By Laura Barros
Asunción (EFE) On the 30th, a new president and the members of Congress will be elected, among others.
With less than three weeks to go to the polls, the country remains attentive to the actions of the government party to finance its campaign activities.
After the financial sanctions against Cartes for alleged acts of corruption forced him to delegate part of his functions to search for resources to other people.
Political proselytism has been concentrated on social networks, in the media and through some posters and banners installed in the streets.
In the absence of a debate between the main candidates for the Presidency and solid data from polls.
shutdown
Cartes, who governed between 2013 and 2018, was accused of corruption in July of last year by the US State Department, which vetoed his entry and that of his close relatives to that country.
This action did not prevent him from being elected president of the Colorado Party on December 18, in internal elections in which he defeated the country’s ruler, Mario Abdo Benítez, with whom he is in an open confrontation.
But it was on January 26 when the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced a series of financial sanctions that pushed the ex-president to undertake a restructuring process of his companies brought together in Grupo Cartes, a brand that since last March 24 it was “in disuse”.
The political sphere seems not to have escaped the shock waves. Sakã, the citizen initiative for electoral transparency, warned in a bulletin released on March 30 about the “strange (non) electoral environment” in the country.
“Starting with the US economic sanctions against the president of the ANR, Horacio Cartes, and the vice president of the Republic, Hugo Velázquez, there was a sort of paralysis,” Line Bareiro explains in an article.
This lawyer and political scientist recounts that the dispute for the December internal elections “was very active, with posters in towns and cities and various forms of presence of the candidates,” a situation that was expected to be repeated in the general elections.
“It would seem that the difficulties that the ANR had or is having to finance the campaign since the US sanctions on the president of the party have meant that the others have not been able to energize the electoral campaign,” he warns.
Bareiro points out that for the first time there is no debate between the main presidential candidates: the Colorado, Santiago Peña, and the opponent, Efraín Alegre, and observes that “there are some gigantographies of candidates and individual advertisements on the internet and also disqualifications of candidates for the same way”.
taiwan
And while ties to Taiwan have previously been a campaign issue, the tone has changed in an environment agitated by the strained relationship between China and the US over the island and Honduras’ recent decision to join the countries that have allied to the Asian giant.
Indeed, the relationship between Asunción and Taipei is the subject of debate in the campaign for the presidential elections in a country that established ties with the island in 1957, during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989).
Since while the opposition values a possible relationship with China as “an important option”, President Mario Abdo Benítez describes Taiwan as a “beacon of democracy”.
Meanwhile, China has made the establishment of official diplomatic relations conditional on breaking all ties with Taiwan, a territory that Beijing claims by considering it a rebel province, and with which today only thirteen states in the world maintain diplomatic relations.
In fact, Honduras recently became the ninth country in the world and the fifth in Latin America to cut ties with the island since 2016.
The concern about the common future has been evidenced by the Taiwanese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Yui, who pointed out in recent days to China that it is doing everything possible to “snatch” Paraguay from it.
“It is a fact that China has obviously been courting candidates from all parties,” said the deputy minister, quoted by the official CNA news agency.
In this regard, the presidential discourse is opposite: Peña told EFE last December that “Paraguay will continue to be an ally of Taiwan,” although he will seek to increase the flow of trade with mainland China, should he come to power.
For his part, Alegre admitted that they are “studying this relationship very seriously and with great responsibility” and valued a possible link with China as “an important option.”