Paraguayan Opposition Candidate Wins Vice Presidential Election

An opposition politician was declared victor Wednesday in a special election of Paraguay’s vice president, defeating the candidate from one of Latin America’s longest-ruling and most authoritarian political parties.

Election officials announced the narrow victory of Julio Cesar Franco of the center-left Liberal Party after an 11-day delay in the vote count--the latest tense episode for a shaky young democracy racked by political gangsterism.

The election filled the post left vacant by the assassination last year of Vice President Luis Maria Argana of the ruling Colorado Party. Franco, a pediatrician, became the first candidate for national office to defeat the rightist Colorado Party, which has dominated the nation for 53 years. With the hand-over of presidential power in December by Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, the Colorados will have held power longer than any other party in the hemisphere.

Franco defeated Felix Argana, the son of the slain vice president, by less than 1% of the vote, officials said Wednesday evening.

Despite the blow to a political machine that is widely viewed as corrupt, nothing is simple in Paraguay, and new turmoil seems likely. Franco, 48, was elected with the support of a dissident ruling-party faction commanded by former Gen. Lino Oviedo, a renegade strongman who is in a Brazilian jail awaiting extradition on charges related to the killing of the vice president and eight pro-democracy demonstrators last year.

That alliance may taint Franco’s credentials as a reformer. And some Paraguayans fear that new political combat will further weaken President Luis Gonzalez Macchi. In fact, Franco has felt pressure to seek the ouster of Gonzalez, a former Senate chief who was appointed president when last year’s crisis toppled his pro-Oviedo predecessor.

After four years that also brought two attempted military coups, the shadow of instability--personified by Oviedo influencing events from a distant jail cell--darkens a day of progress.

“That is the tragedy of this country,” sociologist Jose Morinigo said in a telephone interview from the Paraguayan capital, Asuncion.

He said the election result “was healthy in the sense that the voters broke with this party structure that was so embedded in the society. But the break was not the result of modern, democratic thinking but of [Oviedo’s] messianic, irrational force that is betting on a scenario of continuing instability and conflict.”

Franco’s Liberal Party opposed the 35-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, who turned the now 113-year-old Colorado Party into a personal fiefdom until he was ousted in 1989. Franco has promised to work with the president for stability and solutions to an economic crisis crippling the landlocked nation of more than 5 million.

But Paraguay remains high on the growing list of unsteady Latin American democracies. The government must enact sweeping reform of an economic and political structure based on paternalism, smuggling and corruption. In addition to possible clashes between the president and vice president, the converging ambitions of the opposition and Oviedo forces could stir up new troubles.

The vote count was delayed because election officials scrutinized the votes after Colorado leaders alleged fraud in the border city of Ciudad del Este, a hub of organized crime and political chicanery. The Argana campaign could still challenge the election results before the Supreme Court.

Election observers for the Organization of American States, however, described the election as clean.