Lino César Oviedo
(Lino César Oviedo Silva; Juan de Mena, 1944) Paraguayan coup general.He completed a career in military academies in Germany.As a Paraguayan military officer, on February 3, 1989, and with the rank of colonel, his intervention was decisive in the overthrow of President Alfredo Stroessner.
From this moment on, the promotions in Oviedo's military career followed one another.In May of that same year he was promoted to Brigadier General and in December 1991 to Division General.In that period of time, he served, first, as Head of the 1st Cavalry Division and, later, that of the 1st Army Corps, a position he held until the end of 1993, the year in which he became commander of the Army.
He was only promoted to general in the Army when he starred in the most important political-military crisis of the democratic process in Paraguay.On April 22, 1996, and with the support of loyal commanders, he declared in absentia against President Juan Carlos Wasmosy.The military man refused to comply with his dismissal at the head of the Army Command and quartered in the Asuncion cavalry regiment, from where he demanded the resignation of Wasmosy.
Dismissed from the Army Headquarters, Oviedo was imprisoned after the first investigations into the April events, but 55 days later (August 7, 1996) he was released.From this moment, and while the process for rebellion and sedition continued its course, the former Army commander decided to dedicate himself to politics and assumed the leadership of the National Union of Ethical Colorados (UNACE), a current of the governmental Republican National Association (ANR, Colorado Party), in power since 1947.
On September 23, 1997, he was proclaimed candidate for the Presidency of the Republic of Paraguay for the presidential elections of May 1998.In the internal elections of ANR, Lino César Oviedo obtained the support of 36.75 percent of the votes, compared to his opponent, former Foreign Minister Luis María Argaña, head of the ANR movement, Movimiento de Reconcilitación Colorada, MCR.Due to "aggravating versions" made against Wasmosy's inauguration, the President of Paraguay ordered, on October 3, 1997, the disciplinary arrest of Lino Oviedo for 30 days in the First Infantry Division of Asunción.
Unaccounted for, he reappeared on October 10, 1997, when the presidential measure had been neutralized by the Judicial Power due to a remedial habeas corpus appeal filed by the lawyers of the controversial military.He went underground, where he remained for 42 days, after the Supreme Court annulled the preventive habeas corpus that the First and Second Instance courts had initially formulated in his favor.
It was finally delivered on December 12, 1997, and although the arrest, which he carried out in the First Infantry Division, was initially 30 days, Oviedo remained detained in preventive detention by order of the Extraordinary Military Court formed at the request of the president Wasmosy, given the slowness of the ordinary justice system.
During his detention, on December 29, 1997, he was confirmed by the Supreme Electoral Court of Justice as a candidate for the presidential elections in May 1998.On December 4, February 1998 the Military Court decreed prison for Oviedo and on March 9 he was sentenced to ten years in military prison for "commission of crimes against the order and security of the Armed Forces and for insubordination", as well as the "discharge absolute "of the army.Oviedo, who sometimes defined himself as a "democratic coup leader," thus lost all the honors collected during his military career and on March 10, 1998, he was politically disqualified.
However, the former military man, good friend and political ally of Raúl Cubas Grau, his substitute in the May Presidential candidacy and recently elected President of the Republic to replace Wasmosy, won his freedom on August 18, 1998, by presidential decree, which commuted his sentence from ten years in prison to three months of arrest.All his civic and political rights were restored and, once he was released, he once again assumed the leadership of the internal current of the ruling party against the headed by the new Vice President of the Republic, Luis María Argaña.
However, on December 2, 1998, the Supreme Court of Justice ordered the return to Oviedo prison, considering the presidential decree issued by Cubas three days after coming to power as unconstitutional.Finally, on March 24, 1999, the former coup general surrendered to a military unit in order, according to him, to clarify his legal situation with the military justice system.
Lino César Oviedo thus became the center of a serious crisis in the country that began on March 23, 1999 with the assassination of Vice President Luis María Argaña, and continued with his death, at dawn on the 27th of four members of the group "Jóvenes por la Democracia" and more than a hundred wounded by gunshots, as a result of the shots of snipers related to 'oviedismo' during the demonstrations that took place in the Congress squares.
On March 28, 1999, and before his friend and political ally Raúl Cubas resigned as Head of State, Lino Oviedo fled to Buenos Aires, where he was granted political asylum.Two months later, on July 12, Lino Oviedo was officially expelled from the Colorado Party and on the 15th of that month the Paraguayan justice ordered the imprisonment and seizure of 1,000 million guaranies ($ 303,000) on the assets of the former coup general because they understood that they existed.Sufficient evidence pointed to Oviedo as a suspect of having participated "as a moral co-author" in the attack that killed Vice President Argaña, his driver and one of his bodyguards.
On August 4, 1999, the Government of Paraguay requested that of Argentina the extradition of Oviedo for the crime of instigating the assassination, which was rejected shortly after by the Foreign Ministry of the Andean country.On September 9, and as part of an agreement to eliminate tensions in the bilateral relations of both countries, it was decided to confine the former general in Ushuaia, in the extreme south of the country.Accused on several occasions of remotely managing the decisions of his political followers, Lino Oviedo fled his confinement on December 9, 1999, a day before the Carlos Ménem government handed over power to the new Argentine head of state, Fernando de la Rúa.
In an unknown location since December 9, Lino Oviedo made journalistic statements by telephone, from underground, and on January 10, 2000 he decided to reappear, for the first time, before the press and in Paraguayan territory.He later entered Brazil illegally, from where he announced in 2002 his intention to return to Paraguay.
The former coup general is sentenced to a ten-year prison sentence for leading the rebellion of April 1996 and is also accused of the massacre of four members of the group "Youth for Democracy" assassinated on March 27, 1999 when they were demonstrating for the removal of Cubas.
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