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[Translation of an article from Carta Maior of Brazil for May 3, 2013.  See original here.]

By Marcel Gomes

Rio de Janeiro – The strengthening of relations between Brazil and Venezuela during the administrations of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Hugo Chávez will allow Brasilia and Caracas to maintain close political and economic ties, even after the death of the Venezuelan.

Those who hold this view are supported by the high degree of institutionalization of the bilateral relations. The new president, Nicolás Maduro, has at his disposal UNASUR (Unión de Naciones Suramericanas – Union of South American Nations) and MERCOSUR (Mercado Común del Sur – Southern Common Market), energy projects, local branches of IPEA (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada – Institute of Applied Economic Research), EMBRAPA (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária – Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) and Caixa (Caixa Econômica Federal – Brazilian publicly owned bank), as well as a commercial exchange that has jumped from 800 million US dollars to six billion reais [about three billion dollars] in a decade – 80 percent of it, keep in mind, to Brazil’s benefit. (more…)

((A demonstration at the Brazilian-Paraguayan border against the overthrow of Fernando Lugo — photo by Xinhua))

On the same day, legislators were negotiating for a new military base

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for July 1. See original here and related articles here and here.]

by Stella Calloni

Buenos Aires, June 30 – While the hasty political trial, considered illegal by neighboring countries, of the democratically elected president of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, was taking place last June 22, Paraguayan congressmen were meeting with United States military officers to negotiate the building of a military base in Chaco, a vast uninhabited region of the South American country. (more…)

[Translation of an article from El Clarín of Santiago, Chile, for June 25. See original here and related articles here and here.]

by Guillermo Almeyra

The conspiracy against the Paraguayan president, former bishop Fernando Lugo, began the day he won the presidential election, since he could only assume office thanks to a popular mobilization. Without a party of his own, without a parliamentary caucus of any importance to back him, with a vast but dispersed and disorganized supportive base in the peasantry, forced to face opposition in the hierarchy of his own church, he has always depended on a fragile alliance with the party of Vice President Federico Franco, the Liberal Radical party, which is extremely conservative and represents a sector of the landowners.

Partisans of the Stroessner dictatorship, meanwhile, were and still are embedded in the public administration, the police forces, the so-called justice system and the Supreme Court. Lugo tried too late to form a party/front, the Frente Guasú (“broad” in Guaraní), which is just now taking its first steps and is far from being homogeneous. But all the Paraguayan Rights, backed in the shadows by the United States, wanted to leave no room for the center-left to organize and to try to hold on to power, even though there is more than a year to go before the end of Lugo’s term and ten months before the elections, in which in any case the president cannot be re-elected. (more…)