The Electoral Code provides the legal basis and electoral justice the starting whistle. The country is now a huge mural full of bombastic slogans and people smiling without explanation.
Of course, we have already been experiencing a preseason of electoral tone defacement at the hands of the usual violators, those who play to the limit by order of their constituents, the candidates in the race. The leniency that in punitive matters permeates the electoral law allows these little games of rags. When some embarrassed politician in the running is questioned for allowing propaganda outside the time allowed by the code, the answer is always the same: “They are enthusiastic co-religionists who act on their own, I cannot prohibit them from doing so…” and bullshit like that. What the hypocrite is silent about, although everyone knows it, is that the paint, the banners, the posters, the flyers, the vehicles and the house painters were commissioned by the candidate with money smuggled from the public treasury. The cleanup of all the electoral crap left behind by the campaigns will also have to be paid for with taxpayer money.
If there is something difficult, almost impossible, to change, it is customary behaviors, that is, those that originate in customs whose roots go back in time. Politicians and their gangs of smears consider themselves, at election time, owners of cities, avenues, streets, walls, fences, utility poles, trees and even the pavement itself, which is being incorporated as a valuable and endless canvas for reckless painters and under slogan. All this visual pollution activity is carried out in full view and with the patience of those who should apply the regulations that limit the amount of electoral propaganda that can be installed on public roads.
The banners that cross the streets, the posters pasted in endless galleries and the juxtaposition of murals – the last one erasing the slogan of the penultimate one – turn the country into a Third World landscape of the worst kind. The first impression that the traveler who arrives in Asunción receives is that of a visual mess and chaos next to which, cities like Kampala or Mogadishu are Copenhagen.
Will anyone dare to put an end to this shambles?
