In Ciudad del Este, on the border with Brazil, some 2,000 demonstrators blocked the bridge connecting the two countries, and some protesters looted stores. By the next day, most road blockades had been cleared. The presence of heavily armed troops was higher than normal in the capital and along some highways.

The main peasant organizations, despite their opposition to the current government and its policies, said they refused to join the Oviedo-organized demonstrations. A joint statement opposing the state of siege and how the government is using it to attack democratic rights was issued July 15 by the Free Homeland Movement (MPL), Revolutionary Socialist Nucleus, and Paraguayan Communist Party. The organizations condemned the regime’s measure as "another pretext to continue with its policy of state terrorism and persecution" of opponents of government policies. They also rejected the protests by the pro-Oviedo forces as reactionary.

Oviedo leads a faction of the Colorado Party that is opposed to the ruling Colorado faction, headed by President Luis González Macchi. In 1996 Oviedo, then head of the armed forces, launched a failed coup against then-president Juan Antonio Wasmosy.

Bourgeois politics in Paraguay has been marked by sometimes violent conflicts between rival factions of the Colorado Party, the party under which dictator Alfredo Stroessner ruled the country with an iron fist for 35 years, until his overthrow in a 1989 military coup.

Oviedo supporters, who have blocked with Vice President Julio César Franco of the Liberal Party, are demanding the resignation of President Macchi, accusing him of corruption. Oviedo, who is wanted by Paraguayan authorities for his role in the 1996 coup attempt, remains in exile in Brazil.

Oviedo is a capitalist politician who uses an element of demagogy to win support, posing as a defender of peasants and others devastated by the economic crisis. The antigovernment demonstrations involved not only traditional Oviedo supporters such as army veterans and police, but peasants demanding measures to protect them from dropping prices of agricultural commodities and other aspects of the crisis.

According to a recently released United Nations report, more than 1 million working people in Paraguay are unemployed or underemployed in a country of 6 million inhabitants. About one-third of the population are living below the official poverty line. A growing number of peasants are landless.
 
 
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