Juan Carlos Wasmosy
Juan Carlos Wasmosy was president of Paraguay from 1993 to 1998, the first civilian since 1954 and the first elected in a contested vote since anyone could remember. He was the engineer whose construction company had built the Itaipú dam's Paraguayan half under Stroessner and made him the richest man in the country. The Colorado Party's machine chose him in a primary of December 1992 whose count the army's commander, Lino Oviedo, is generally believed to have adjusted. The five years were the argument with Oviedo. He was the general who had put him in, who ran the army as a party of his own, and who in April 1996, ordered to resign, refused, surrounded the presidential palace with tanks, and demanded the presidency, which Wasmosy, from the American embassy, refused to give. The Mercosur presidents, the OAS and the crowds in the Plaza de Armas backed him. Oviedo went, was offered the defence ministry, was refused it by the Congress. He was jailed for ten years by a military court in 1998 on the president's insistence. It was on the eve of an election Oviedo would have won. The rest was the constitution of 1992 carried into practice. There were the Mercosur treaty signed at Asunción in 1991 made real, and the banking collapse of 1995, in which two of the largest banks and a dozen finance houses failed and the state paid. There were the privatisation of the airline and the shipping line, the growth that did not happen, the corruption that did, the peasant land occupations, and the Congress that impeached nobody but investigated everybody. He was born in Asunción, of Hungarian descent, and studied engineering. He built dams, roads and the Yacyretá works. He had never held office before the presidency. He handed over in August 1998 to Raúl Cubas, Oviedo's proxy. Cubas freed Oviedo within a week. The vice-president Argaña was murdered in the street seven months later. Cubas fled and Oviedo with him. That was the sequel to his five years. He was charged in 2002 with the diversion of the central bank's funds to a failed bank, convicted, sentenced to four years, and cleared on appeal. He lives in Asunción, the president who kept the army out and the money in.
- Lived: 1938 CE – ?
- Nationality: Paraguayan
- Roles: president, engineer, businessman
