Paraguay is reeling from the news that its moral-crusader president had a teenage mistress while still a bishopHe offered hope, promised change and swept to the presidency on a historic tide of popular enthusiasm.
Yet the man described as South America’s answer to Barack Obama has fallen off his Paraguayan pedestal and the crash has been felt in world capitals from Washington to the Vatican.
President Fernando Lugo was hardly the first of his country’s politicians to admit to fathering a child out of wedlock - a predecessor had acknowledged that he had more than 90 illegitimate children.
Yet Lugo’s admission last week that he had a long affair with Viviana Carrillo, who was 24 when she bore him a son named Guillermo two years ago, broke new ground for the number of social taboos he shattered.
When he met Carrillo, Lugo was a leftist Catholic bishop steeped in liberation theology and devoted to improving the plight of the poor in San Pedro, one of Paraguay’s most impoverished provinces.
To the Vatican’s dismay, he later decided to abandon the priesthood and enter politics as a supposedly incorruptible outsider who promised to transform Paraguay’s notoriously crooked political elite. It has since emerged that before Lugo left the church he had broken his vows of chastity and started romancing Carrillo when he was 48 and she was just 16.
Lugo, now 57, has denied that he had sex with her before she was an adult. But Carrillo revealed in papers prepared for a paternity suit that she was taking confirmation classes with the bishop when she became “seduced by the way he talked, his pretty words, his beautiful expressions”.
The story of the bishop, the girl and their baby has shaken Paraguay, appalled the Vatican and created a dilemma for the White House, which had hoped to woo Lugo from the inflammatory antiAmerican radicalism espoused by President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and other Latin American leaders.
Obama and Lugo are attending a regional summit in Trinidad this weekend but Washing-ton sources said the US president was likely to steer clear of a man whom many Americans might regard as a paedophile.
The affair has dealt a potentially fatal blow to Lugo’s chances of turning Paraguay into a modern, democratic state after his victory over the once-omnipotent Colorado party last year.
Twenty years after General Alfredo Stroessner, among the world’s longest-serving dictators, was sent into exile, Paraguayans hoped Lugo could drag their country into the 21st century and overhaul its reputation as a dismal haven for gangsters and Nazi fugitives.
“He presented himself as the different candidate, the candidate of change, honesty and ethics,” said Jorge Torres Rom-ero of ABC, a prominent newspaper in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. “But in the end he has lost the unique capital with which he constructed his campaign: his credibility.”
Despite opposition calls for his resignation and claims that he would never have become president had the scandal broken before the election - Lugo has offered no hint that he is prepared to stand down.
Some of his supporters have even suggested that his admission of paternity, his plans to pay child support and his agreement to let his son use his name are in keeping with his commitment to honesty and transparency and signal a new age of Paraguayan government. Male voters clinging to Latin America’s macho traditions may conclude he has done nothing that cannot be forgiven.
Others are not so sure. Ignacio Gogorza, one of Paraguay’s senior bishops, described the affair as “a harsh blow for the Catholic church and a bad example that might cause citizens to lose confidence in the institution”. Of Paraguay’s 7m people, 90% are Catholic.
Lugo’s critics have also argued that, far from coming clean voluntarily, he was forced into facing up to the scandal after lawyers representing Carrillo filed a paternity suit before Easter.
She has accused her former lover of promising to “spend his life with me, that we would have many children together and form a household”. Lugo has since ruled out resuming the relationship and says he intends to return to the church when his presidency ends.
One opinion poll last week showed a sharp drop in Lugo’s approval rating from 64% to 48%. He has also become the subject of frenzied local media speculation about other women he may have been involved with - notably an Argentinian model and television personality.
Several bloggers accused the president’s Colorado party critics of hypocrisy. “Let’s remember that Señor Bernardino Caballero [co-founder of Colorado and Paraguay’s president in the 1880s] was a great Paraguayan reproducer who acknowledged fathering 92 children,” noted Perla Cano Arias.
President Barack Obama told the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad that the US seeks a “new beginning” with Cuba and an “equal partnership” with all the nations of the Americas.
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(Source: TOUK)