Paraguay Voters Elect Conservative Economist as President

POZO COLORADO, Paraguay — Paraguayans elected Santiago Peña, a 44-year-old conservative economist, as their new president on Sunday, retaining the South American nation within the management of the right-wing Colorado Party that has run the nation for all however 5 of the previous 76 years.

The end result signifies that Paraguay, a landlocked nation of seven million individuals, has resisted the leftward shift throughout Latin America in recent times. Instead, Paraguayans delivered victory to a right-wing candidate who made imprecise guarantees so as to add jobs, decrease power costs and clear drug addicts from the road.

Mr. Peña had 43 % of the vote with 99 % of the ballots counted, defeating two challengers who cut up the opposition vote.

His election may complicate Paraguay’s relationship with the United States, an in depth ally.

Mr. Peña is a political protégé of a former Paraguayan president, Horacio Cartes, who’s one in all its richest males and the president of the Colorado Party. In January, the American Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mr. Cartes over accusations that he had doled out thousands and thousands of {dollars} in bribes to pave his method to energy and that he had constructed ties to the Islamist militant group Hezbollah.

In his victory speech Sunday evening, Mr. Peña stood subsequent to Mr. Cartes, hugged him and thanked him first. “Your contribution, president, can only be paid with the currency of respect, of appreciation and approval,” Mr. Peña stated. “Thank you for this Colorado victory.”

Mr. Peña’s victory exhibits that his occasion has retained a agency grip on Paraguayan society a long time after the autumn of the dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, a Colorado Party regime that dominated from 1954 to 1989.

The Colorado Party’s highly effective political machine was on show on Election Day, with a dense community of political operators fanned out throughout the nation. They monitored voting stations, bused Indigenous individuals to the polls and pressed voters to elect Mr. Peña.

That group appeared to make up for the troublesome gross sales pitch Mr. Peña needed to make to voters. During the marketing campaign, he introduced himself as a recent face — regardless of being Paraguay’s former finance minister and a outstanding determine within the nation’s dominant political occasion, which was based in 1887.

Mr. Peña additionally tried to distance himself from Paraguay’s present chief, President Mario Abdo Benítez, who can also be from the Colorado Party. Mr. Benítez, who can’t run once more due to time period limits, is one in all Latin America’s most unpopular leaders due to his dealing with of the coronavirus pandemic, in response to opinion surveys.

But Mr. Peña’s trickiest problem was his shut ties to Mr. Cartes. The U.S. authorities has accused Mr. Cartes of “a concerted pattern of corruption,” alleging that he paid as much as $50,000 a month to lawmakers whereas president and that he performed a few of his illicit enterprise at occasions held by Hezbollah.

Mr. Cartes has denied the accusations, dismissing them as politically motivated. He declined requests for an interview.

One political opponent, Efraín Alegre, who completed second on Sunday with 27 %, seized on the allegations through the marketing campaign, calling Mr. Cartes the “Paraguayan Pablo Escobar” and saying that Mr. Peña was Mr. Cartes’s “secretary.”

Mr. Peña stated in an interview on Friday that he believed Mr. Cartes was harmless and that he couldn’t perceive how the United States may have gotten it so fallacious.

“I think this is going to be one of the great mysteries, along with: Could it be that man reached the moon? Or who assassinated President Kennedy?” he stated. “Those unsolved mysteries that we can never know.”

On Sunday evening, as he stood subsequent to his mentor, Mr. Peña led his victory occasion in a chant of “Beloved Horacio, the people are with you.”

Mr. Peña’s ties to Mr. Cartes have been on the minds of some voters.

“He’s a good leader, but if he wins, it won’t be him that governs, sadly,” stated Mariano Ovelar, 39, who waits tables and performs the keyboard in a truck-stop restaurant in Paraguay’s rural north.

Mr. Peña, a former International Monetary Fund economist in Washington, largely centered his marketing campaign on the financial system, promising to create 500,000 jobs, supply free kindergarten, lower gas and power costs, and get extra law enforcement officials on the road.

His solely rationalization for the way he would pay for these guarantees was to increase the financial system by eliminating pink tape and retaining taxes among the many lowest on the earth. “Paraguayans understand that we can be the most developed nation in the world,” Mr. Peña stated.

Paraguay is one in all South America’s poorest nations. 1 / 4 of its inhabitants lives in poverty, colleges are rated among the many worst within the area and hospitals are brief on fundamental medicines.

Mr. Peña attributed Paraguay’s underdevelopment to its crushing defeat in a warfare towards its neighbors that resulted in 1870 and worn out most of its male inhabitants. “The conflict made us miss the train of development,” he stated.

His reply to these issues is to streamline the federal government and make Paraguay extra welcoming to companies.

Mr. Peña seems to be aiming to appease the United States, most notably by pledging to maintain Paraguay among the many membership of 13 nations — principally small island nations — that preserve diplomatic relations with Taiwan quite than China. Paraguay and Taiwan sealed ties in 1957, when each have been led by dictators, and Taiwan has since paid for Paraguay’s modernist congressional constructing and donated its presidential jet.

But consequently, Paraguay’s farmers face obstacles in exporting soybeans and beef to China. Mr. Peña stated in an interview that shut financial ties with Taiwan would go away Paraguay in a greater long-term place than constructing its financial system round promoting commodities to China.

Cristaldo Tabares, 65, a builder who lives in a riverside suburb of the capital, Asunción, stated he voted for Mr. Peña on Sunday, however reluctantly. “I like Efraín more than Peña,” he stated, referring to the No. 2 finisher.

Mr. Tabares needed to solid his poll for Mr. Alegre as a result of he represented change, he stated, “but I couldn’t.” That was as a result of the Colorado Party had employed him as a polling station official and he felt he ought to vote for his employer.

Asked what he considered Paraguay’s potential future beneath Mr. Peña, he shrugged and laughed: “Nobody knows what’s going to happen.”