Juan Carlos Wasmosy

Who is Juan Carlos Wasmosy?

Juan Carlos Wasmosy Monti was the President of Paraguay from 1993 until 1998. He was a member of the Colorado Party, and the country's first civilian president in 39 years.

Born in Asunción, Paraguay, Wasmosy trained as a civil engineer and became head of the Paraguayan consortium working on the Itaipu Dam. During this project, he amassed a large amount of wealth. He served as minister of integration under President Andrés Rodríguez.

His ancestors immigrated to South America from Debrecen, Hungary in 1828. at that time, the surname of the family was Vámosy. His relative, Alceu Wamosy, a famous Brazilian writer, is also from this ancestry. Juan Carlos Wasmosy went to see the home town of his ancestors in 1995 during his official visit to Hungary.

Rodríguez endorsed Wasmosy as his successor in the 1993 elections. He won with approximately 40 percent of the vote in what is generally acknowledged to be the first honest election in the country's history, with Domingo Laino finishing a close second. Although there were confirmed cases of fraud, a team of international observers led by Jimmy Carter concluded that Wasmosy's margin of victory was large enough to offset any wrongdoing. Carter also noted that opposition candidates took 60 percent of the vote between them—a remarkable figure in a country where opposition had been barely tolerated for most of its history up to that point.