hands of the opposition do the same and so do the municipalities. I’m not saying it’s right, on the contrary, we’ve been fighting it for a long time, but it’s not an exclusivity (red),” Riera told BBC Mundo.

He points out that there were also democratic parts of the party that were persecuted by the Stroessner regime and that since 1989 elections in Paraguay have been “absolutely democratic”.

“The Colorado Party is a popular, mass party and more than 50% of the population is affiliated with or sympathetic to it,” said this politician who was also mayor of Asunción and Paraguayan education minister.

Colorado’s unique defeat in 2008 has been attributed by many to a bitter division the party had then, more than from acts of corruption or clientelism.

And this month, the Colorados return to the polls with an internal rift that could cost them power, now divided around the controversial figure of Cartes.

“Very Nervous”

The opposition of part of the Colorado Party to the billionaire businessman who ruled Paraguay between 2013 and 2018 is far from new.

“Cartes has been a very authoritarian and dominant figure since he practically bought his 2013 election within the Colorado Party to be a candidate,” said Fernando Masi, a sociologist and economist who directs the Center for Analysis and Diffusion of the Paraguayan Economy (Cadep) leads. .

And he adds that as president he began to gain support in Congress, the judiciary and the prosecution. the rejection of Cartes grew within his own party.

Because of that, and because of his failed attempt to reform the constitution to get reelected, sparking fierce street protests, the Colorados chose Abdo, the son of Stroessner’s private secretary and a symbol of the party’s traditional wing, as their 2018 presidential candidate.

But Cartes maintained his internal pulse with the Abdo sector, and in the December primaries he was not only elected party leader, but also managed to win over Peña, his former Treasury secretary and political dolphin, the Colorado presidential candidacy. .

The following month, the US claimed that “Cartes’s political career was based on and still depends on corrupt means for success” and accused him of being associated with members of Hezbollah, the militant group backed by Iran and regarded by Washington as considered a terrorist group.

Sanctions from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) include that the former president is prevented from using the US financial system.

In addition, four Cartes companies and the Paraguayan Vice President, Hugo Velázquez, were sanctioned.

It was a hard blow to Cartes, who announced the dissolution of his business group and rejected the allegations against him.

“I deny and reject the substance of the allegations, which I consider baseless and unfair,” the former president said in a statement released in July, when the US listed him for corruption before sanctioning him.

In March he said he was “convinced that the truth will come out with time”.

The impact all this will have on the election is uncertain.

Polls on voting intent differ widely, with some putting pro-government leader Peña ahead and others putting opposition Efraín Alegre, who is running for president for a third time.

Former Minister of Public Works in the Lugo government and Chairman of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party coalition of center-right and left-wing forces called National Consultation.

Masi points out that the US sanctions had an effect on the campaign, as they made banks reluctant to extend credit to a Colorado party whose leader and spending manager is Cartes.

“They can’t use the banks and that has made Colorados very nervous because that money is needed not only for the presidential candidate but for all the other candidacies. So there are people who are asking that (Cartes) resign,” Masi told BBC Mundo.

“Obviously, if the Colorado Party wins, it can establish itself as president,” he said. “But if he loses, this will be the time when they will demand his resignation much more forcefully.”