News

Last paternity claim withdrawn against Paraguay’s ex-bishop president

February 03, 2010

The third and final paternity claim against Paraguayan President Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez, a former bishop, has been withdrawn. A campaign worker who had claimed that the president fathered her two-year-old boy dropped her request for a DNA test.

DNA testing confirmed that the president fathered the child of the first woman to file a paternity suit, and last August, the president spent a day with his son. According to local media reports, the bishop began a long relationship with a young woman when she was 16, approximately five years after his 1994 appointment as Bishop of San Pedro. The woman, now 26, bore his child in 2007. Lugo resigned his office in 2005 but remained a bishop until his laicization in July 2008-- two weeks before his presidential inauguration.

After the second woman to file a claim withdrew her suit, she “moved from the wooden and cardboard house where she lived with four children to a more comfortable home near Ciudad del Este,” according to the Associated Press. “Newspapers in the capital have shown her running errands in an SUV and police guarding her residence.”

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Paraguay's Lugo sees last paternity claim dissolve (AP)
• Paraguay’s ex-bishop president faces 3rd paternity suit (CWN, 11/6/09)

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• Posted by: DrJazz - Feb. 03, 2010 8:53 AM ET USA

  Gotta give this guy credit for pulling off a trifecta: He's degraded the offices of priest, bishop, AND politician. And what a credit to the people of Paraguay for electing him! What's that saying about the people getting the government they deserve?