General Who Ousted Dictator Wins Paraguay Election

For the first time in generations, Paraguayans took part Monday in open and comparatively fair elections--and voted overwhelmingly for the army general who overthrew the old order.

Gen. Andres Rodriguez, who deposed President Alfredo Stroessner in February, won about 74% of the votes, according to the unofficial count of about two-thirds of the ballots cast.

Although the defeated opposition parties complained bitterly of “grave and numerous irregularities,” most analysts agreed that there was less fraud and more participation than in any Paraguayan election since 1928, the date of the last truly competitive ballot. International voting monitors attributed the problems more to disorganization than design.

Seven Other Contenders

Rodriguez, who became one of Paraguay’s richest men while serving as Stroessner’s top aide, defeated seven other candidates, three of whom had been jailed, tortured or exiled during Stroessner’s nearly 35-year reign.

The only real challenger, Domingo Laino of the Authentic Liberal Radical Party, the nation’s second political force, trailed with about 20% of the vote. Laino did win a Senate seat as his party took nearly one-third of the legislative posts.

The century-old Colorado Party, its leadership purged of Stroessner loyalists since the coup, won majorities in both chambers of Congress. The vote confirmed the party’s position as the leading political force in the country, even without relying on the widespread voting fraud that had characterized elections under Stroessner since 1954.

The party nominated Rodriguez for the presidency after he brought down Stroessner and pledged to bring full democratic pluralism to Paraguay for the first time in its 178-year history. The 65-year-old general legalized opposition parties, reopened banned opposition media and promised to respect civil rights in one of the last dictatorial holdovers in South America.

The opposition parties had virtually conceded beforehand that Rodriguez would win, and they chose to view the election as part of the transition to democracy that will culminate in the next election in 1993.

Short Campaign

With just 90 days to organize a race against the entrenched Colorado Party, the opposition had little chance to make a respectable showing, especially against the jovial Rodriguez’s genuine popularity during the post-coup political honeymoon.

The structure of the vote, under the rules drafted by the Stroessner regime, also worked against the opposition. Outdated and incomplete voter lists were the main sources of complaints. Nevertheless, for the first time in decades, voters had a choice, and several safeguards cut down on abuses.

“Lots of dead people, absent people, used to vote. That was the reality. This is the first clean election in my life,” said 57-year-old Mario Cristobal Martinez, a monitor at a voting table on behalf of the Authentic Liberal Radicals in the town of Caacupe, 35 miles east of the capital, Asuncion.

‘No Double Voting’

A young Colorado Party supporter, Nicolas Guillen, said that in Stroessner’s last election in February, 1988, “you could vote twice, you could vote and get in another line and vote again and nobody would say anything. This is very different. There is no double voting because of this ink.” He displayed his purple-tinted finger, dipped in ink donated by the U.S. government to identify those who had cast ballots.

“The changes are being carried out as Gen. Rodriguez promised,” Guillen said. People have freedom. It’s a big difference.”

Many opposition members, however, complained that the ink could be scrubbed off. U.S. Ambassador Timothy Towell said he could not explain why the ink could be removed from some fingers, including that of a television interviewer.

“This is a first step in the transition to democracy,” Towell said of the vote. “I am optimistic.”

In Caacupe and elsewhere, Colorado Party members said they had never seen such a turnout or such enthusiasm. People came on horseback, in flatbed trucks and by the busload. Some bought skewered meat grilled over a campfire, lending a festive air to the drizzly day.

The presence of voting monitors from rival parties added an element of control to the voting and counting, but the process was often chaotic, in part because of the heavy turnout.

In Capiata, 15 miles west of Asuncion, lawyer Rodrigo Campos Cervera, an organizer for the Authentic Liberal Radical Party, raced from table to table conveying complaints about procedures. He noted that some voting lists had double the authorized 200 names and that scores of people were allowed to vote whose names were not on the lists.

The Colorado Party table officials answered that those who voted had presented their registration certificates, proving they had signed up, and thus were allowed to vote despite their omission from the lists.

Capiata voters cast ballots in school classrooms with open windows, angering opposition party monitors who said the windows should have been blacked out to ensure secrecy from prying eyes.

‘Defects’ Acknowledged

Percival Silva, a Colorado Party spokesman, said Paraguay had never experienced such a clean election despite some “defects” resulting from lack of organization. He said there was no conscious attempt to commit fraud, adding, “this election has shown that the Colorado Party does not need fraud to win.”

The opposition, Silva said, was seeking excuses to rationalize its crushing defeat.

Allocco Vittarino, the Chile-based European Community ambassador for the region, said of the problems: “Essentially, it was a lack of organization. There might have been a few irregularities.

“I saw many people who were not allowed to vote, and many of them said they were Colorados. So, both sides were affected.” Vittarino was one of 130 foreign observers monitoring the vote

Laino, president of the Authentic Liberal Radicals, acknowledged after casting his ballot that it was an emotional moment for a someone who had been jailed dozens of times since 1956, most recently in December.

“Then I was in jail, and now my name is on the ballot,” he said. “Things have changed, and the future is ours. In any case, it is a beginning.”