Amid damage caused by conservative political opponents and his own sexual activity, Fernando Lugo, formerly a Divine Word Missionary and a diocesan bishop in Paraguay, is today his country's elected president, beginning to make a country of paupers ruled by oligarchs a bit juster and more productive.
Born in 1951 to a railway worker and his schoolteacher wife, Lugo was always an ambitious person. As a teenager he set his heart on a military career. Then supporters of the dictator General Alfredo Stroessner told him his family were suspected of disloyalty and he should find something else.
After a period as a teacher he joined the Divine Word Order in 1970. Ordained priest in 1977, he was sent off to Ecuador where he fell under the influence of Leonidas Proaño, the devoted bishop of the Andean diocese of Riobamba. Back home the Order saw he was a big asset to them — but so did the dictatorship. Consequently his superiors felt he would be better kept out of the way again studying in Rome.
He came home in 1987 and by 1994, with Stroessner overthrown, he was appointed bishop of San Pedro, like Riobamba, a rural slum.
He resigned in 2005 and, against Vatican opposition, stood for the presidency and won by a landslide last year.
As a politician Lugo has faced squabbling and racial tension. His revelation at Easter that he fathered a child with a woman who worked in his diocese created headlines in Paraguay and other countries. Yet it does not seem to have done his reputation lasting harm. He is good at politics and his skills as a reformer keep him popular still in a poverty-stricken country where marriage very often loses out to co-habitation.
Conservative politicians who sought to make capital out of his failing have been rebuffed. Recriminations by those who put sexual morality above all else have had to yield to the popular support for his efforts to mend a society which cannot provide the essentials of life for most of its seven million inhabitants.
Appearing at his inauguration in native dress, he has prioritised the majority who have indigenous ancestors and prefer Guaraní to Spanish. He is chasing the potential of Paraguay's sunny climate and well-watered land. Lugo is completing 14 months in office and beginning to make dreams realities.
In the past few decades Paraguay