Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay

1. The Transition to Democracy

1 The Transition to Democracy When I first visited Paraguay in 1998 and for ten years thereafter , the word democracy was everywhere and always laden with complicated negative feelings. At the very least, Paraguay was still in a “transition to democracy” which had no clearendinsight.Since1989,whentheColoradoParty,which had then been in power for forty-two years, announced that democracy was coming, Paraguayans had been participating in open, internationally approved national elections. But the Colorados had remained in power, and a degree of cynicism had overtaken most opinions of the transition. Depending on where and whom I asked, the reasons for these feelings varied. In Asunci—n, where most of my conversations were with middle-class professionals, a longing for democracy and state reform was still palpable under the deep despair about the transition, hatred of the Colorados, and fears of a return to outright dictatorship. In the countryside, or campo, where I spoke mainly with politically active campesinos, hatred of the Colorados, often couched in a language of anti-authoritarianism, was underwritten with ambivalence about what democracy might actually bring.1 A common refrain in the campo was “with Stroessner you couldn’t say what you wanted to say, but you could eat what you wanted to eat.” The politics, aspirations, and worldviews of these two groups were shaped by the different frustrations of prolonged transition, and they came to be related to each other, 26 Chapter One often antagonistically. For while campesinos continued to believe that they epitomized el pueblo Paraguayo, “the Paraguayan people,” in Asunci—n a quite different vision of the country was brewing. The most powerful actor in Paraguayan politics throughout the transition period remained the Colorado Party, a deep-rooted clientelist network that tied Paraguay’srichestfamilieswithitspoorestandgavetheformeralmostcomplete control of the military, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy. But if campesinos had carved out their politics in relation to the Colorados throughout the Cold War, they now found they had to negotiate political space with those who increasingly dominated media, business, development organizations, and the school system, and whose primary hope for campesinos was their disappearance. The transition sweeping Paraguay was not about the destruction of traditional campesino culture (although certainly the romantic vision of peasant ways of life reemerged in the debate over these transformations), but rather about the unraveling of a once powerful if fractious historic bloc, organized around a land reform that linked the Colorado Party to campesino economic aspirations. With that unraveling came profound economic and political realignments and a complete overhaul of both the political and the agricultural landscape. The transition to democracy, whatever else it might have been, was a powerful narrative that organized new democratic politics.2 The transition produced a publicly legitimated sense of past, present, and future, which in turn created exclusions in time. If the Stroessner government prior to 1989 made a great show of saying that campesinos were the future of the nation, after the coup new democrats increasingly portrayed campesinos as part of the nation’s past, and doomed to disappearance. This view of campesino anachronism did not necessarily emerge from overt malevolence toward the rural poor. In the years just after the coup, new democratic politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and social leaders made huge efforts to bring the campesinado into the transition project and to make the narrative of new democratic ascendancy agree with the narrative of rural people’s liberation from tyranny. But these projects didn’t work out, and over time it became clear that the campesinado simply didn’t fit the transitional narrative. Campesinos were eventually held responsible for the continuities associated with a tyrannical past, cultural and bureaucratic elements embarrassingly out of joint with the primary symbols of the coming democracy: transparency, civil society, and the free market.3 In the worst cases, campesinos were perceived as the frightful masses whose political irrationality The Transition to Democracy 27 might just bring the dictatorship back. At other times they were seen simply to be in the way, a drag on inevitable progress. Campesinos and New Democrats Cold War Campesinos Even in the most dispassionate of analyses, the word campesino connotes for Paraguayans a series of cultural, linguistic, and historical associations spanning the gamut between romantic ideals and deeply racist stereotypes.4 It includes ideas about traditional cultural norms that prevailed among mestizo smallholders in the rural departments closest to Asunci—n (Caazap‡, Guair‡, Paraguar’) in the nineteenth century and early...