At first glance, Diego Abente Brun may look like a scholar who stumbled into politics. on closer examination, it is clear that politics has defined his scholarship.

Abente's introduction to the passions and punishments of politics came early on as a high-school student, and continued into his days at the Catholic University of Asunción in Paraguay. Like other idealistic members of his generation, he wanted to see greater openness on the part of the Alfredo Stroessner regime and feared for the future of his homeland. And, like so many others, he came face-to-face with the security apparatus that kept Strossner in power for 35 years.

In 1976, Abente was imprisoned and tortured for his student activism. By the time he emerged from prison, few options remained for him as a political activist, and with the help of relatives and faculty members at Ohio University, he was allowed to leave Paraguay and travel to the United States in 1979. He completed a master's degree at Ohio University and earned a PhD from the University of New Mexico in 1984.

From 1984 to 1992, he led a quiet academic life as an associate professor of political science at Miami University (Ohio). In 1987, he received a visiting fellowship from the Kellogg Institute. After the fall of the Stroessner regime in 1989, Abente began to give serious consideration to picking up where he had left off 10 years earlier. In 1993, he returned to Paraguay to form a new political party, encuentro Nacional (National encounter Party, or PIN), as a challenge to the dominant Colorado Party that had kept Stroessner in power for so many years. Although the agenda of Encuentro Nacional met with limited success, Abente held various positions in government, as a Senator (1993-2003), Minister of Justice and Labor (2002), Paraguay's Ambassador to the Organization of American States (1999-2002), and most recently Senior Cabinet Advisor to the Minister of Finance (2003-2005). Today, he seems ready to leave politics behind and return to the less hectic pace of academia. He is currently Professor of Sociology and Politics at the Catholic University of Paraguay and a Senior Researcher at Centro de Analysis y Diffusion de economic Paraguayan (CADE), and spent the fall 2006 semester at Notre Dame as a Kellogg Visiting Fellow.

His project during his visiting fellowship, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Dilemmas of Democracy in a Small South American Country," explores the causes of the political and economic malaise in Paraguay and the variables likely to contribute to the development of a quality.

KI: Why, in your opinion, did the Stroessner regime fall? Why wasn't there a greater backlash against the ruling Colorado Party?

The fall of the Stroessner regime was the result of internal contradictions. We were not able as a civil society or political society to set up a challenge strong enough to bring down the regime. The regime basically began to unravel primarily because of a succession crisis, a crisis within the dominant coalition, secondarily due to external pressures, and lastly because of a limited degree of domestic pressure.

To understand that you have to keep in mind that the Stroessner regime was not a military regime or a personal dictatorship, but rather a particular kind of authoritarian regime that combined the presence of a strong traditional party with well-developed roots in the countryside that created a very strong system of patronage. Even today, the Colorado Party remains the majority party thanks to a vast network of state clientelism, which translates into the fact that more than 55 percent of the registered voters are card-carrying members of the ruling party.

When you have 40 percent of the population living in poverty, the people prefer the short-term benefits that the Colorado Party provided, instead of the long-term benefits of a better system for the future. In a sense, the people are risk-averse: the clienteles apparatus provides them with tangible, if insignificant, benefits in a country where 75 percent of the urban labor force is informal and only 17 percent of the population has access to health insurance. That's goes a long way to explaining why the Colorado Party has been in power and has retained power for 17 years since the fall of the regime.

KI: Why did you return to Paraguay after the fall of Stroessner?

As an academic, I could have made a contribution, but then I thought that I had spent my entire life working in all sorts of political movements with one objective: to bring down the dictatorship. Once the dictatorship had fallen, how could I not participate in the construction of a new system? So, I decided to give up my academic position and my green card, and go back to Paraguay.

KI: How successful were you?

We were quite successful in the 1993 presidential elections, in spite of the fact that the elections were rigged by fraud everywhere. In a way we [encuentro Nacional] were naïve in that we were not able to deal with that fraud effectively and it cost us that election. In spite of that, we were able to win a significant presence in Congress of Deputies and the Senate. The good thing was, for the first time the ruling party lost a majority in Congress. Therefore we had a majority in Congress, along with the Liberal Party, and a unique opportunity to bring about change.

We also had a new constitution (1992) that included a number of new institutions: the renewal and establishment of a new judiciary, the creation of a comptrollership, an office of ombudsman, and a new electoral system. Even though we didn't control the presidency, we had sufficient influence to change the system.

Unfortunately, that was not possible. We had difficulty putting together positions between the two major opposition parties and even inside each of the parties. The Liberal Party developed an independent strategy of just dealing directly with the government, and getting some benefits in exchange. In hindsight, the institutions that were created, especially those related to the electoral process, were a true disappointment and only promoted fragmentation, incentives to particularistic bargaining, and clienteles. by early 1998, it became clear that we had not done a good job, despite our good intentions.

As for our party, it had a clear agenda, but lacked discipline and firmer leadership to put it into practice. On the other hand, the Liberal Party relied on a strategy of power sharing that backfired, as was demonstrated when we supported its presidential candidate in the presidential election of 1998 only to be handed a clear defeat.

We were concentrating mainly on political and economic reforms. This was during the period of the Washington Consensus when international institutions handed countries a common economic recipe to be followed scrupulously, regardless of local peculiarities. There was some debate, but the majority of the political leadership was in favor of following the Washington Consensus almost blindly. And yet, even though Paraguay adopted the majority of the measures, development did not follow.

On the political front, we had a really heavy agenda: the renewal of the judiciary branch, development of a new electoral system, establishment of a comptrollership to control corruption, improving local governments, and creating an ombudsman. Of these five tasks, only one was a relative success, the establishment of the new electoral authority.

KI: The Washington Consensus was billed as a way to lift many from poverty. As someone who was intimately involved in applying the policies, what is your view in retrospect?

The diagnostic on which that recipe was based had nothing to with the reality of Paraguay. In the last 20 years, with all the policies of the Washington Consensus, we now have a country that is in the exact same condition-or worse, for our GDP per capita is slightly lower now-compared to where we were 20 years ago. And, of those 20 years, 17 of them were in democracy. Paraguay has had two lost decades, not one. These all-encompassing recipes are not useful; on the contrary, they are counter-productive.

I think we have to be pragmatic and look at the situation in each country on its own merits. Of course, market reforms are necessary, but the way in which the Washington Consensus was applied led to "ulna economía de mercaderes no de mercado" (an economy of merchants, not a market economy).

Take privatization. Paraguay did not have many state-owned enterprises, and yet the few that were privatized were the least relevant and more money-losing ones. We socialized the losses and privatized the gains, and all through a rather corrupt process. We didn't have the regulatory framework in place, nor the capacity to create it. So rather than privatizing, we should have opened up the enterprises to private sector participation.

KI: What are you researching at the moment?

There is a great deal of disenchantment with democracy in Latin America in general. In some countries, that disenchantment is greater than others. Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica enjoy a high degree of support, but there are countries that have extremely low levels of support and are extremely dissatisfied, such as Paraguay. People are not happy because the system is not producing results. You have 40 percent of the population living below the poverty line in Paraguay; 60 percent of Bolivia's population lives beneath the poverty line. In general about half the population lives in poverty and there is also a great deal of inequality in the distribution of income. You have economies that don't grow and that don't generate employment, and political parties and movements quite successful in mobilizing electoral support though clientelism but completely insensitive to the real needs and demands of common people. So we have a set of problems in these countries that democracy has not been able to solve and, I am afraid, in some cases has worsened.

We are between a rock and hard place. The rock is the reality we have now, bad, low-quality democracy, and the hard place is the possibility of the emergence of people like Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador, Lino Oviedo in Paraguay, who are basically populist, militaristic leaders that will lead our countries to regimes with the appearance of democracy but none of its content.

KI: As you look back on your time in politics, what have you learned?

The lesson is that democracy cannot be constructed overnight with only goodwill and good intentions, and even good people. These are countries with a low level of socioeconomic development and large portions of the population in the informal sector. This results in a socioeconomic matrix detrimental to the emergence of collective actors that fosters the development of clientelistic politics and patronage. Not surprisingly, a party system like the Paraguayan one is thoroughly clientelistic, with strong roots in the countryside and a strong organization. The peculiarity of the Paraguayan case is the main legacy of the Stroessner regime: an extremely strong system of ruling party-administered and state-delivered clientelism. That is the main force against change.

How do you change a society like that? Change will come eventually, but we need a dose of patience. We have more than 50 percent of the population in rural areas and a very small middle class and working class, and we don't have the social actors that will press for the development of a quality democracy.

There is a phrase that [Simon] Bolívar coined at the end of his life, "I have plowed in the sea." often one is tempted to share that view. And yet we must be reminded that, as [Max] Weber put it, "Politics is a strong and hard boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective...Men must arm themselves with steadfastness of heart to brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today."