The baby jokes just keep coming.
Fernando Lugo, the former priest who is now the country’s president, shocked the nation last month by admitting to fathering one child — and possibly more — before the Vatican had returned him to layman status.
Now the Internet here is buzzing with an irreverent video showing him in a baby carriage, magically impregnating each woman he passes on the street. A popular television show in neighboring Argentina has dedicated a tango to him and recommended that he use contraception. A local cumbia song is even mocking his campaign slogan.
“The playboy has heart, but he doesn’t use a condom,” goes the refrain, playing on the slogan that helped get him elected, “Lugo has heart.”
Even his closest advisers say they were stunned and dismayed by the revelations — and cannot rule out the possibility of more secret babies turning up.
“He isn’t sure, so we can’t be sure of exactly what could be coming,” said Miguel López Perito, his chief of staff and a close friend, speaking about the current paternity claims and any others.
“He didn’t open up about this issue to me,” he said. “I respected that, as he is not a person who talks about his personal life. Although I knew this could explode at any moment, I never knew specifically what was out there.”
When he assumed the presidency of Paraguay last August, Mr. Lugo took on a heavy task. After 61 years of one-party rule, the country was consistently rated one of the world’s most corrupt. Mr. Lugo, a bearded former Roman Catholic bishop, had no political experience, yet he stormed into office on the faith of the nation’s poor.
He had run a campaign focused on ethics, morality and transparency — attributes he associated with the church — so Mr. Lugo’s admission that he was not quite the innocent servant of Scripture he seemed has devastated and disillusioned many here, some of whom are calling for his resignation.
“I feel betrayed,” Gladys Bernal, a 50-year-old nurse who broke from the long-entrenched Colorado Party to vote for Mr. Lugo, said at an outdoor meeting recently organized by women who made speeches and waved signs like “Who will defend us from Lugo now?”
Since news broke last month about a 2-year-old that the president has recognized as his, two other women have come forward with similar assertions. One woman is awaiting DNA test results to confirm paternity and says that Mr. Lugo, now 57, was still a bishop when they became involved, when she was 18.
The mother of the boy he did accept as his, Viviana Carrillo, originally said in a court filing that she was only 16 when they first had sex, but appeared to change her story recently to avoid statutory rape charges against Mr. Lugo.
He is not the first priest to father a child, something that is surprisingly common in this deeply Catholic country of 6.8 million people. In Paraguay’s traditional, macho culture, men are actually revered for fathering children with multiple women.
But Mr. Lugo was seen as a departure from the politics of patronage that characterized the Colorado Party, even after its longtime leader, the dictator Alfredo Stroessner, was ousted in 1989. Now the disenchanted voters who elected Mr. Lugo worry that the scandal will scuttle their chance for change.
“For the foreigners, this will be just a story about a bishop having children,” said Gustavo Arzamendia, 35, a hotel clerk here. “But for the Paraguayans, it is much more than that. He was our last hope, the person people really believed could make a real break from the past.”
The president has not acknowledged having more than one child, though he has hinted that it is possible. After the second and third women came forward last month, he apologized for the scandal and asked for forgiveness, but he did not refute the women’s assertions.
His lawyer, Marcos Fariña, said Mr. Lugo would have no problem recognizing paternity if the claims were proved in court.
Mr. Lugo resigned from the diocese in San Pedro in 2005 and requested laicization in order to run for office. Ms. Carrillo, the mother of the child he acknowledges, now says their sexual relationship began only three years ago when she was 23 — not 16 as her original paternity suit asserted.
Mr. Lugo continued to serve as a priest, offering Mass and administering the Sacrament, until at least December 2006, and Pope Benedict XVI did not grant Mr. Lugo status as a lay person until last July, after the baby was born.
Andrea Machain contributed reporting.
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