Social structure, demographic changes, and democratic transition in Paraguay

Résumé 0

Paraguayan society, understood as the social structure of the country, presented certain features in the last years of the authoritarian regime of Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989), which persisted during the three decades that followed the overthrow of his dictatorship in a sinuous and difficult democratization process. One of them, perhaps the most outstanding, is social fragmentation, according to which the relations between social classes are characterized by a recurrent tension around resources and opportunities, taking on the institutional and territorial forms of segmentation and segregation respectively. These features were structurally maintained for three decades, varying however in forms and extensions, and their dynamics largely explain the limits of the democratic regime in the country, despite oscillating cycles of both economic growth and institutional stability in recent Paraguayan history. This article highlights the convergence of demographic and social processes that explain significant changes in the social structure of Paraguay since the end of the twentieth century. The aforementioned changes had three main characteristics: the marked (and delayed) demographic transition, the extension of access to education to the entire school-age population, and the variation in the relative weight of social categories in the social structure. Among these three main changes, the effects of the educational reform of the 1990s deserve special attention, one of the most notorious of which was the increase in the urban middle class linked to the branches of activity in the tertiary sector, whose rise mitigated the discontent toward social inequality that persisted after three decades of democratization. Likewise, the expansion of intermediate social categories mitigated the contradiction between growth and concentration of income that resulted in the increase of added value at the expense of an impoverished and excluded disadvantaged class. To shed light on these processes, this study is based on information from secondary sources, including official statistics and bibliographic information.