The surgery, which was performed at the Italian Hospital in Asuncion, had been scheduled for weeks, spokesman Augusto dos Santos told reporters. Lugo's doctor, Nestor Martinez, said the operation was a transurethral resection, a surgery in which an instrument is inserted into the urethra to remove a section of the prostate that is blocking urine flow. The surgery involved nine doctors and three nurses and took about an hour, Martinez said at a news conference.
Lugo arrived at the hospital at 4 a. ET , was wheeled into surgery at 5 a. It was also formalized more widely in South America with the signing of the Additional Protocol to the Constitutional Treaty of Unasur on Commitment to Democracy in November , in response to the attempted coup in Ecuador in September of that year. Buenos Aires, 29 June. Kirchner's interpretation converges with the arguments presented in the previous section, especially with regard to the appearance of democratic legality that has been maintained throughout the various institutional disruptions in the region.
As a result of the parliamentary coup disguised as constitutional impeachment against Lugo, the foreign ministers of eleven South American countries united on June 22, to condemn the Paraguayan Congress summary dismissal of the President — an act without precedent in the history of coups in the region.
Congress failure to present evidence of a crime of responsibility, and instead, as mentioned above, its pursuit of impeachment on the grounds of 'public notoriety', in addition to the summary way in which the President was removed, were interpreted by the South American foreign ministers as characteristic elements of a rupture of the democratic order in Paraguay. In line with the official declarations of the governments, they opted for the simple political suspension of Paraguay and thus avoided imposing economic-commercial sanctions that would directly harm the Paraguayan population.
Observador On-line. Journal of European Integration. On the other hand, from an ideological perspective, the shared left-wing orientation of governments in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay assisted them in reaching a rapid consensus.
It is important to add that the decision to suspend Paraguay also resulted in Venezuela's admission to Mercosur, which had not yet been completed due to the Paraguayan Senate's refusal to ratify the agreement signed by the four Mercosur presidents in With the suspension of Paraguay, this impediment was removed and Venezuela could be admitted to the bloc 4 4 Around four years later, in December , Venezuela was itself suspended from Mercosur, by a unanimous decision by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.
The notification of Venezuela's suspension stated that the country has not fulfilled the obligations assumed in the 'Protocol of Accession of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela', signed ten years before. Conjuntura Austral. However, ideological motivation is unable to explain the position of the other countries, since the suspension of Paraguay from Unasur was supported by governments with different political orientations to those of the Mercosur members, such as Colombia and Chile, for example.
Therefore, we can state that the responses of other countries in the region embodied an attempt to fulfill the commitment to defend democratic institutions in the South American region, albeit within certain institutional limitations 5 5 Other international bodies active in the Americas, such as the Organization of American States OAS and the declaration of the presidents of the Ibero-American Summit, also affirm their commitment to defending the democratic order in the region, however, with little clarity regarding the procedures by which they would ensure this outcome.
The next sections deal, respectively, with the repercussions of the Paraguayan suspension in two other institutions of the bloc, Parlasul and the TPR. The suspension of Paraguay from Mercosur had repercussions in Parlasur on two main issues. The first concerned the decision as to whether or not a session should be convened in which members could vote on a common position regarding the suspension.
The second concerned whether or not to accept the CMC's decision to suspend Paraguayan representatives from all of the bloc's institutions. The positions on these questions within each of the national delegations varied significantly, as the following analysis demonstrates. It is argued that this fact can be attributed to two factors: the institutional immaturity of Parlasur, a body characterized by major uncertainty regarding its role in relation to the institutions of the bloc, and the prevailing relations between the various national delegations and their respective governments.
When Mercosur was created, the inclusion of parliamentary bodies was seen not only as a way of legitimizing the integration process politically, but, above all, as a means of facilitating the process of internalizing the norms negotiated by the national executive powers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was a new impulse to regional integration, due to the rapprochement between Argentina and Brazil and the economic recovery of these countries.
In this context of 'relaunching the bloc', the Constitutive Protocol of the Mercosur Parliament was signed. Revista Universitas Jus. According to the Constitutive Protocol of Parlasul, one of the agency's roles would be to "assume the permanent promotion and defense of democracy, freedom and peace", with the responsibility "to ensure the preservation of the democratic regime in the party states, in accordance with Mercosur rules, and in particular the Ushuaia Protocol on Democratic Commitment in Mercosur, the Republic of Bolivia and the Republic of Chile" PARLASUL, , p.
As such, Parlasur would be an appropriate forum for debating issues related to instability and democratic disruption within the Mercosur States. In the context of the crisis that led to the removal of Lugo, and taking into account the fact that the body is composed of representatives of all member countries, Parlasul could have provided a space for dialogue between representatives of Paraguay and of the other countries of the bloc.
It was for this reason that a meeting of the body was convened for July 02, , two weeks after the fall of Lugo. The Paraguayan, Brazilian and Uruguayan representatives were present at the Mercosur headquarters in Montevideo, but the Argentinian delegation failed to attend. Based on the positions adopted by members of the Mercosur Parliament, summarized in Table 02 , some important considerations can be made regarding the frustrated attempt to debate the issue.
The majority of the Brazilian delegation believed that Parlasur would act independently and that the Paraguayan members of parliament had the right to be present, expressing a view of the Parliament as an autonomous institution in relation to the other intergovernmental bodies.
Even the Brazilian representatives who sided with the government in supporting the Paraguayan suspension believed that the Paraguayan members of Parlasur should have the right to exercise their parliamentary functions, as reported by the Brazilian Senate news agency:. With the presence of a majority of federal deputies, the Brazilian representatives in Parlasur agreed, by majority vote, that Brazil would oppose the definitive exclusion of Paraguay. The majority position was that Parlasur is independent of the governments that form the bloc and therefore does not have to follow the decisions of the executives.
As for the question of the suspension itself, it is possible to identify political dimensions relating to government-opposition dynamics among the Brazilian representatives in Parlasur. While Deputy Dr. Rosinha Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT , former president of the Mercosur parliament and a member of the governing party, followed the position of the Brazilian executive in supporting Paraguay's suspension, Deputy Eduardo Azeredo Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, PSDB , one of the opposition leaders and also a Parlasur deputy, was critical of the position of the Brazilian foreign ministry, especially with respect to the process surrounding Venezuela's admission into the bloc.
The position of the Argentinian delegation indicates that its members followed the Argentinian foreign ministry in believing that Parlasur should be subordinated to the decisions of the executives. Due to the absence of the Argentinian members of parliament, the meeting could not take place. In practice, the Argentinian delegation, standing unanimously against even holding the meeting to discuss Paraguay's suspension, exercised a national veto power, thus obstructing the opening of the session.
The directly-elected Paraguayan members of Parlasur were present in Montevideo and hoped to participate in the meeting, including both supporters and critics of Lugo's impeachment. The case of the Paraguayan group thus reaffirms the lack of a unified position within the national delegations. Finally, the actions of the Uruguayan delegation also indicates the presence of political divisions: "The Uruguayans were divided.
The left-wing MPs of the Frente Amplio Broad Front, FA followed the recommendation of the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry and did not enter the chamber, while their opponents supported the opening of the session and adopted a position that was highly critical of the manner in which Paraguay had been suspended.
As the Paraguayan case has demonstrated, there is no guarantee that there will be national unity in the positions taken by members of the regional parliament. The ideological differences within each of the national blocs in Parlasur prevent collective action among representatives.
American Journal of Political Science. Since the national delegations in Parlasur do not only include supporters of the respective national governments, the political positions within Parlasur do not necessarily reflect those of the foreign ministries. The government-opposition dimension in the Paraguayan case demonstrates the plurality of opinions within each national delegation, indicating that the logic of preferences in Parlasur is distinct from that of national governments.
Opposition parties in Brazil and Uruguay took advantage of the regional parliament to express their opposition to Paraguay's suspension from the bloc, just as Paraguayan members of parliament opposed to Lugo's departure challenged the position of the country's new rulers.
On the other hand, in the Argentinian case, the fact that the individuals who composed the Argentinian delegation were all in agreement with the position of the executive led them to unanimously support the position of President Cristina Kirchner in favor of suspending Paraguay.
Furthermore, the cancellation of the July meeting of Parlasur indicates that there is no consensus regarding the role of Parlasur within Mercosur. Even though Parlasur's stated role is to act in defense of democracy, the members of parliament still differed over how to act in what was a clearly relevant case. Some members of parliament understood Parlasur to be an autonomous parliamentary institution, not subordinated to the decisions of national governments.
Other representatives, however, understood the parliament to be subordinated to the foreign ministries, and thus not competent to decide upon such a controversial topic. However, it is reasonable to argue that Paraguayan members of parliament should not have been suspended from Parlasur as they were. The Constitutive Protocol of Parlasur provided the body with relative autonomy in relation to national executives, in addition to establishing it as one of the entities responsible for defending democracy within the bloc.
On July 09, , the new government of Paraguay appealed to the TPR, challenging the legality of its suspension from the Mercosur body and the incorporation of Venezuela as a full member of the bloc. Paraguay did not receive a favorable response from the Court: the five judges examined only the preliminary, or procedural, issues raised by the parties and, because they recognized the existence of preliminary circumstances that would prevent consideration of the matter, they did not examine the merits of the appeal itself.
In addition, the Olivos Protocol provides for the use of direct negotiations, one of the issues that would come to the fore in the case of Paraguay's political suspension. On the one hand, the new system preserved the provision of an arbitration procedure via the constitution of ad hoc Arbitration Tribunals, while on the other hand it introduced the previously unavailable option of bringing an appeal to a permanent court, the TPR.
Although constituted as a court for reviewing the outcomes of arbitration processes, the TPR can also act in the first instance. In legal terms, it also acts as an 'a quo' court and not only as a court of appeal, or 'ad quem' judgment.
The jurisdiction of the TPR is consultative, meaning that it is not mandatory for the national authorities to follow the judgments it issues, which only constitute lines of interpretation. Unlike the legal structure developed in the European Union, the creation of the TPR did not produce autonomous, supranational institutions in Mercosur's dispute settlement system. The case of the political suspension of Paraguay was the fourth request for an advisory opinion made to the Court since its inception 8 8 It is interesting to note that the first three consultations with the TPR all related to the primacy of integration law.
Accessed on November, 13, Upon analysis, three sets of arguments can be observed in the petition presented by the representatives of the new Paraguayan government. Firstly, it was alleged that the gravity of the suspension imposed by the Presidential Summit would cause irreparable damage, inasmuch as it would deny the exercise of inalienable and sovereign rights by the Paraguayan State; that the suspension was not enacted via rules issued by a Mercosur body provided for in Article 41 of the Ouro Preto Protocol, but instead by a summit meeting whose participating heads of state lacked the legitimacy to adopt binding decisions; and, lastly, that there was no disruption of the democratic order and that the consultations provided for in Article 04 of the Ushuaia Protocol should never have taken place.
The second set of arguments related to the admission of Venezuela to Mercosur as a full member. The third set of arguments was based on a variety of norms and principles of international law, such as the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which they argued had been violated by the decision of the other Mercosur members assembled at the CMC. With respect to the procedure chosen by Paraguay, they opted for a route specifically reserved for exceptional and urgent cases, provided for in Article 24 of the Olive Protocol.
In their response to Paraguay's request, the governments of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay presented their defense in a joint petition, probably as a way of challenging the impression that the Uruguayan government had been forced to approve the suspension. In their defense of the decision taken by the presidents, three preliminary points were raised: firstly, they alleged that the Court did not have the competence to rule on the case on the grounds of subject-matter jurisdiction 'ratione materiae' , taking into account the political nature of the decision to suspend Paraguay and the commercial nature of the Mercosur dispute settlement system; secondly, they alleged that the procedure for exceptional and urgent cases provided for in Article 24 of the Olivos Protocol that had been chosen by the applicant, did not apply to the case; and finally, the three countries claimed that the Court lacked the necessary jurisdiction of an 'originating body' 'instancia originaria' , due to its being a Permanent Review Tribunal.
On the merits of the case, the joint petition defended the legality of both the suspension of Paraguay and the accession of Venezuela. Regarding the Paraguayan suspension, the following points were emphasized: the importance of the democratic clause, provided for in the Ushuaia Protocol, and its link to the continuation of the integration process; the claim that previous consultations with various Paraguayan political actors had been held; the rights of the Heads of State to suspend Paraguay, as well as the proportionality of the measure, being of a strictly political and provisional nature; and finally, the defendants maintained that the removal of President Lugo, carried out by means of a summary procedure, had produced an effective rupture of the democratic order in Paraguay.
Mr Lugo is a former priest in the Roman Catholic church turned centre-left politician. He was elected two years ago after 61 years of unbroken conservative rule. Mr Lugo has maintained friendly relations with the United States as well as leftist leaders such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. However, he caused a scandal last year when he admitted fathering a child while still a priest. Two other claims that he had fathered children have since been dismissed. Paraguayan president has cancer. Paraguay paternity claim dropped.
Paraguay leader admits love-child.
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