PARAGUAY:PARAGUAY FINALLY completed its transition to democracy on Sunday night when a former Catholic bishop ended the near 62-year grip on power of the country's ruling Colorado party, almost two decades after the end of the country's dictatorship.
Fernando Lugo becomes Paraguay's first opposition leader to win power peacefully since independence from Spain more than two centuries ago.
The presidential candidate of the 20-party coalition, Patriotic Alliance for Change, he beat the Colorado candidate by more than 10 points, beyond the wildest hopes of most of his supporters.
The scale of his victory - and the high turnout - led the Colorado leadership to concede defeat and so end fears that it might try and use fraud to rob the opposition of the result. Mr Lugo based his campaign on the need for change after decades of Colorado corruption had left the state ransacked and unable to do anything for the population of one of South America's poorest nations.
To shouts of "El Colorado Cayó!" - The Colorados have fallen - there were euphoric scenes after the result was announced. Crowds jammed into the centre of the capital, Asunción, to celebrate, waving the flags of the parties and social movements that made up Mr Lugo's coalition. Despite containing every age group from pensioners to toddlers most of the crowd had no memory of any government other than the Colorados.
Among them were thousands of Paraguay's huge diaspora, forced abroad in search of work but who came back to vote for Mr Lugo. One of these was 68-year old Pastor Baez who has lived in Argentina for 48 years and came back to vote for the first time since he left. "I never felt there was a choice before, but this time there was. I never lost hope that the Colorados would be defeated but this time I felt it was going to happen. So I came back to vote for my grandchildren, so that they could have a future without corruption."
Addressing the crowd, Mr Lugo said: "Starting from now things are going to change, and for the better. . . We will build a Paraguay that will not be known for its corruption and poverty, but for its honesty." In a front-page editorial, ABC Color, the country's biggest- selling newspaper, said yesterday: "The people have defeated those who humiliated them, impoverished them and betrayed them."
Mr Lugo now faces a mammoth task in trying to reimpose respect for the law on state institutions that have brazenly ignored it for decades. Colorado supporters populate every level of the state bureaucracy which is chronically corrupt. Leading Colorados also have ties to powerful gangs of smugglers and drug traffickers. Attempts to pursue this criminal arrangement through the courts will have to await a reform of the Colorado-dominated judiciary.
The president-elect also faces a delicate balancing act in holding his own coalition together. It has an agreed programme of government but there are deep ideological differences between its left-wing components and its biggest element, the traditional conservative Liberal party.