BY KEVIN G. HALL
 Herald World Staff

 ASUNCION, Paraguay -- Angry citizens tossed bottles and other objects at
 President Luis Gonzalez Macchi on Friday night, chasing an embarrassed and
 uninvited chief executive from a rally in memory of students killed a year ago in
 protests that toppled the previous government.

 Gonzalez Macchi, who assumed the presidency through constitutional
 succession last March 28, appeared unexpectedly with his wife at a rally of more
 than 100 citizens' groups that had gathered to criticize the lack of reforms under
 his government and to remember seven slain students. The rally had been billed
 as an event without politicians.

 The students were killed in protests that followed the assassination of Vice
 President Luis Maria Argaña last year. Anger over the student killings in turn
 triggered the flight of President Raul Cubas.

 After surprising organizers on stage Friday night, Gonzalez Macchi was shouted
 down repeatedly as he tried to address what had been a silent, somber crowd.
 Television cameras captured his desperate efforts to be heard over the roar of
 2,000-plus protesters in the plaza in front of the legislative palace in Asuncion.

 ``This is also my plaza. I was here with you . . . a year ago . . . in the plaza, with
 my children and my wife,'' a shaken Gonzalez Macchi pleaded, hidden behind a
 mass of bodyguards and television cameras. ``This is my plaza as much as it is
 yours.''

 The treatment of Gonzalez Macchi by the angry crowd lent support to fears that
 Paraguay, a landlocked California-sized nation in the center of South America, is
 on the verge of political chaos. Citizens have grown tired of waiting for promised
 reforms amid a stagnant economy and flagrant misuse of government funds in the
 decade since the end of President Alfredo Stroessner's strongman rule in 1989.

 Gonzalez Macchi may have shown his misreading of citizens' anger in a Thursday
 interview, when he discounted U.S. concerns that Paraguay is on the brink of
 collapse. He said his country has little in common with Ecuador, which suffered a
 coup in January after angry Indian protesters stormed Quito.

 ``Here those things are not happening,'' he said.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald