Small world! I found a standard, obnoxious hit piece on Fernando Lugo, looked for the author.....

His name leaped right up in an article written two years ago, which showed me immediately the unavoidable conclusion about the character assassin was accurate.

First, here's his imitation of journalism:

Bishop Fernando Lugo No Saint
Tuesday, 26 June 2012 00:00
By Marco Cáceres

Most of the media coverage about former President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay will justifiably focus on whether his impeachment by that country's Senate was fair or constitutional. There will also be tremendous coverage of the public's response in Paraguay over the next few weeks and months, particularly if a sizeable resistance movement emerges on the streets, as it did in Honduras following the overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Of course, the growing isolation of Paraguay as a result of political and economic sanctions imposed by its neighboring countries as punishment will receive considerable attention. Because of his shoddy treatment at the hands of an overzealous Senate, Mr. Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop, will attract much sympathy as a victim and may even end up a kind of martyr -- not too dissimilar from Mr. Zelaya. But he should never... ever... be taken for a saint.

What is most fascinating about Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez is not his controversial and turmoiled Presidency or his swift impeachment, but rather his lurid history prior to being elected President. The bulk of Mr. Lugo adult life -- from August 1977 until just after he was elected President on April 20, 2008 -- has been as a priest and bishop, which in-and-of-itself makes it amazing he ever got elected in the first place, given his lack of political experience and connections. One of the reasons Mr. Lugo was so easily impeached is that he had such a weak base of support in Paraguay's Parliament.

Mr. Lugo did not belong to either the powerful conservative Colorado Party or the centrist opposition Authentic Radical Liberal Party, and was never able to wield enough power through his minority leftist Christian Democratic Party of Paraguay (CDP) in partnership with the Patriotic Alliance for Change -- a coalition of numerous other tiny parties. Not unlike what could happen in Honduras were Mr. Zelaya's Liberty and Refoundation Party (Libre) to win control of the government in next year's national elections and try to form a coalition with tiny leftists parties such as the Democratic Unification Party (UD), Innovation and Unity Party (PINU), Christian Democratic Party (DC), and Broad Political Electoral Resistance Front (FAPER).

This explains the 76-1 vote to indict Mr. Lugo by the lower house of Parliament and the 39-4 vote to impeach by the Senate.

... But I digress too much.

More:
http://hondurasweekly.com/bishop-fernando-lugo-no-saint-201206265366/



Marco Cáceres

Why is the US Backing a Military Contractor Whose Attacks Against Honduran Democracy are a Self-Proclaimed "Holy" Mission?

Saving Honduras?
by ADRIENNE PINE And DAVID VIVAR

I’m not sure why anyone would see a conference of mostly NGOs involved in humanitarian and development work in Honduras as threatening or suspicious. Same goes for a briefing by the US Deputy Consul in Tegucigalpa of the consular services available to US citizens working in Honduras. This borders on the silly.

–Marco Cáceres, quotha.net (my blog)

I met a friendly State Department foreign service agent on the train from DC to Baltimore recently. He didn’t know much about Latin America; he’d been stationed in the Middle East. When I told him I was doing work on the Honduras coup, he laughed heartily and said "We probably had our fingerprints on there somewhere!"

Indeed, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that certain individuals within State had direct knowledge of and involvement in the planning of the June 28, 2009 military coup that ousted president Manuel Zelaya, but that is largely beside the point. More importantly, the State Department’s role has been fundamental in ensuring the continuance of the coup regime through the de facto governments of Micheletti and Pepe Lobo, governments that have been responsible for thousands of human rights violations against members of the vast resistance movement against the coup-a movement that has now collected one million three hundred thousand signatures for a sovereign declaration demanding a popular constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution and the unconditional return of former president Manuel Zelaya and the 100+ other political exiles. The State Department’s support for the de facto governments has not wavered despite ongoing targeted extrajudicial assassinations of journalists, union leaders, intellectuals, LGBT activists, and others identified with the resistance movement, or the violent unprovoked police and military attack on an all-ages peaceful concert last month that resulted in the death of an elderly man, dozens of seriously injured concert attendees and band members.

The U.S. State has supported all this, but too often we confuse the State with the government. The State Department is but one very powerful part of what makes up the State, but it has not been working alone. Our U.S. neoliberal "democracy" is structured to protect the interests of corporations above all else: in criminal law, electoral spending, regulation, and privatization focused on turning desperate need into profit, the role of corporate power in determining state policy is paramount.

This is important to note because in the end, the 2009 Honduran military coup was not about ideology. It was about money. Corporate money. It was about opposition by corporations to Zelaya’s minimum wage hike, to his removing tax breaks that defined McDonald’s as a tourist industry, to his refusal to grant new mining concessions to Canadian mining companies and insistence on fining them for flagrant environmental damage, to the idea of a new constitution that threatened to challenge the complete control of Honduras’s resources by Honduran and foreign corporations. This was a neoliberal coup-a clear example of Bourdieu’s characterization of neoliberalism "a programme of the methodical destruction of collectives," when Hondurans were at a peak of collective resistance to corporate control. And although the coup failed spectacularly in its goal of destroying the collectivity, it succeeded in consolidating control over the resources and profits under contestation.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/10/15/saving-honduras/