The radical tide sweeping Latin America is moving into the obscurer creeks and backwaters of the continent. The isolated and unnoticed country of Paraguay is about to elect a red bishop as president, bringing to an end the rule of the Colorado party and its six decades of dictatorship and corruption. Fernando Lugo, the bishop of the northern town of San Pedro, is well ahead in the opinion polls and should remain so on polling day, April 20. He abandoned the priesthood last year, at 57, to forge a progressive opposition movement - the Patriotic Alliance for Change.
The Colorado party has been in power since a brief civil war in 1948, while the Liberal party and assorted groupings further to the left have been in permanent opposition, active only in prison or in exile. For much of the past 60 years, the emblematic Colorado leader was General Alfredo Stroessner. He was dislodged by his generals in 1989, but his legacy remains largely intact. The current president, Nicanor Duarte Frutos, has achieved record unpopularity, and the woman he has promoted as candidate for president, Blanca Ovelar, has suffered by her association with him. Her apparently fraudulent defeat of a rival Colorado candidate has split the party, and she has been obliged to admit that her private polls indicate a dead heat with Lugo, not a Colorado victory.
The polls of the Lugo camp suggest a substantial majority for their man, and his cause recently won the support of ABC Color, the country's principal newspaper and a political weather vane. His promise to combat corruption and to persuade Paraguay's 2 million economic exiles to return have aroused fresh hope in an otherwise jaded electorate. The chances of the third candidate, the former general Lino Oviedo, have dwindled in recent months. He was regarded as a powerful populist outsider, but overt support from Brazilian landowners who control the eastern section of the country has been ill received by a strongly nationalist population.
Lugo's appeal, as with the other new leftist leaders in Latin America, comes partly from his emphasis on the needs of the rural poor and the indigenous population. The Brazilian landowners, and their rapacious replacement of forests with fields of soya, have inevitably come under attack. But as significant is Lugo's nationalist project to secure a proper price for natural resources. Paraguay sells its abundant hydro-electricity to Brazil and Argentina - at absurdly low prices, nationalists have always complained. Lugo's plans to require a more economic price are causing considerable alarm in Brasilia and Buenos Aires, which might otherwise be favourable to a progressive change in Asunción.
A Lugo victory will only be the start of a difficult period, for the new president will not take office until August and the new congress is likely to have a Colorado majority. Lugo's alliance of Liberals, dissident Colorados, socialists and assorted social movements could easily splinter under the pressure of forming a government.
Some of the impetus for change in Latin America comes from the growing political awareness of indigenous movements, yet in Paraguay another half-forgotten current is at work. It is nearly 50 years since Pope John XXIII summoned the ecumenical council known as Vatican II, a revolutionary gathering that was to revive the social doctrine of the church, notably in its vast hinterland in Latin America. Impatient young priests in the 1970s became enthused by the new theology of liberation and its "preferential option for the poor", and they were soon propagating their subversive message.
To Pope John Paul II this smacked of communism, and in the 1980s he all but excommunicated its adherents. Evangelical churches moved into empty Catholic parishes in the shantytowns. Yet many priests remained true to their original inspiration, and slowly moved up the hierarchy to become bishops. Lugo is such a man. He acquired his version of liberation theology as a trainee priest in Ecuador, home of one of its great proponents, the late Leonidas Proaño, bishop of Riobamba. Another political figure influenced by Proaño is Rafael Correa, Ecuador's leftist president.
Important for Paraguay itself, Lugo's victory will signal that the new mood in Latin America is not just the creation of a competent economist in Ecuador, a charismatic colonel in Venezuela, or a couple of union leaders in Brazil and Bolivia, but the result of a heartfelt and deep-rooted desire for change. Indeed it is not too fanciful to imagine that Barack Obama is himself the beneficiary of this now all-American phenomenon.
Richard Gott