The election of tobacco magnate Horacio Cartes as Paraguay's President was mired by scandalous accusations of corruption, and now experts say he will do little to confront the country's flourishing contraband cigarette trade.Paraguay - a poor, landlocked nation of about 6.57 million people also bordered by Bolivia -is Latin America's most important supplier of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes, according to a study released last year by Peruvian economist Lindon Vela Melendez, an economist at the Institute of Economics and Development in Peru. Referring to data he reports as sourced from Philip Morris International, Mr Melendez wrote that Paraguay's annual production capacity is around 40 billion cigarettes, while only2.5 billion are consumed domestically each year. A 2006 report by Uruguay's Centra de In-vestigacion de la Epidemia de Tabaquis-mo (CIET) claimed Paraguay's production capacity was 68 billion. Mr Melendez said 4 billion cigarettes were exported legally last year, leaving 33.5 billion unaccounted for.
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