Get Me the Paraguayan President's DNA: Three Devastating Wikileaks from Latin America

[Judi Lynn]

Wednesday, 01 December 2010 11:32
Get Me the Paraguayan President's DNA: Three Devastating Wikileaks from Latin America

~snip~
1. Collecting DNA in Paraguay

Much has been made, and rightly so, about US diplomats collecting financial and biometric information of foreign diplomats at the United Nations. As nefarious as that is, diplomats have limited influence, what if the State Department were doing the same for elected presidents?

Of the five media outlets to receive advance copies of the leaks, The Guardian was the only one to publish a March 2008 cable from the State Department to the U.S. embassy in Paraguay. The Guardian ran the entire cable, without comment, under the headline: "Washington Worries that Paraguay Harbors Iranian Agents and Islamist Terrorists". The cable is a shopping list of information that the State Department requested in the run-up to Paraguay's 2008 presidential elections. Near the bottom of the list is a disturbingly casual request that the U.S. embassy gather "(b)iographic and financial information on all leading contenders, and especially on Minister of Education Blanca Ovelar, former Vice President Castiglioni, Lino Oviedo, and Fernando Lugo; and biometric data, to include fingerprints, facial images, iris scans, and DNA, on these individuals."

Fernando Lugo, a Catholic bishop who promised to bring about massive land reform in order to return needed crop space to the country's peasant farmers, went on to win the presidency. As the Real News reported recently, Lugo has been unable to achieve many of his pledges, due in part to the influence of U.S. agribusiness corporations who are using the land for soy production.

~snip~
Another possible scenario involves straight-up blackmail. Threatening to frame the president with a misdeed of some kind, or maybe just implying the capacity to do so. I have absolutely no information that this is the case, but for those who think it impossible, I would point out that it has only been two decades since the U.S. was training the soldiers of Paraguay's brutal dictator and U.S. ally, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner. Blackmailing the president would be peanuts compared to the torturing of political dissidents by sodomizing them with electric cattle prods, the forced enslavement of the Ache indigenous nation as house workers for the elite, or the extrajudicial execution of the regime's opponents, all of which enjoyed the support of successive U.S. administrations for 35 long years.

More:
http://www.therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/42/499-wikileaks-in-the-western-hemisphere

[Peace Patriot]

1. You forgot the obvious. Lugo has a mistress and a love child.

This scandal came out after he was elected (the first leftist president of Paraguay, ever, after 60 years of rightwing rule, including a heinous dictatorship). He copped to it--so he WASN'T blackmailed. But we now have this evidence that the U.S. likely tried to blackmail him with it.

It had special potential to damage him because he is a former Catholic bishop and is still a priest.

I frankly don't know what the political fallout from this disclosure was, on Lugo, or how it got disclosed. But his honesty probably helped quite a lot.

Latin Americans, like Europeans, are a lot saner about such 'weaknesses' in politicians than our oddly Puritan/licentious corporate media is. If the truth were known, I think most Americans are liberal about such things as well--consider Clinton's high approval ratings during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Try as the far rightwing and the corpo-fascist press could, they couldn't dent his polls! Sex scandals are more a corpo-fascist media/secret government thing, for controlling politicians--than a concern of ordinary Americans. Paraguay, however, has been been in the iron grip of the rightwing for a very long time, and is considered socially very conservative--but that may just be a rightwing overlay (socially oppressive power structure). What the peasant farmers who are getting dosed with toxic pesticides in the corporate soy operations, and the poor--the majority of the people in the country--think of a priest falling in love and having children may be quite different --they are probably forgiving of it, in their beloved "bishop of the poor."

But I don't know for sure.

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(Edited for typo.)