[News] Welcome to 'democraship'

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Welcome to 'democraship'

Jul 4, 2012
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".

Note: 1. See <http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/03/09ASUNCION189.html#>here


Pepe Escobar is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0978813820/simpleproduction/ref=nosim>Globalistan: 
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 
2007) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/Red-Zone-Blues-snapshot-Baghdad/dp/0978813898>Red 
Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent 
book, just out, is 
<http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Does-Globalistan-Pepe-Escobar/dp/1934840831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233698286&sr=8-1>Obama 
does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com




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