Lugo’s new calling

Margaret Hebblethwaite

After breaking the longest spell of single-party rule in the world, ex-bishop Fernando Lugo Méndez has been elected president of Paraguay. While left-wing like his Latin American presidential counterparts, his views owe far more to liberation theology than to anti-Americanism

Fernando Lugo Méndez, in his first public pronouncement after the exit polls in Paraguay unanimously showed he was the winner, promised that his would be "a humble and a modest presidency". The former bishop was casually dressed in an open-necked shirt and sleeveless anorak: he never wears a suit. He spoke very briefly, as is his custom, but said the result had shown that "the little ones" were capable of winning - a good expression from someone identified with liberation theology.

I first met Fernando Lugo in 1996, when he was hosting the Fifth Latin American Congress of Basic Ecclesial Communities in his diocese. San Pedro de Ycuamandyju is one of the poorest regions of the country. To get there I drove all night with a friend in a rattling old banger, trying to hold a straightish line on a strip of dust. Other participants at the congress had arrived by a bus, which broke down on the journey back. Lugo said it was a miracle that the congress had come to his diocese. It was.

"I wish I had arms enough to embrace you all," he declared in his closing homily, expressing the warmth that always characterised his addresses. He was less at home the next time I met him, in Rome for the synod for America in 1997. "Do you like this sort of thing?" he said, looking round the synod hall, where all (including him) were togged up in their red and purple robes. "Don't you?" I asked. "It's a spectacle," he replied coolly.

The next time I travelled towards San Pedro I was in Lugo's car at his invitation, so that we could talk while he travelled. He had quite a comfortable jeep, no doubt donated from abroad for the missions - "an episcopal car" he joked, mock-pompously - to force its way through when rain turned the road to mud.

Because of his work in San Pedro, Lugo is identified with the struggle of the poor, but he himself comes from an educated, though relatively modest, home. He chose to make a statement to the press on Christmas Day 2006, when he confirmed he would be willing to stand for the presidency, from his parents' wood-and-tile house in Encarnación, which he described as "the most humble house in the neighbourhood". But his uncle was Epifanio Méndez, who was the most important opposition politician exiled by Alfredo Stroessner, and who died in exile before the 34-year dictatorship came to an end.

Born in 1951, Lugo began his working life as a teacher in a country school so remote that he was able to escape the usual rule that teachers had to be members of the ruling Colorado Party. He joined the Divine Word congregation and studied sociology in Rome. Then he worked for a while as a missionary with the indigenous people of Ecuador. He was ordained bishop in 1994, and was a strong supporter of basic ecclesial communities in the diocese. Lugo was one of the few bishops who would regularly attend national meetings of base communities - the local church groups that are associated with liberation theology - and the only one who would be always be there for the whole of the congress.

In San Pedro he had problems with drug traffickers and landowners, and received death threats: it was all in a day's work. He resigned from his diocese of San Pedro in 2005, and became prominent on the national scene again when he organised a massive demonstration on 29 March 2006 against a return to dictatorship, at a moment when President Nicanor Duarte Frutos seemed to be showing tendencies in that direction. After the success of that march, Lugo began to think about running for president.

Clergy who go into active political life are severely censured by the Church: warned, suspended from their ministry, expelled from their religious orders, and publicly criticised. Lugo anticipated the problems by writing his own letter to Pope Benedict asking to be suspended a divinis, that is, from the exercise of his ordained ministry. It received a frosty reception, and the Vatican claimed that there was no need for Lugo to offer his services to politics, because Paraguay was a democracy and there were plenty of lay people who could take his place. The truth is that no one other than Lugo could have beaten the Colorados last Sunday. The Catholic Church is held in high esteem in Paraguay, while politicians are seen as thieves and liars, so being a bishop was crucial to Lugo's victory. It made him trusted among the poor majority, so that when his opponents tried to blacken his name with the unlikely charges of being a kidnapper and terrorist, the people simply laughed.

The Paraguayan bishops were torn between their esteem for Lugo and their loyalty to Rome. In public they had to distance themselves from Lugo's candidature. Only one, the outspoken Bishop Mario Melanio Medina, came out from the start in favour of Lugo's move. But when the Lugo victory was predicted by the exit polls last Sunday, the president of the episcopal conference, Bishop Ignacio Gorgoza, held a press conference and said obliquely: "The Church has never opposed the official postulation of Lugo, who ecclesiastically continues to be suspended."

If the bishops were pleased, the country was ecstatic. Although opinion polls indicated that Lugo had the most support, there had been widespread fear that the Colorado Party, which had managed to stay in power for 61 years by corrupt means, would trounce him. "Change" is the word that summed up the reasons why people voted for Lugo. The most establishment newspaper, ABC Color, ran the headline "The people have overthrown those who humiliated, impoverished and betrayed them".

And with the exception of a hard core of Colorado activists who have retreated into their houses, everyone is greeting their neighbours with open arms, radiant faces and cries of "Lugo tiene corazón" ("Lugo has a heart") - the refrain of his campaign song.

But difficult as it was to win the election, once the honeymoon is over governing a country with 20 per cent of its population in extreme poverty, and no experience - ever - of true democracy, will be extremely difficult. If the experiment ends in disillusion and the cracking of Lugo's reputation of quasi-messianic ruler, we can hardly be surprised; though to say that now, in the current euphoria, feels almost a sin.

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