Paraguay’s congress grants military powers to its new president

Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes has won new powers by the nation’s legislators to deploy military forces to crush the unrest in the country just a week after being sworn into office.

Paraguay’s Senate vote Thursday to back the measure, one day after the lower house of the nation’s parliament approved the move.

The measure is reportedly aimed at combating the country’s armed rebel group, known as the Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP), which has been blamed for a number of attacks in northern parts of the nation.

The ruling Colorado Party and its allies in the poor country’s legislature wasted no time in agreeing to a plea by President Cartes to deploy military forces to fight the rebels even without first declaring a state of emergency.

A multi-millionaire businessman before he became president and his nation’s richest individual, Cartes pledged to ‘wage war on poverty’ during his inaugural speech last week.

Cartes’s Colorado Party dominated power in the impoverished country for 60 years and played a key role in backing the military rule of Gen Alfredo Stroessner from 1954 to 1989.

In 2008, however, Cartes’s party was beaten by a left-wing coalition led by Fernando Lugo, who was impeached in June 2012 by the nation’s opposition-controlled parliament in a politically controversial process that took less than 48 hours.

The measure was widely deemed unfair by many of Paraguay’s neighboring states, leading them to expel it from the Mercosur trading bloc that includes Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Meanwhile, Cartes’s new powers to deploy the military come nearly a week after five security guards were kidnapped and then killed, allegedly by EPP rebels, in Paraguay’s San Pedro region, north of its capital of Asuncion.

President Cartes decided to deploy the army to the area, but first had to amend the law so it could reinforce the police in its fight against the EPP.

Critics of the move, however, describe the new powers as a dangerous development for a country that spent much of the 20th Century under a military dictatorship.