Is the CIA somehow behind or connected to the impeachment – in a trial that took just a few hours – of the president of Paraguay? For Ecuador’s El Telegrafo, columnist Nancy Bravo de Ramsey speaks for many on the Latin American left when she ascribes the removal of office of President Fernando Lugo, a former priest who was trying to resolve a 140-year imbroglio over land reform, to U.S. machinations. In Paraguay, one percent of the population owns 77 percent of the arable land.
For El Telegrafo, Nancy Bravo de Ramsey writes in part:
The powerful country to the north, with the help of the traitors that are always on hand in Latin America, seems to have returned to its old ways. And this time the victim is Paraguay. The events of Saturday, June 23rd have all the hallmarks of the CIA and the pungent odour of a coup d’état, planned and hatched in the Paraguayan parliament.
Without putting any evidence on the table – “because the facts are a matter of public record and there is no need to present them,” they said – without observing due process, leaving only a few hours for the preparation of a defense and without identifying the crimes of the accused, the representatives of the purest elements of the Paraguay oligarchy put an end to a historic presidency that had made possible the greatest ever economic growth of the Guaraní people [the indigenous inhabitants of Paraguay].