POZO COLORADO, Paraguay — Paraguayans elected Santiago Peña, a 44-year-old conservative economist, as their new president on Sunday, maintaining the South American nation within the management of the right-wing Colorado Celebration that has run the nation for all however 5 of the previous 76 years.
The end result implies that Paraguay, a landlocked nation of seven million individuals, has resisted the leftward shift throughout Latin America lately. As a substitute, Paraguayans delivered victory to a right-wing candidate who made imprecise guarantees so as to add jobs, decrease vitality costs and clear drug addicts from the road.
Mr. Peña had 43 p.c of the vote with 99 p.c of the ballots counted, defeating two challengers who break up the opposition vote.
His election may complicate Paraguay’s relationship with the USA, an in depth ally.
Mr. Peña is a political protégé of a former Paraguayan president, Horacio Cartes, who’s one among its richest males and the president of the Colorado Celebration. In January, the American Treasury Division imposed sanctions on Mr. Cartes over accusations that he had doled out tens of millions of {dollars} in bribes to pave his technique 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 solely be paid with the foreign money of respect, of appreciation and approval,” Mr. Peña stated. “Thanks for this Colorado victory.”
Mr. Peña’s victory reveals that his social gathering has retained a agency grip on Paraguayan society a long time after the autumn of the dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, a Colorado Celebration regime that dominated from 1954 to 1989.
The Colorado Celebration’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. Throughout the marketing campaign, he introduced himself as a recent face — regardless of being Paraguay’s former finance minister and a distinguished determine within the nation’s dominant political social gathering, which was based in 1887.
Mr. Peña additionally tried to distance himself from Paraguay’s present chief, President Mario Abdo Benítez, who can be from the Colorado Celebration. Mr. Benítez, who can’t run once more due to time period limits, is one among Latin America’s most unpopular leaders due to his dealing with of the coronavirus pandemic, in line with opinion surveys.
However Mr. Peña’s trickiest problem was his shut ties to Mr. Cartes. The U.S. authorities has accused Mr. Cartes of “a concerted sample 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 p.c, seized on the allegations throughout 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 USA may have gotten it so unsuitable.
“I feel that is going to be one of many nice mysteries, together with: May it’s that man reached the moon? Or who assassinated President Kennedy?” he stated. “These unsolved mysteries that we are able to by no means know.”
On Sunday evening, as he stood subsequent to his mentor, Mr. Peña led his victory social gathering in a chant of “Beloved Horacio, the individuals are with you.”
Mr. Peña’s ties to Mr. Cartes had been on the minds of some voters.
“He’s an excellent chief, but when he wins, it received’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 Worldwide Financial Fund economist in Washington, largely targeted his marketing campaign on the financial system, promising to create 500,000 jobs, provide free kindergarten, lower gasoline and vitality costs, and get extra law enforcement officials on the road.
His solely clarification for a way he would pay for these guarantees was to develop the financial system by eliminating crimson tape and maintaining taxes among the many lowest on the earth. “Paraguayans perceive that we might be probably the most developed nation on the earth,” Mr. Peña stated.
Paraguay is one among South America’s poorest nations. 1 / 4 of its inhabitants lives in poverty, faculties are rated among the many worst within the area and hospitals are quick on primary medicines.
Mr. Peña attributed Paraguay’s underdevelopment to its crushing defeat in a warfare in opposition to its neighbors that led to 1870 and worn out most of its male inhabitants. “The battle made us miss the practice of improvement,” 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 USA, most notably by pledging to maintain Paraguay among the many membership of 13 nations — principally small island nations — that preserve diplomatic relations with Taiwan reasonably than China. Paraguay and Taiwan sealed ties in 1957, when each had been led by dictators, and Taiwan has since paid for Paraguay’s modernist congressional constructing and donated its presidential jet.
However 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 greater than Peña,” he stated, referring to the No. 2 finisher.
Mr. Tabares wished to forged his poll for Mr. Alegre as a result of he represented change, he stated, “however I couldn’t.” That was as a result of the Colorado Celebration had employed him as a polling station official and he felt he ought to vote for his employer.
Requested what he considered Paraguay’s potential future underneath Mr. Peña, he shrugged and laughed: “No one is aware of what’s going to occur.”
