IF YOU need a pretext for a political climbdown in Latin America, they don’t come much better than a plea from the pope. That was the excuse that Horacio Cartes, Paraguay’s president, used to drop his plan to run for a second consecutive term in 2018, which required changing the constitution. He was inspired to desist, he wrote to the archbishop of Asunción this month, by Pope Francis’s call for peace and dialogue. An attempt to ram the change through congress had provoked a riot in which the parliament building was set on fire.
After ten days of hesitation, during which Mr Cartes’s Colorado Party failed to withdraw the amendment, on April 26th congress voted unanimously to reject it. But Paraguay’s decision will not quiet debate across Latin America about whether or not to allow presidential re-election.
When in the 1970s and 1980s Latin America emerged from a period of dictatorship, its politicians were keen to place limits on executive power. Most countries either barred presidents from seeking re-election, or allowed them to do so only after waiting out at least one term.
Since then, there has been a gathering trend in the region to relax term...Continue reading
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