We’re equating the theft of an election to a conversation about the weather, something you spend a few minutes left over and then go back to business as usual. It no longer shocks us, it does not provoke reactions of indignation or demands for explanations. Something like “let’s all say together, what an outrage! so we can go out and play”, as stated by Quino, the sociologist humorist of the 20th century.
Between the Mafalda of the ’60s and the wild criollaje of the here and now, 60 years have passed. Instead of investing all that time in consolidating the system of popular representation, we have endeavored to empty it of content, adapting it to each circumstance and modeling it with blows of temporary opportunism.
We will not fall into the naiveté of saying that there was a time when everything was normal. Fraud, the manipulation of lists, the loading of ballot boxes, the falsification of records, the evasion of bulletins, the purchase of identity cards, the hauling of voters, the compulsive suffrage of public officials… everything is a creative adaptation of the pathological secretions left behind. for the dictatorship. The 1992 Constitution and the 1996 Electoral Code were born with the sacred mission of curing the Republic of all these inherited illnesses, beginning by restoring the citizen’s confidence in the vote as the supreme instrument of the popular will.
And here we are, going through something very similar to a terminal crisis in the political system and facing the worst of nightmares: a combination of malpractice in a body whose health has been undermined by systemic corruption. The images of politicians running towards next April spin like an out of control carousel with a background of circus music. Stupidly smiling faces to which the labels of destroyers of the popular vote are pasted in succession. They are names that would never get around a “cloud of words” without the descriptions of thief, corrupt or cheat being stabbed at them like darts.
They say that the diseases of democracy are cured with more democracy. It is becoming clear that in the Paraguay of the 21st century, that recipe would not be working, judging by what oozes from the electoral system the day after the internal party elections. Therapeutic relentlessness is ineffective. You have to change the diagnosis and medication.
