Fernando Lugo Totally Explained

Everything about Fernando Lugo totally explained

Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez is a Paraguayan politician who won the April 2008 presidential election and is therefore president-elect of Paraguay.
A Roman Catholic bishop, he's associated with the Socialist International through the APC-coalition's Revolutionary Febrerista Party. He had requested laicization in order to run for office. However, the Holy See refused the request on the grounds that Bishops couldn't 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 didn't dismiss him from the clerical state.

Early life and history with the Church

Lugo's family wasn't particularly religious: he never saw his father enter any chapel. But instead, it was a very political one. 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'd 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'd 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.

Presidential candidacy

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's said he finds the presidency of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela interesting, he's also made a point to distance himself from populist leaders in Latin America, focusing more on social inequality in Paraguay.
   On February 23, 2007, a Prensa Latina article noted that the Paraguayan Interior Ministry offered Lugo protection because of the death threats he's received during the course of his political activities.
   According to a poll released in February 2007, he was the leading contender in the 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 wouldn't initiate any proceedings to block Lugo's candidacy, there's 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.
   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 will be Paraguay's second leftist president (the first being Rafael Franco, who served from 1936 to 1937), and the first to be freely elected. Also, it'll be the first time in Paraguay's history (the country gained independence in 1811) that a ruling party peacefully surrenders power to an elected member from the opposition.

Blog

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

Further Information

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