BY the time this issue is out, on August 15 to be exact, Paraguay, a small, poor, landlocked South American country of 6 million people – known to most Filipinos mainly because one of its citizens, Amado del Paraguay, was once Pilita Corales’ beau – will have a Catholic bishop, Fernando Lugo, as its president. For the first time in 61 years, the world’s longest-ruling party, the Colorados, the party of dictator General Alfredo Stroessner (ousted in a coup in 1989) and later his civilian cohorts, with the backing of the Americans, have won, by hook or by crook, all presidential elections in that country.

        Until Fernando Lugo, with a ragtag coalition of small parties from the center right to the radical left, won the elections last April while he was still a Catholic bishop. The Vatican reluctantly accepted his resignation.

        Though he won handily, he got only 42% of the vote and he does have a majority in Congress. For 10 years he was a bishop in the poorest region of Paraguay, San Pedro, peopled by peasant farmers and landless laborers. He ran on the main issue of land reform, in a country where only 1% of the population owns 77% of the farmland. Paraguay shares the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, the Itaipu, with its neighbor Brazil but it uses only 1/10th of its share, selling the rest to Brazil at a price below the spot prices in the latter. Lugo promised to renegotiate the treaty.

        Let us watch and see how Lugo performs in Paraguay. He promised to stay for only one term (5 years), and he intends to push to completion his anti-poverty programs of land reform, health care and education for the poor.

        In the Philippines, land reform is a dismal failure. The big haciendas of the Cojuangcos (Luisita), the Arroyos (Negrors) and many others remain in the hands of their owners, through the passage in Congress of the stock-option share for farmers, signed into law by President Cory Aquino. The abolition of tenancy affected only small landowners, who are bound in perpetuity to the family of their former tenants under an agricultural leasehold contract of 75% - 25% sharing of the harvest. Under the law, the spouse of the lessee takes over when the latter dies; and when he or she dies, the eldest child becomes the lessee, no matter if he or she is not a farmer. As a result, there is no incentive to increase productivity or use modern farming technology to improve production.

        Look at the roster of presidential aspirants in 2010. Look at their assets. They all belong to the upper crust of our society. Even our very own Chez Escudero, the “poorest” of them all, is somehow tainted by his and his father’s membership in Danding Cojuangco’s Nationalist Citizens Party. Although to his credit he did not join Cojuangco’s two sons and a nephew who blocked the impeachment move in Congress, the recent signing of a deal between San Miguel’s Cojuangco and GMA to develop around a million hectares of public land has never been questioned by any of the presidential aspirants, including Chez. If you are a keen observer of our politics, you will know by now that without Danding’s 50 or so diehards in Congress, no impeachment of GMA can happen.

        Perhaps the Catholics in this country should start looking for a candidate who can galvanize the great masses of our electorate to change the status quo. Of the current members of the CBCP, Archbishop Cruz of Pangasinan, were he 15 years younger, could be our Fernando Lugo. Or maybe Fr. Ed Panlilio, governor of Pampanga, could take on the billionaires, actors, media celebrities or the military-industrial complex types supported by big business, but he has one drawback: he comes from the same province of the most unpopular president this country has ever had, barring none, including the late President Marcos.

        If the Catholic church can involve itself in a highly charged political issue as the population bill in Congress, perhaps it is about time its leaders, with its almost half a million years of moral ascendancy and religious dominance in this country, should take its pro-poor programs to its highest and fastest level of attainment by helping elect a president who share its mission, vision and passion.

        Every election, the issue of graft and corruption is raised like a broken record. Isn’t it time we Catholics should do something about it? If lowly Paraguay can do it, why can’t we?

        If Manalo’s INK, Villanueva’s JIL, and even the Catholic-sponsored El Shaddai can elect party-list representatives in Congress, and thereby have seats at the table of power, why can this only Catholic nation in Asia elect a president who will free us from our perennial Sisiphus-like burden every election?