Weekly Report - 23 March 2004

President Duarte is taking his anticorruption campaign to the Entidad Binacional Yacyretá (EBY), the body that runs the Argentine-Paraguayan Yacyretá hydro complex. Last week he appointed Carlos Goiburú as interim director, in place of Luis Fretes, who is seriously ill, and announced that the EBY's books would be audited by the comptroller-general's office.

The EBY's binational status had been used as an excuse to exempt it from such audits, and it had been plagued by corruption scandals since it was being built. Former Argentine President Carlos Menem used to call it `a monument to corruption'. Last February Duarte got Argentine President Néstor Kirchner's blessing to `open up the EBY to investigation by the competent jurisdictional entities'.