Latin America: The bishop of democracy

From The Economist print edition A welcome for another left-wing leader; but expect the pendulum to start swinging to the right APART from featuring in a couple of novels by Graham Greene, Paraguay has rarely attracted the attention of outsiders. It is a poor, sweltering, landlocked tract of South America with only 6m people, many of Amerindian descent. But it enjoys a sad distinction. For the past 61 years it has been in the grip of the world’s longest-ruling party, the Colorados, first under the kleptocratic dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner and then under his only slightly less grasping civilian acolytes. It is not surprising that it took a man who might have walked off the pages of a Greene novel to end Colorado misrule. Fernando Lugo, who takes office on August 15th, was at the time he won the presidential... [read full story]