Mario Abdo Benítez: The President of Paraguay avoids being dismissed from his functions due to the demand for a political trial to manage the pandemic | International

The majority in the Paraguayan Congress rejected the impeachment request of the president, Mario Abdo Benítez, for his handling of the pandemic. The Paraguayan opposition, which asked to prosecute the president, assured that the management of the health crisis was “corrupt and inoperative”.

The protests against Mario Abdo Benítez, in power since August 2018, were concentrated on Wednesday outside the Paraguayan Congress. Police charged some protesters with rubber bullets, tear gas and water jets. The center of Asunción is once again an apocalypse, seen a few weeks ago when the outbreak of the protests began. Broken windows, some looting and twenty arrested and wounded were the results of a night that the young demonstrators concluded with the fire at the headquarters of the National Republican Association (ANR), the official name of the Colorado Party. , conservative training. which has governed Paraguay since 1954, with the exception of the progressive government of 2008-2012. The flames were extinguished by firefighters and police.

A country in crisis

Despite macroeconomic data that the government disseminates and that international organizations unquestionably accept, such as average and sustained GDP growth of 4% per year or contained inflation at 5%, the vast majority of the country, seven out of 10, earn less. that the minimum wage of two million guaraníes (one dollar is equivalent to 7,000 guaraníes) and 46% of the population lives on irregular jobs without social security registration and therefore without medical insurance.

Before the start of the covid-19 pandemic, Paraguay was already suffering from two epidemics: dengue fever with more than 200,000 infections, and that even President Mario Abdo Benítez suffered in January 2020; and the other: corruption.

Paraguay is the country with the highest self-perceived corruption rate in South America after Venezuela, according to the annual survey prepared by Transparency International. Since 1954, the country has been ruled by the same political formation, the Colorado Party, except between 2008 and 2012, when the president was the ex-bishop of “the poor” Fernando Lugo of the Front Guasu (left), who won surprisingly, allied with the traditional opposition Liberal Party (center-right). The Lugo government ended a year earlier than it should have, as it went through a parliamentary trial that lasted 48 hours and was rejected.

The health crisis already existed before covid-19. It is so common that Paraguay’s public hospitals do not have medicines that many families, whether middle or lower class, have to resort to selling foodstuffs known as “polladas” or “hamburgueseadas” to get them. resources.

“People who do not have medicines in hospitals are forced to obtain them from an illegal market dominated by the same government party,” Julio Benegas Vidallet, Paraguayan writer and journalist who has just published, told EL PAÍS. The quarantine of Ñasaindy, a novel about the pandemic in Paraguay. “People are very sensitive, we see patients in intensive care and their families looking for money so they don’t die. We all have a cousin, sister or nephew with the virus, something that two or three months ago was just media terrorism, ”adds Benegas Vidallet.

Paraguay was one of the first countries in the Americas to close its borders, order quarantines and cancel classes when the COVID-19 pandemic began. But there were growing reports of drug diversion, borderline intensive care beds, and no prospect of a massive arrival of covid-19 vaccines.

On the streets and on social media, scenes like an older man approaching the president in a public act to beg for drugs for his brother recovering from covid-19, the parents of a girl in need of a surgical intervention demonstrating in front of the hospital or hundreds of mothers asking for medical cannabis for epilepsy and degenerative diseases of their children.

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