Fernando Lugo
Fernando Lugo was president of Paraguay from 2008 to 2012, the Catholic bishop of San Pedro, the bishop of the poor, who resigned his see in 2006 to run for the presidency, was refused by the Vatican, which does not let bishops resign, and ran anyway. He won the election of April 2008 with forty-one per cent at the head of a coalition of the Liberals and the left, ending sixty-one years of the Colorado Party's rule, the longest of any party in the world then, thirty-five of them under Stroessner. The four years were the land question he had promised to answer and could not, with two per cent of the owners holding eighty-five per cent of the land and the soy frontier moving. There was the renegotiation of the Itaipú dam treaty with Brazil in 2009 that tripled Paraguay's payment for the electricity it sold, the free health care in the public hospitals, and the cash transfers. There were the paternity suits that began in April 2009 when a woman announced that the president had fathered her child while he was a bishop, which he admitted, and two more he admitted after. There was the massacre at Curuguaty on 15 June 2012, when a police eviction of landless farmers from a Colorado senator's estate ended in a gunfight with eleven farmers and six policemen dead. After that the congress impeached him in twenty-four hours, with two hours given for his defence. It removed him on 22 June by seventy-six votes to one. The region's governments called it a parliamentary coup and suspended Paraguay from Mercosur for it. He was born in San Solano in 1951 into a family that Stroessner's police had persecuted, three of his brothers exiled and his uncle a Colorado dissident. He was ordained in 1977, spent five years as a missionary in Ecuador where he learned liberation theology, was expelled from Paraguay for a year in 1983, studied in Rome. He was bishop of San Pedro, the poorest diocese, from 1994 to 2004, where he walked with the landless. He was treated for lymphoma in 2010 in São Paulo and recovered. He was elected to the senate in 2013 and was its president in 2015-16 and 2017-18. He ran again for the presidency in 2018 without reaching the ballot. He has lived since 2023 in retirement after a stroke. The Colorados have governed since the day he was removed.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Paraguayan
- Roles: president, bishop, politician
