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President-elect Fernando Lugo of Paraguay meeting with the media in Asuncion on Tuesday.
(Jorge Saenz/The Associated Press)

An outsider's victory allows jubilant Paraguayans to look past dictatorship

ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay: The revelry on the streets in front of the Hall of Justice carried on deep into the morning. Bottle rockets flew. Couples danced and kissed. Drums beat wildly. Young people draped with Paraguayan flags clung to the columns of the building.

The Colorado Party was dead — at least, for now.

After living more than 60 years under one-party rule, Paraguayans finally mustered the strength on Sunday to wrestle the ghost of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner to the ground. The stunning victory by Fernando Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop, closed the book on the authoritarian regimes of the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America. And now, finally, voters were breathing what they hoped would be the first strong whiffs of real democracy.

The National Republican Association, known as the Colorado Party, was more than a mere political organization. It was the country's largest employer, the bureaucratic apparatus that helped keep Stroessner in power for 35 years.

The other major dictators of that era from Argentina, Brazil and Chile relied on their military apparatus to hold power. But Stroessner "had the Colorado Party apparatus at his service," said Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. "There was nothing comparable in Latin America where you had a single party tied to a leader."