Ciclo Político / Poltical Cycle

  Kattya González, of the National Encounter Party, gave an emotional farewell speech after 23 out of her 45 fellow senators voted to removed her from office earlier this month. Blaming “the boss,” former Colorado Party President Horacio Cartes, she said the unexpected vote was punishment for her fight against corruption, clientelism, and organized crime that has turned Paraguay into a “narco-state.”    Although the former senator belongs to a minor political party, her voice was amplified by social media and the news media’s coverage of her anti-corruption campaign. Yet González’s downfall was not an isolated event. Rather, her ousting was part of a broader strategy by allies of the former president, known as “cartismo.”   Paraguay’s Colorado Party, which has ruled uninterruptedly for 70 years, is not monolithic; indeed, the last Colorado president, Mario Abdo, was a critic of Cartes and his Honor Colorado movement. However, Cartes, Paraguay’s president fro...

We are experiencing a transition of epoch, with constant turbulence and notable contrasts. It is a time of crisis and there are many of us who have the conviction that crises are overcome through cooperation and joint effort. The spirit of solidarity plays a unifying role and allows the smooth coupling of the social gears. The father of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, warned that without this unifying, harmonizing component, social cohesion would gradually fray until it breaks into a thousand pieces. Today, this dystopia of a general social breakdown is  a very real possibility. In the first quarter of our century, tensions seem to be increasing. Societies are torn between centrifugal forces that try to bring people together in solidarity, and centripetal forces that scatter people’s intentions,  leaving behind social antagonisms. Needless to say, this is a very  broad and general problem, with multiple variants and facets, and with manifestations at the family, communi...

One of the characteristics of democracy is that from time to time there are candidates for the presidency that rise  from below. Leaders who emerge from the popular classes, without university degrees in the United States or in their own country. People who knew poverty in first person; who speak and gesticulate like the people. Pedro Castillo is one of them. Primary school teacher, leader of the Peruvian teacher movement, from Cajamarca, in the north of the country, proud of being a “rondero”, that is, belonging to a type of rural communal organization that emerged in the 1970s in Peru. The antecedents of this type of leadership in our region can be found in Lula, a metal worker union leader and, perhaps, closer to Pedro Castillo, Evo Morales, a Bolivian coca grower leader. However, the candidacy of Pedro Castillo, although on the left, has put the left in trouble. Although there is a progressive discourse, there also very socially conservative underpinnings, and the Peru Libre pa...