THE ROVING
EYE Welcome to
'democraship' By Pepe Escobar
Let's start with a bomb. Over 10 days ago
a new brand of coup d'etat took place in Paraguay
against elected president Fernando Lugo. It was
virtually unnoticed by global corporate media.
Anything unexpected? Not really. A March
2009 cable from the US Embassy in Asuncion,
revealed by WikiLeaks, [1] had already detailed
how oligarchs in Paraguay were busy devising a
"democratic coup" in congress to depose Lugo.
At the time, the US embassy noted
political conditions were not ideal for a coup.
Key among the plotters was former president
Nicanor Duarte (2003 to 2008), severely bashed by
progressive South American governments for having
allowed US Special
Forces in Paraguayan
soil to conduct "educational courses", "domestic
peacekeeping operations" and "counter-terrorism
training".
This US Special Forces drive
was happening decades after "one of our bastards",
notorious dictator-general Alfredo Stroessner (in
power from 1954 to 1989) had allowed the set up of
a giant US-owned semi-clandestine landing strip
near the Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay Triple Border -
later to become part of the war on drugs, and then
the war on terror.
So it's a no-brainer
which was the first government to recognize last
Friday's coup plotters in Paraguay: the United
States of America.
Forget about sharing
our cake Progressive Egyptians are now
realizing new democracies take years, sometimes
decades, of co-existing with the nightmare of
dictatorship. It happened, for instance, in Brazil
- now universally lauded as a new, global
powerhouse. During the 1980s and 1990s, some form
of institutional re-democratization was going on.
But for years Brazil really did not turn into a
full democracy - economically, socially and
culturally. It took a long 17 years - until
president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva first came to
power in 2002 - for Brazil to start on the road of
becoming less outrageously unequal than its
rapacious ruling classes always wanted it to be.
The same historical process is now at work
in both Egypt and Paraguay. Both countries
suffered dictatorships for decades. When a
dictatorship seems to be on its death throes, only
political parties linked - or mildly tolerated -
by the ancien regime find themselves in the best
position to profit from the long, tortuous
transition towards democracy. These countries then
become what Brazilian political scientist Emir
Sader has dubbed "democraships".
This
applies to the Liberal Party in Paraguay and the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In the Egyptian
presidential election, we had a former Hosni
Mubarak crony against an Ikhwan (Muslim
Brotherhood) cadre. It remains to be seen whether
the Orwellian SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces) in Egypt will allow this new "democraship"
to turn into a real democracy, and to what extent
the Ikhwan is fully committed to the notion of
democracy.
Paraguay was already in a more
advanced stage than Egypt. Yet four years after a
democratic presidential election, congress was
still dominated by two dictatorship-friendly
parties, Liberal and Colorado. It was a piece of
cake for this bipartisan oligarchy to gang up and
take Lugo down.
A medium-rare
impeachment, please Lugo was evicted by a
coup disguised as an impeachment, processed in
only 24 hours. Regime change practitioners in
Washington must have been ecstatic; if only we
could do that in Syria ...
This simulacrum
had to be concocted by what is the most corrupt
senate in the Americas - and that's a huge
understatement. Lugo was found guilty of
incompetence in dealing with a very murky story
linked - inevitably - with an issue that is
absolutely key all across the developing world:
agrarian reform.
On June 15, a group of
policemen and commandos about to enforce an
eviction order in Curuguaty, 200 kilometers from
Asuncion, close to the Brazilian border, was
ambushed by snipers infiltrated among farmers. The
order came from a judge protecting a wealthy
landowner, Blas Riquelme, not by accident a former
president of the Colorado party and a former
senator.
Through legal shenanigans, he had
taken possession of 2,000 hectares that actually
belonged to the Paraguayan state. These lands were
then occupied by landless peasants, who for some
time had been asking the Lugo government to
redistribute them.
The School of the
Americas Watch has already documented how enormous
tracts of land in Paraguay were actually stolen
from farmers and "donated" to military and
upper-class cronies during those decades under the
Stroessner dictatorship.
The result in
Curuguaty was 17 dead - six policemen and 11
farmers - and at least 50 wounded. It simply
doesn't make sense; the elite members of the
eviction force, a hardcore unit named Special
Operations Group, were trained in
counterinsurgency tactics in Colombia - under the
right-wing Uribe government - as part of the
US-concocted Plan Colombia.
Plan Paraguay,
for its part, was very simple; absolute
criminalization of every peasant organization,
forcing them to leave the countryside for
transnational agribusiness.
So this was,
essentially, a trap. Paraguay's rabid
right-wingers - joined to the hip with Washington,
for example trying to prevent, by all means,
Venezuela's entrance into the Mercosur common
market - were just waiting to pounce on a regime
that had not, yet, affected its interests, but had
opened up plenty of spaces for social protest and
popular organization.
Lugo, a former
bishop elected in 2008 with large rural support,
might have seen it coming, but he did nothing to
stop it. Compared with his power to mobilize
people in the streets, he had minimum support in
Congress: only two senators. Over 40% of
Paraguayans live in the countryside, but they are
hardly mobilized. And 30% live under the poverty
line.
The "winners" in Paraguay had to be
the usual suspects: the landowning oligarchy - and
its concerted campaign to demonize farmers;
multinational agribusiness interests such as
Monsanto; and the Monsanto-linked media (as in the
ABC Color daily, which accused ministers not
acting as Monsanto stooges of being "corrupt").
Agribusiness giants such as Monsanto and
Cargill pay virtually no taxes in Paraguay because
of the right-wing controlled Congress. Landowners
don't pay taxes. Needless to add, Paraguay is one
of the most unequal countries in the world; 85% of
land - like 30 million hectares - is controlled by
the 2% composing the rural aristocracy, a great
deal of them involved in land speculation.
Thus their Miami Vice-style
mansions in Uruguay's hip Punta del Este resort
or, for that matter, Miami Beach; the money, of
course, is in the Cayman islands. Paraguay is de
facto ruled by this cream of the 2% mixing
agribusiness with the neoliberal financial casino.
And by the way, as Martin Almada, a top
Paraguayan human-rights activist and alternative
Nobel Peace Prize winner, has noted, this concerns
Brazilian landowners as well. The wealthiest soya
bean producer in Paraguay is a "Braziguayan",
double nationality holder Tranquilo Favero, who
made his fortune under Stroessner.
A
coup on the rocks, please The Union of
South American Nations (Unasur) treated what
happened in Paraguay for what it is; a coup. Same
with Mercosur. The contrast with Washington's
position couldn't be more glaring. Coup plotter
Federico Franco is a darling of the US Embassy in
Asuncion.
Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela
and Ecuador won't recognize the coup plotters.
Venezuela cut off oil sales to Paraguay. Brazilian
President Dilma Rousseff has proposed the
expulsion of Paraguay from both Unasur and
Mercosur.
Paraguay is already suspended;
this means coup plotter Federico Franco was
prevented from attending a key Mercosur meeting
last week in Mendoza, Argentina, when the
temporary Mercosur presidency would be handed over
to Paraguay. The Paraguayan oligarchy - under
Washington's orders - was blocking Venezuela's
entrance in Mercosur. Not anymore; Venezuela
becomes a full member by the end of the month.
Yet South American progressive governments
must be very careful. If Paraguay is expelled from
both Unasur and Mercosur, it will inevitably ask
Washington for commercial and military help. That
could translate into a nightmare - US military
bases in Paraguay.
Paraguay's oligarchs,
the media they control, and last but not least the
reactionary Catholic church hierarchy, calculate
they will extend their power when elections take
place in April 2013.
Lugo was in fact
facing a Sisyphean task - trying to steer a weak
state, with minimum income from taxes (less than
12% of GNP), and under severe pressure by powerful
transnational lobbies and comprador elites. This,
by the way, is the structural reality of a great
deal of Latin America - and, roughly, one might
add, of Egypt.
On a geopolitical level,
what progressives everywhere - from South and
North America to the Arab world - should worry
about is how, since the June 2009 coup against
Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, Latin America is being
turned into a giant laboratory testing all sorts
of "democratic" coup d'etat mutations.
Paraguay is one such mutation. Another one
was the failed coup against Ecuador's Rafael
Correa in September 2010. All these coups are
against progressive governments who privilege
social advances.
Not by accident, Correa,
who was almost evicted by a coup, said that if it
succeeded this time in Paraguay it would "open a
dangerous precedent" in the whole region.
And in terms of poetic justice, nothing
beats Correa - the target of a coup - currently
studying the possibility of offering political
asylum to Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks
revealed, among other things, how the Paraguayan
elite was plotting their own coup.
In
Egypt, a military coup happened even before a
presidential election. Progressive Egyptians who
actually led the Arab Spring must be extremely
alert; Paraguay is showing how the rocky road
towards democracy may end up in a "democraship".
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