It's more interesting how many countries had one-term limit but abandoned it (Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia...) under Democratic governments. Itamar Franco couldn't run in 1994, despite having freaking 80% approvals.
Colombia restored the absolute ban on presidential re-election in 2015. As much as the 2004 amendment was adopted through legal procedures, it wouldn't have passed had the swing votes in a congressional commission not been bribed by the Uribe government.
Anyhow, Horacio Cartes and Fernando Lugo's people aren't even bothering to use legal procedures in Paraguay: the senatorial majority (25 out of 45) which approved the amendment last night subverted congressional procedures by meeting and voting behind closed doors. The president of the Senate, who is from the opposition, had blocked consideration of the amendment. The amendment also appears to be blatantly unconstitutional: it is using the 'constitutional amendment' procedure (art. 290) whereas that same article explicitly states that "the procedure indicated for amendment will not be used [...] for those provisions affecting the mode of election, the composition,
the duration of the mandates or the attributions of any of the powers of the State." The procedure for 'constitutional reform', which should be used to modify term limits, requires a two-thirds majority in both houses (which the cartistas and luguistas lack) and election of a constituent convention. Moreover, aforementioned article 290 also states that any proposed amendment rejected by either house "may not be presented again within a year" - and, in August 2016, the Senate had rejected this very amendment. The cartista Colorados seem intent on pushing forward - Cartes seems to have blamed the media for all this - which would send this amendment to the lower house, where a majority seems assured, and would then need to be ratified in a referendum within 180 days.
It's also worth keeping in mind who this is intended to benefit in the first place: incumbent president Horacio Cartes. Cartes is a wealthy businessman and tobacco tycoon (and probably a drug trafficker) who seemingly hadn't even
voted in any election prior to his own in 2013 (a true outsider!). Prior to his becoming president, Cartes had been convicted for a currency fraud in the 1980s (he obtained 35 million dollars at preferential rates from the central bank and then resold them on the parallel market at a higher rate), for which he served a few months in jail after four years as a fugitive (the case was later dropped or dismissed in 2000). In 2000, a small plane carrying over 300 kg of marijuana and 20 kg of cocaine was seized on his property -- it also happens that Cartes' father was Cessna's representative in Paraguay and Cartes studied aeronautical engineering in the United States, where he briefly worked for Cessna in Oklahoma and Kansas. According to a DEA cable, Cartes was considered the "head" of a drug trafficking and money laundering organization in the tri-border area between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil -- basically, Cartes and his associates would have laundered proceeds of cigarette smuggling and drug trafficking, and participated in smuggling activities which financed various international criminal organizations. During the 2013 campaign, the ICIJ revealed that the directors of a bank owned by his family set up an offshore secret bank in the Cook Islands in the mid-1990s, likely for money laundering purposes as that's what people in the Cook Islands did back then. On a less criminal but no less charming note, in his 2013 campaign, besides praising paedo chainsaw murderer Stroessner, said that he'd shoot himself in the balls if his son was gay.
I haven't followed much of Paraguay since 2013, but it appears that, until recently, Cartes had managed a fairly convincing "reformist liberal technocrat
" image to outsiders, not unlike EPN.
