Senator Fernando Lugo assured that with his dismissal, ten years ago, in a parliamentary impeachment trial. they lost “everyone” in the country.
Source: Efe
“We have all lost there. The coup has not only been against Lugo but against Paraguayan democracy in transition and with fragile institutions, ”Lugo declared in an interview with Efe, a decade after his departure from the Presidency.
Lugo, a former Catholic bishop who with his electoral victory in 2008 ended 61 years of hegemony of the Colorado Party, thus referred to the result of the political trial that was voted on June 22, 2012.
That day, the Senate found him guilty for poor performance of his duties in a process, which, he said, lasted “17 hours” and was convened after the death of 6 police officers and 11 peasants in a land eviction operation in the town of Curuguaty (southeast).
“Ten years ago there was a lot of confusion and especially in the information about what was a confrontation between police and peasants,” recalled Lugo, who warns that the question that remains in force until today is “what happened in Curuguaty?”
For the senator, what is now known as the “Curuguaty massacre” was “an event that was used very well politically to start a political trial with an accusatory libel with very fragile arguments” to justify his dismissal.
He acknowledged that the victory he obtained at the polls supported by social movements and by an unprecedented alliance with the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA) assured him of executive power.
However, they did not have the backing of Parliament nor did they have “good relations with the Judiciary.” To this he attributed that during his almost four years of management they had “22 threats of impeachment.”
“On a personal level, I hardly believed anymore, I thought he was just another threat. But he was so well orchestrated (the trial) with the opposition and some international organizations, the media, that they executed it in record time, “said Lugo.
The decision, he confesses, left him personally “hurt”, since it cost “a lot to reach the Presidency and break the model of a country, of a hegemonic party”.
However, he considers that what happened “is part of this painful, weak and fragile Paraguayan transition.”
After the condemnation vote of 39 of the 45 senators, the former president assured that “there was no other way than to accept an unfair decision, a political trial without head or tail, but that it had the constitutional legal forms.”
“Impeachment is a constitutional figure that exists in almost all countries, but -he regrets- it has been used so crudely, specifically in the argumentation, in the time, in the process and also in the sentence”.
After ten years and now in the Senate, which he arrived in 2013 supported by the alliance of left-wing parties Frente Guasu, he considers that “without a doubt” the biggest debt in his country is agrarian reform.
“There are almost eight million hectares that were distributed to subjects who are not worthy of agrarian reform,” he said, citing the report of the Truth and Justice Commission.
He also noted that during this time “free healthcare ended,” as well as the “equal-to-equal” negotiation over the Itaipu hydroelectric plant, which is shared by Paraguay and Brazil.
