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ASUNCION, Paraguay : Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo has replaced his military chiefs after making accusations of a coup plot to overthrow his leftist government, officials said Thursday.
Lugo, a former Catholic bishop who assumed office in August 2008, fired his army, navy and air force commanders on Wednesday, a day after claiming there were "pockets of coup-plotters" in the armed forces.
He named other senior career officers to take their places.
The overall head of the joint chiefs of staff, Rear Admiral Cibar Benitez, kept his post but is due to give it up next month. Benitez denied there had been any military rebellion planned.
"Nobody in the armed forces had these intentions," he told reporters.
Lugo made no public comment on the sackings, which were announced in a statement by the armed forces.
The military chiefs fired on Wednesday were Army General Oscar Velazquez, Navy Rear Admiral Claudelino Recalde and Air Force General Hugo Aranda.
They were replaced by, respectively, General Bartolome Pineda, Rear Admiral Egberto Orue, and General Dario Davalos.
Paraguay's congress, which is dominated by Lugo's opponents, warned the president was overstepping his authority, and threatened to go ahead with an impeachment process started before the sackings.
Analysts said Lugo appeared to fear an ouster similar to the one that befell Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was forcibly deported in his pajamas in June by his country's military.
"The idea of a plot has grown, and the response to those who wanted to push him into an impasse was this. Lugo really does not want to follow in the footsteps of Zelaya," said one analyst, Horacio Galeano, who was education minister in Lugo's government until four months ago.
Galeano affirmed that the shake-up of the armed forces chiefs "doesn't mean much" in the long term, and that the real risk was from a congressional impeachment.
Others roundly criticized the firings.
"It's a humiliation, a lack of respect. People are going to say they were plotters. They don't deserve to shoved aside like President Lugo did," said the General Bernardino Soto, who was head of the armed forces until the end of last year and who now is an opposition figure.
While Lugo has vowed he would not be forced out of office before the end of his mandate in 2013, the congress is moving forward with plans to secure the two-thirds majority vote needed to remove him under the constitution.
The basis of the impeachment motion is alleged laxness by the government in the face of a crime wave that includes kidnappings and robbery, as well as administrative improprieties.
Politically, Lugo has been accused of styling himself on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in his determination to improve the lot of Paraguay's poor.
Lugo's base of popular support has been eroding steadily under a worsening scandal in which three women have claimed he fathered their children while he was a priest. In May, he admitted responsibility for one of the offspring.
- AFP/vm
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