ASUNCION, Paraguay -- The Brazilian air force plane dipped down out of rainy skies, taxied for mere minutes at Asuncion's airport, then took off with Paraguay's disgraced former president aboard.
Raul Cubas left the country Monday for his first day of political asylum in Brazil Tuesday, while his successor struggled to unify a country wobbly from a political crisis marked by an assassination, riots and an impeachment trial.But the arrival of Luis Gonzalez Macchi as Paraguay's new president does not guarantee months of bickering among the country's politicians has come to an end.
The abrupt transfer of power was the latest evidence of the fragility of youthful democracies across Latin America. Ten years after Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship fell, Paraguay is still trying to step out of the long shadow of his 34-year rule.
Cubas and his family arrived in southern Brazil early Tuesday on a Brazilian Air Force plane. The plane touched down in Itajai, about 430 miles southwest of Rio de Janeiro, airport authorities said. News reports said Cubas went immediately to the neighboring town of Camboriu, a seaside resort where he has an apartment.
Some observers skeptically watched the crisis unfold over the past week, calling it one of the more bitter, and certainly more bloody, manifestations of the feuding within the Colorado party that has ruled through dictatorship and democracy since 1947.
"Poor Paraguay. Another stage in the warfare within the Colorados," said Riordan Roett, director of Western Hemisphere programs at Johns Hopkins University. "It's been a decade of rivalries and factions."
The crisis sparked by the March 23 ambush shooting of Vice President Luis Maria Argana led to the removal of one of the most divisive figures from the Colorado party: former army Gen. Lino Cesar Oviedo, who fled to Argentina late Sunday.