ASUNCION, Paraguay — After a troubled, occasionally bizarre presidential campaign in Latin America's most fragile democracy, early returns in Paraguayan elections Sunday gave the edge to the machine-style political party that has ruled this isolated nation for 50 years.
Raul Cubas of the Colorado Party, a wealthy engineer and former finance minister, held an apparently solid lead of about 6 percentage points over former Sen. Domingo Laino of the center-left Democratic Alliance, according to exit polls and projections based on partial results Sunday evening.
But the opposition party charged that the results were tainted by the discovery of fraud involving doctored vote tallies. The allegations arose after a day in which international observers described the electoral process as well-conducted.
The crusade to retain power by the Colorados, the hemisphere's longest continuously ruling party except for Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, centered on a charismatic leader in a jail cell: Gen. Lino Oviedo, the former candidate whom a military tribunal sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in April for attempting a coup in 1996. The sentence disqualified Oviedo's candidacy after a political brawl that almost caused another coup by rival generals.
It was Oviedo's name, not the candidate's, that a crowd of Colorado voters decked out in party crimson chanted Sunday evening as a sweaty Cubas, 54, declared victory.
"The strength of the Colorado Party has been demonstrated," Cubas said. "We will work with all Paraguayans to improve our living conditions."
A defiant Laino, meanwhile, predicted victory and called the Colorados a "mafia that has once again tried to fool public opinon."
"We are going to begin a new era," the opposition candidate said. "There will be a new Paraguay."
Cubas, formerly the vice presidential candidate, replaced Oviedo only three weeks ago. He has promised to win the retired general's release and grant him a leadership role, raising fears that Cubas will become a puppet for a militaristic strongman with an aggressively nationalist, right-wing ideology.
Oviedo is regarded with alarm by the international community because of the military's corrupt, anti-democratic tradition in this country of 5.5 million, a haven for organized crime, smuggling, product piracy and international terrorism. High-ranking U.S. diplomats, including recently retired Ambassador Robert Service, have openly questioned the general's credentials to lead a democracy.
