Fernando Lugo

Fernando Lugo
President of Paraguay
Incumbent
Assumed office August 15 2008
Vice President	Federico Franco
Preceded by	Nicanor Duarte Frutos
Personal details
Born	(1951-05-30) May 30, 1951 San Solano, Paraguay
Political party	APC

Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez (born May 30, 1951) is the current President of Paraguay and the former Roman Catholic bishop of the Diocese of San Pedro.

Early life and history with the Church

Lugo's family was not particularly religious; by his own account, he never saw his father set foot in a chapel. However, his upbringing was emphatically political. His uncle Epifanio Méndes Fleitas was a noted Colorado Party dissident and was persecuted and exiled by General Stroessner's regime. His father was imprisoned twenty times, and some of his elder siblings were sent to exile too. He received his basic education at a religious school in Encarnación, all the while he worked selling snacks on the streets. At age 17 or 18, against his father's wishes of him becoming a lawyer, Lugo entered a normal school, and began teaching at a rural community. He was well accepted within this people, who were very religious, but they had no priest. He recalls that he was touched by that experience, discovering his vocation, and so he decided to enter a Society of the Divine Word seminary at age 19. Lugo was ordained a priest on August 15, 1977. That same year he was sent to Ecuador as a missionary for five years. There he had the opportunity to learn about the controversial Liberation theology. He returned to Paraguay in 1982, and after a year, the regime's police asked that he be expelled from the country. The Church complied and sent him to Rome for further academic studies. Lugo returned to his homeland in 1987, two years short of the Stroessner dictatorship's ultimate fall. He was ordained Bishop on April 17, 1994, and received the nation's poorest diocese, in the San Pedro department. Following his presidential aspirations, Lugo resigned as ordinary of the Diocese of San Pedro on January 11, 2005. He had requested laicization in order to run for office. However, the Holy See refused the request on the grounds that Bishops could not undergo laicization, and also denied him the requested canonical permission to run for civil elected office. Subsequently following his declaration of candidacy, the Holy See imposed on him the penalty of suspension from the discharge of the ordained ministry, but did not dismiss him from the clerical state. In July 2008, the Vatican reversed its decision and Pope Benedict XVI accepted Lugo's request for laicization.

Presidential candidacy

Without doubt it is possible to resurrect a country like Paraguay. We are people of hope, of faith, and I won't be the one killing that hope of the people. I do believe we will resurrect this country, a country deeply drowned in misery, poverty and discrimination. Because I do believe Paraguay could be different. I do not lack faith in this flock. Where there is a scream coming from the poor people, where there is sweat, where people are shoeless, we will be there. Because in such people there is a resurrection; if that exists there, then there is resurrection for Paraguay.

— Fernando Lugo

Lugo jumped to the national arena by backing peasants' claims for better land distribution. During 2006, wide-spectrum opinion polls published by Diario ABC Color newspaper showed him as a possible choice for the opposition's presidential candidacy. Known as "the bishop of the poor", Lugo was seen in the subsequent months as the most serious threat to the dominance of the Colorado Party on Paraguayan politics. Although he has said he finds the presidency of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela interesting, he has also made a point to distance himself from populist leaders in Latin America, focusing more on social inequality in Paraguay. lalala

On February 23, 2007, a Prensa Latina article noted that the Paraguayan Interior Ministry offered Lugo protection because of the death threats he has received during the course of his political activities.

According to a poll released in February 2007, he was the leading contender in the April 2008 presidential election, with more than 37% of the voters' intention. On October 29, 2007, he registered himself into the tiny Christian Democratic Party of Paraguay in order to get his bureaucratic habilitation to run for office. That party integrated a coalition of more than a dozen opposition parties and social movements, named Patriotic Alliance for Change. Federico Franco, from the center-right Authentic Radical Liberal Party, Paraguay's largest opposition party, was his running mate.

Even though on November 16, 2007, the Chairman of the National Republican Party (ANR, Partido Colorado), then-sitting President Nicanor Duarte Frutos, announced that the Colorado Party would not initiate any proceedings to block Lugo's candidacy, there is a debate going on about its legality, because Article 235 of the Constitution forbids ministers of any religious denomination to hold elective office, and Pope Benedict XVI rejected Lugo's resignation from the priesthood. In July 2008, however, the pope downgraded Lugo to layman's status in order to allow him to assume the presidency without violating church rules.

On April 20, 2008, Lugo won the election by a margin of 10 percentage points, although far short of a majority. The Colorado Party candidate, Blanca Ovelar, acknowledged that Lugo had an unassailable lead and conceded the race that same night at about 9 p.m. local time. Two hours later, President Duarte acknowledged that the Colorados had lost an election for the first time in 61 years. Lugo became Paraguay's second leftist president (the first being Rafael Franco, who served from 1936 to 1937), and the first to be freely elected. Also, his swearing in marked the first time in Paraguay's history (the country gained independence in 1811) that a ruling party peacefully surrendered power to an elected member from the opposition.

Lugo was sworn in as President on August 15 2008. He said that he would not accept the presidential salary because it "belongs to more humble people" and encouraged other politicians to refuse their salaries as well.

Since Lugo has no spouse, he recently announced the designation of his elder sister, Mercedes Lugo, as First Lady of Paraguay. On August 18, 2008, he named Margarita Mbywangi, a member of the Aché indigenous ethnic group, as minister of indigenous affairs, the first indigenous person to hold such a position in Paraguay.

During the campaign, Lugo had suggested that he would switch diplomatic relations from the Republic of China on Taiwan to the People's Republic of China, thereby depriving the ROC of its last diplomatic ally in South America. However after the inauguration. which had been attended by President Ma Ying-Jeou from Taiwan, Lugo stated that he had no plans to switch recognitions.

Blog

Lugo began writing a blog on the web site of newspaper ABC Color in March 2007.

External links

• Fernando Lugo on Catholic Hierarchy
• Feb. 27, 2007 New York Times article on Lugo's possible candidacy
• Feb. 22, 2007 article on Lugo from Worldpress.org
• Dec. 30, 2006 Daily (Maybe) blog on background to Lugo's presidential bid
• Lugo Wins Election at AP
• April 18, 2008 article on Lugo and Paraguay elections from The Christian Science Monitor
• "Rise of the Red Bishop" The Guardian Weekly, August 14 2008

Template:Persondata