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Paraguay’s population is aging, fast

Ediltrudis and Carolina Noguera often say they were raised by clay.

Growing up in the small Paraguayan town of Tobatí — nestled in green hills around 40 miles east of the capital, Asunción — their father was typically absent with work.

Their mother, Mercedes, just about managed to put food on the table by making hand-built, wood-fired pots from ñai’ũ, the prized black earth harvested from local hillsides.

Mercedes had her work cut out: she had no fewer than 15 children.

Today, the sisters have inherited the family craft and taken it in new directions. Ediltrudis in particular has won admirers for her bulbous ceramic sculptures that have something of Colombian artist Fernando Botero to them.

But the tradition of huge, struggling families, they recently told me, was something they resolved not to continue.

Ediltrudis, 60, has eight kids. Carolina, 43, has four. And between them, they only have three grandchildren, whom they have encouraged to stay in education as long as possible before picking a trade and starting a family.

“It was my decision,” said Ediltrudis, describing how she delayed parenthood until her twenties and carefully controlled her pregnancies. “My husband had to accept it.”

The story of the shrinking Noguera family across three generations encapsulates a historical shift unfolding across Paraguay — and Latin America as a whole.

As I write for the cover story of the latest issue of Americas Quarterly, Latin America’s average birth rate has plunged — from roughly six children per women in 1950 to just 1.8 today — reflecting greater access to contraception, education and employment. Better medicine, sanitation and nutrition mean the region’s average life expectancy has increased by nearly 30 years over the same period, to 76.

The result: Latin America is aging faster than any other continent. The ranks of the elderly are expanding exponentially: where one in ten Latin Americans are over 65 today, somewhere between a fifth to a quarter will be pensioners by 2050.

This rapid demographic transition will have far-reaching consequences for economies, pensions systems, and politics, as lawmakers grapple with how to pay for the elderly when so many other pressing needs are at hand.

“The main challenge for Latin America,” Citigroup economist Ernesto Revilla told me, “is that the region will get old before it gets rich.”

The story is often framed as an issue mainly for the wealthier Latin American nations like Chile, Uruguay, Argentina or Costa Rica. It’s true that those countries have precipitously low fertility rates: that of Chile, at 1.14 births per woman, is now lower than Japan.

Paraguay (2.42 in 2024) is notionally at the other end of the table, belonging to a group of developing countries like Haiti (2.63), Bolivia (2.52), Honduras (2.48) and Guatemala (2.29) where a range of factors – including Indigenous and Afrodescendant traditions of young motherhood and large, rural households – mean that birth rates remain relatively high.

But it would be a mistake to assume that Paraguay is insulated from the regional baby bust. The country’s birth rate has nearly halved since 1990. The 2022 census found that just 6.1 million people live in Paraguay: well below estimates of 7.5m.

And Paraguay’s fertility continues to drop fast: the country’s national statistics institute (INE) projects a birthrate of 1.92 in 2025, below the replacement rate of 2.1. If this trends continues, Paraguay’s population will peak around 7.1m in 2050, before inexorably falling.

THE POST TAKE:

The 2022 census figure came as a shock – the economy minister said he would “basically have to plan for a new Paraguay” – but the underlying trend has been clear for decades.

Moderate improvements in education, greater access to contraception, and rural-urban migration – 68% of Paraguayans now live in cities – have all reduced the number of babies being born.

So too, say experts, has the outflow of young, working-class women to work as nannies, cleaners and carers in places like Spain, Argentina and the United States. Put another way, catering to the elderly in rich countries is accelerating Paraguay’s own demographic transition.

And especially among Paraguay’s educated middle classes, many are postponing paternity indefinitely, citing corruption, climate change and the cost of living. The Post knows one thirty-something couple who have a dozen mouths to feed: but they belong to cats, not babies.

The consequence is that Paraguay’s median age has risen sharply in the past twenty years, barely rising from 19 in 1982 to 20 in 2002, before leaping to 29 in 2022. The proportion of the population aged 65+ has also grown exponentially since the turn of the millennium, and is projected to double from roughly 8% today to 16.4% of the total by 2050.

Paraguay’s aging process is already producing political frictions. In recent months, protests and opposition in congress have forced the Peña administration to water down a controversial public-sector pension reform, one intended to plug a fiscal black hole forecast to reach $10bn by 2030.

A new paper by CADEP notes that even with the reform, a serious pensions crisis has been delayed until 2032 at most. IPS, the social welfare and public health system, is also projected to go bust later in the same decade.

And many people qualify neither for the IPS or other contributory pension funds (because they don’t earn minimum wage) nor the Adultos Mayores welfare pension (because they’re not below the poverty line).

In a country where pre-teen mothers remain shockingly common, it can only be a positive thing that more young women and girls are enjoying greater control over their bodies and lives.

But as the population turns grey, the urgent priority should be helping Paraguayans gain skills, get formal jobs, and save for their retirement. In December, UN population expert Sabrina Juran warned that Paraguay’s “window of opportunity” to make the most of its relatively youthful population is rapidly closing.

Paraguay, most serious economists agree, will also need to rethink its flat 10% tax rates – along with generous exemptions for soybean farmers, real estate developers and factory-owners – to help fund the pensions and care systems of tomorrow.

The country currently spends barely 4% of GDP on social protection for the elderly, compared with 8% in Brazil and 11% in Uruguay: partly reflecting a feeble tax take of just 11.4% of GDP.

Yet strong vested interests, and a chronically short-term political cycle – the 2028 election is already dominating headlines – are likely to get in the way of a serious discussion about how Paraguay can age with dignity.

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U.S. to send Paraguay up to 25 deportees every month

Paraguayan officials said on Thursday that 16 migrants from other countries deported from the United States had arrived on Paraguayan soil via charter flight.

In a statement, the national migration authority (DNM) said the individuals were all adults with no criminal record, and would be given assistance to return to their home countries.

Local press said the group was made up of economic migrants from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador who had been apprehended illegally entering the United States.

The deportation flight is the first to arrive following a Safe Third Country Agreement signed in August between Donald Trump’s White House and Paraguay’s president Santiago Peña. That deal focused on people seeking asylum in the U.S., allowing them to be transferred to Paraguay while their claims are processed.

A subsequent agreement signed in February — the text of which has not been published, and does not apply to asylum-seekers — envisions a regular flow of would-be migrants to the U.S. being deported to Paraguay on a rolling basis.

The latest deal allows the United States to send Paraguay up to 25 deportees from Spanish-speaking countries per month. Paraguay will be given a flight manifest 72 hours in advance with information about migrants, including their criminal record.

On Wednesday, foreign minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano said Paraguay had declined to receive nine people originally due to be on Thursday’s flight, citing issues with their documents.

Once in Paraguay, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN body, will be responsible for providing accommodation, food, emergency medical attention, and supporting their onward journey. Paraguay does not expect to shoulder any of the cost.

The deportees will be lodged in a hotel in central Asunción, the capital, and helped to return home within 30 to 60 days. They can also apply to stay in Paraguay. ABC Color reported that nearly all of the first group of arrivals did not plan to stay.

“Many of them have suffered a lot,” Paraguay’s national migration director, Jorge Kronawetter, told ABC Cardinal 730 AM. “We want to help them return to their home countries.”

The migrants will be able to circulate freely. Most, if not all, come from countries that do not require a visa to enter Paraguay.

Speaking to reporters earlier in the week, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Asunción Robert Alter hailed the recent deportation agreement as “another element in the strategic alliance between the United States and Paraguay”.

He stipulated that the monthly deportation flights would not carry asylum seekers, but rather migrants that the U.S. wants to return to their home countries “in a safe and orderly way.”

“We are extremely grateful for the collaboration of the Paraguayan government,” he added.

THE POST TAKE:

“Welcome, foreign brother / my people are full of friendliness / my countrymen will take your hand.”

So goes a popular Paraguayan folk song, praising the country’s fabled openness to people from far-off lands.

According to Latinobarómetro, a region-wide opinion poll, Paraguay is one of Latin America’s most welcoming countries towards immigrants.

Just a third of Paraguayans think migration is harmful to the country or increases crime, while 73% think it boosts economic development, compared to a regional average of 57%.

This could reflect a long history of immigration — and emigration. Thousands were forced into exile overseas by the 1954-89 Stroesser regime. In recent decades, almost a million Paraguayans, some 15 percent of the population, are estimated to have gone abroad in search of greater opportunities.

And amid a rush to enjoy tax benefits and the quiet life in Paraguay, a record 40,000 foreigners — mainly Brazilians, along with Argentines and Europeans — were granted residency last year. Paraguay is also reportedly home to roughly 6,000 refugees, mostly from Cuba and Venezuela.

But the news that victims of Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive will be arriving on guaraní soil every month for the foreseeable future has provoked criticism and concern.

Some Internet users complained that the deportees will bring crime. One TV news anchor grumbled that while most Paraguayans have to fly coach with at least one stopover to reach the United States, deportees get an express service.

Paraguay’s press, opposition, and even some members of Peña’s party have criticised the secrecy around the two deportation deals — neither of which have been debated by the country’s congress — and questioned what Paraguay gets in return.

“The Parliament was not consulted,” Oscar Salomón, a senator with the ruling Colorado Party, told UPI. “We do not know who they are or why they were deported,” he said of the migrants.

Left-wing senator Esperanza Martínez defended Paraguay’s tradition of hospitality, but accused Peña of “kneeling before the Trump administration, which not only harasses and persecutes migrants, but also seeks to turn our country into a storehouse for whoever it expels.”

“What does Paraguay gain from this?” asked her colleague Rafael Filizzola. “It seems to be payback for individual favours … this is yet another display of Peña’s submission to the agendas of other countries.”

Critics have often claimed that a series of pro-U.S. policies are a quid pro quo for the Trump administration having removed corruption sanctions on Horacio Cartes, the former powerful president (2013-18), Peña’s patron, and current boss of the Colorado Party.

Yet Paraguay’s international profile has risen rapidly amid hand-in-glove cooperation with the U.S. Trump has praised Peña as “young and handsome” and “doing a great job.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called him a “strong American ally.”

The country’s security services in particular have benefited from deeper ties. In March, a military cooperation deal between Paraguay and the United States — which gives U.S. personnel local immunity from crimes committed on Paraguayan soil, and paves the way for more frequent joint operations and training — came into force.

Washington has recently given eight new patrol craft to Paraguay’s river-based navy along with weapons, parts and ongoing training — a donation it says will be worth $12m — sold Paraguay an advanced radar system, and strengthened its cybersecurity. Multi-billion-dollar investments by U.S. firms to build AI data centres in Paraguay have also been announced.

It’s even possible to detect preferential treatment, if you can call it that, in the small print of Paraguay’s deportee deal. The Trump administration has signed similar pacts with at least 27 other allies and client states, but often involving higher numbers, a range of different nationalities, and fewer clawbacks.

Costa Rica will get 25 deportees per week. Panama has agreed to take migrants originally from countries such as Afghanistan, China, Iran, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. Paraguay, by comparison, should find it relatively easy to cope with barely two-dozen Spanish speakers from culturally similar countries each month that it doesn’t even have to pay for and should soon be moving on.

Yet Peña has said little publicly about the migration agreements, instead leaving it to ministers — and foreign officials — to give the public an explanation.

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Narciso, reviewed

It’s 1959, and Paraguay is five years into South America’s longest-lasting dictatorship. Asunción is plastered with propaganda for el rubio, a.k.a. Alfredo Stroessner: the blond despot who will rule this isolated nation with an iron fist for three decades to come. Gunshots ring out in the sultry night air. Driven underground, unmarried couples and gay men rendezvous in abandoned buildings in a blur of grasping, panting bodies.

This is the moodily atmospheric backdrop to Narciso, the latest outing by Paraguayan writer-director Marcelo Martinessi, which premiered in local cinemas on Thursday after picking up the prestigious Fipresci prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. Paced like a thriller and beautifully shot — and inspired by real events — the movie doubles as a sharp critique of contemporary Paraguay’s ultra-conservative turn.

Lulú (Manuel Cuenca) is the impresario behind Radio Capital, which beams out a soporific sequence of radio plays and folkloric harp music. Lulú styles himself a man of the people and an upstanding pillar of the artistic community. He struts the stage in the scarlet shirt of the ruling Colorado Party, a portrait of the autocrat-in-chief hangs in his office, and a rosary dangles from his rear-view mirror.

But Narciso (Diro Romero) — a suave, twenty-something upstart from the country, who has imbibed the music of Bill Haley and the swagger of Little Richard while living in Buenos Aires — threatens to destabilise the broadcaster’s squeaky-clean reputation. Sensual and vain as his name suggests, Narciso persuades Lulú to let him play rock and roll records to a live studio audience and begins to shake the Paraguayan public out of their stupor.

As Narciso leaps into the crowd to shimmy, shake and twirl with a flock of screaming teenagers, he transforms into a Paraguayan Elvis with a yanqui-yopará drawl and more than a touch of James Dean. Mobbed by fans wherever he goes on his motorbike, he can take his pick of admirers: women, men, even the louche, Stratocaster-strumming charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart).

Married but closeted, Lulú also becomes obsessed with his new presenter, twitching the curtain to watch Narciso gyrate on stage and sweatily crawling the curb for young men who look like him. Yet as the regime whips up a moral panic about pop music, and Lulú’s infatuation reaches fever pitch, Narciso is found dead amid an unexplained fire at his boarding house. His apparent murder immediately becomes the pretext for a violent round-up of men of “doubtful sexual conduct.”

In the film’s final, striking scenes, a Radio Capital actor dressed up as Dracula (Arturo Fleitas) warns listeners of the long nightmare to come as Stroessner’s goons hammer at the door. Next thing, he’s one of the dozens of men handcuffed and stripped to their underclothes in a truck bound for a torture cell. El rubio is now firmly calling the tune, and the real monster, it seems, isn’t the one in the greasepaint and cape.

THE POST TAKE:

Fast cementing his reputation as Paraguay’s leading filmmaker, Martinessi’s previous work has probed around the edges of the 1954-89 dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner.

His debut short, Karai Norte (2009), is set during the 1947 civil war that paved the Colorado Party’s rise to power. The award-winning Las Herederas (2018), is also a study of repressed same-sex desire among an upper-class Asunción couple who live off the dwindling family fortune — it’s implied — accrued under Stroessner’s rule.

Martinessi’s latest examines the beginnings of the stronato, as a military regime initially feted for bringing order after decades of turmoil rapidly devolves into a repressive reign of terror. Narciso draws on the real-life story of Bernardo Aranda, a 27-year-old radio presenter and dancer who died in a mysterious blaze in 1959. The case triggered a public uproar over homosexuality — Aranda’s home was said to be frequented by male lovers — and a crackdown by the authorities.

Pro-regime newspapers published a list of 108 suspected gay men, who were jailed and brutalised despite having no proven link to Aranda. (A similar bout of homophobic repression in 1982 is the subject of Cuchillo de Palo, a 2010 documentary by Renate Costa, whose uncle was among those rounded up.) To this day, 108 is known as the “cursed number,” scratched out or omitted altogether in hotels, licence plates, addresses and public institutions across Paraguay.

And the film presents clear parallels with modern Paraguay, where discrimination remains common, same-sex civil unions aren’t permitted — and the Colorado Party, still in power, recently scrubbed the word “gender” from schoolbooks. A scene where Lulú throws dangerously “foreign” records on a bonfire mirrors a suggestion in 2017 by the education minister that he was prepared to publicly burn books mentioning trans people.

But the heavy subject matter of Narciso is leavened by a strong ensemble cast, sumptuous period costumes and set design, and thumping, thrumming soundtrack. Alternating Buddy Holly riffs and classical strings evoke the intoxicating dawn of the rock and roll era and the lengthening shadows of Cold War authoritarianism.

Some of the characters feel underdeveloped. Perhaps deliberately, the title role is something of a cipher, his background left unclear. Narciso’s inner life is made even harder to discern by the gloomy lighting. His girlfriends come and go without doing much to advance the plot: possibly a hangover from an earlier working title, Quien mató a Narciso? that may have focused more on the murder-mystery aspect among his jilted lovers.

The American diplomat’s role is also ambiguous. He is sympathetic to Narciso’s mission of helping the kids cut loose, but also proudly shows off a U.S.-funded water-treatment facility whose crystalline pools — in which Stroessner’s face is briefly reflected — seem to serve the regime’s propagandistic message of purity.

In Martinessi’s version, the desire to punish dissent — sexual, musical — seems to emanate from the authorities, against the wishes of an increasingly emancipated public. Arguably, a more faithful retelling of Aranda’s story would capture how a conservative “committee of parents” pressured Stroessner’s regime into stamping down on diversity. In today’s Paraguay too, Colorado lawmakers are both cultivating and pandering to conservative civil society activists linked to the global, evangelical far-right.

But the overall story is powerful, moving, and unsanitised. Narciso is no saint, nor a helpless victim. Instead, he represents a radical yearning for liberation that will outlive his immolation. It’s a message to cause hypocrites, censors, and gangsters of all stripes to tremble. As Martinessi recently put it: “We need more films and, above all, we need more courage.”

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Bolivia-Paraguay ties reactivated

Paraguay and Bolivia, who share nearly 500 miles of border, have spent most of their history looking past each other, in a relationship defined less by cooperation than by absence.

For centuries, they were separated by the Chaco, a tough, arid outback. Then, they fought over it. The Chaco War (1932–1935) left hundreds of thousands dead and lingering border questions in its wake. In recent decades, divided by ideology, the two countries have traded little and discussed important issues even less.

In 2024, Paraguay exported $92.2m to Bolivia and imported $75.9m, for total trade of just $168.1m: barely 0.6% of Paraguay’s total commerce. Compare that with bilateral trade with Paraguay’s other neighbors, Brazil ($7bn) and Argentina ($4bn).

Paraguay mainly ships agro and industrial inputs to Bolivia’s agribusiness heartland around Santa Cruz: herbicides, oilseeds, packaging components, metal containers, and medicines. Bolivia sends Paraguay a narrow basket dominated by urea, hydrocarbons, lead accumulators, potash, and some fish products.

Migration is thinner still. Out of Paraguay’s 156,000 foreign-born residents, 65,000 were born in Argentina and 52,000 in Brazil. The number born in Bolivia was just 1,619. One likely reason: Bolivia and Paraguay are both developing countries with similar levels of wages and public services, meaning the working-classes in each nation have little incentive to migrate to the other.

So while Brazil and Argentina are embedded in everyday Paraguayan life through families, labour, and frontier economies, Bolivia remains much less socially present. One sign of just how distant and “exotic” the Andean-Amazonian nation to the north is perceived as being is an occasional, tropical-coded Asunción club night called Bolivia.

There are now signs that could be changing. Bolivia’s new conservative president, Rodrigo Paz and Paraguayan president Santiago Peña held a summit in November, with Peña hailing an “excellent moment” to boost bilateral ties.

In March, both leaders agreed to reactivate URUPABOL — a dormant economic bloc created in 1963 by Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia — as part of a broader new agenda around trade, energy, and infrastructure.

For two landlocked countries, integration should matter. Paraguay offers river access to the Atlantic and a growing logistics network in the Chaco; Bolivia wants cheaper, faster ways to move goods to market.

The border itself — 704km of dry frontier and 38km of shared river — is now entering the final phase of technical demarcation, a process begun shortly after the Chaco War. Paraguayan officials have been working using drones and satellite measurements in the remote Bahía Negra–Río Negro segment; the long afterlife of the 1938 armistice is finally being translated into precise cartography.

This could unlock greater progress on binational infrastructure. A 120km road linking Roboré–Hito VII–Agua Dulce to Paraguayan river ports has become the flagship idea behind this new moment. Regional authorities in Santa Cruz and Alto Paraguay have already signed cooperation agreements around connectivity and development. One projected benefit cited in the report is a saving of up to 17 hours for hauliers heading toward Paraguayan river ports.

There is also a broader economic logic emerging in the background. The Santa Cruz–Chaco axis is becoming more important as an agribusiness frontier, with subnational governments, logistics operators, and local businesses playing a larger role.

THE POST TAKE:

For decades, Paraguay-Bolivia relations have been characterized by what they were not: not strategic, not culturally or socially vital, nor commercially important. Unlike Paraguay’s dense entanglement with Brazil and Argentina, Bolivia has remained peripheral. That is precisely why this moment is interesting.

The potential reset is not being driven by sentiment or even by diplomacy, but rather logistics and business. If Bolivia needs better access to global markets and Paraguay wants to bring its version of development to the northern Chaco, the two countries have reasons to start taking each other more seriously.

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Finance minister falls

Carlos Fernández Valdovinos has had quite the month.

It was only on Friday that Paraguay’s economy and finance minister was trumpeting new data showing the country’s GDP grew by 6.6 percent in 2025 — faster than any other non-oil economy in Latin America.

The expansion was fuelled by growth in services, agriculture, hydroelectric generation, manufacturing, construction, and ranching, as well as private consumption.

New statistics also indicated that poverty fell by 3.6 percentage points last year to reach 16% — the lowest recorded rate in Paraguay’s modern history. Extreme poverty, meanwhile, nearly halved to 2.4%.

“We’re building the country we want and deserve,” Valdovinos posted on X, along with a jab at critics who say topline growth numbers aren’t trickling down to regular people.

“But ‘the macroeconomy isn’t reaching the microeconomy’”, he wrote sarcastically, including a rolling-eyes emoji.

Less than a week later, the University of Chicago-educated economist — who has expanded incentives for overseas investors and religiously maintained Paraguay’s ultra-low taxes — joined the two thirds of Paraguayans who are lacking a formal job.

In a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, cabinet chief Javier Giménez told reporters that Valdovinos had been instructed to resign.

Giménez said the change had come on the orders of President Santiago Peña, citing the need for “very specific skills and competencies” to handle the economy in the next half of Peña’s 2023-28 term in office.

He thanked Valdovinos for his “commitment”, said presidential economic advisor Juan José Galeano would step into his shoes on an interim basis, and indicated Peña would announce a permanent replacement after a period of reflection over Easter Week.

A statement from the president’s office indicated Paraguay’s next economic tsar will need to “deepen the progress already achieved, ensure the efficient use of resources, and guarantee that economic growth translates into better living conditions for all Paraguayans, especially the poorest groups.”

Valdovinos — who was only recently named Finance Minister of the Year by The Banker, and has lately given talks at Harvard, Oxford, and the LSE on how he helped steer Paraguay to investment-grade status — seemed unbowed by the implicit criticism of his performance.

“Mission accomplished!!!”, he posted on Tuesday. “Everything for my beloved Paraguay.”

THE POST TAKE:

Rumours of an imminent reshuffle at the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) have circulated for weeks.

Earlier in March, Última Hora reported that Valdovinos was considering resigning. Peña, it seems, has since made the decision for him.

The shake-up at the MEF follows a confluence of crises and clashes that have weakened the star minister’s position and cast a shadow over Paraguay’s strong economic showing in 2025.

The first was a controversial pension reform that hiked retirement ages and contributions from teachers, police, judges and soldiers in order to plug what Valdovinos claimed was a ballooning $380m hole in public finances.

After three months of protests from unions and tense negotiations in congress, a watered-down version of the bill was passed on March 18 — with little of the planned savings, or the minister’s political capital, left intact.

The second is an austerity drive abruptly announced by Valdovinos on March 16. Plunging customs tax receipts due to a weakened dollar, he said, required a “wartime economy” of slashed government expenditures.

“The economy is doing well,” he argued, “but not the treasury.”

Both measures alienated lawmakers in the ruling Colorado Party, whose support depends on channelling state resources towards public-sector workers and allies.

Yet the third factor in Valdovinos’s downfall is accumulating evidence that last year’s minor GDP miracle may be a one-off — and even an achievement built on sand.

Recent data compiled by the Central Bank (the BCP) show economic activity slowed to just 0.9% in January, down from 5.9% a year earlier.

This partly reflected a slump in construction, as bosses complain Valdovinos has postponed payments to firms building highways, providing medicines to hospitals, and delivering other government services in order to artificially suppress the fiscal deficit in 2025.

Construction bosses have repeatedly warned that activity will grind to a halt and workers will be fired unless such arrears — now at an estimated total of $1.5bn — are paid in full.

The deficit — the difference between government spending and earnings — fell slightly to 2% of GDP in 2025, well above an official target of 1.5%.

And analysis by Paraguay’s National Statistics Institute (INE) shows nearly all of last year’s drop in poverty wasn’t due to growth or increased employment — as implied by Valdovinos — but rather social programmes.

Without essential cash grants for the poorest like Tekoporã, the INE found, the poverty rate — measured at an income threshold of 31,000 guaraníes ($4.80) per day — would have been 20% in 2025, even higher than the year before.

Put another way: the benefits of growth are largely failing to reach the poorest, who depend on government assistance to scrape by.

Paraguay is clearly having a moment in the spotlight. Foreign investment is up; residency requests are at record levels.

“We used to be like the ugliest girl at the ball,” the director of the capital’s ritzy Shopping del Soll mall recently told Bloomberg. “Now everyone’s asking us to dance.”

Even if growth slows to 4.2% in 2026, as expected by the BCP, it will far outstrip the sluggish Latin America average of 2.3% predicted by the World Bank.

But the tale of Valdovinos’s hubris and downfall suggests Paraguay’s growth model is fragile, just one shock away (exchange-rate fluctuations, a spike in oil prices) from turbulence.

The “reawakening giant” — as Peña often describes Paraguay — seems to have feet of clay.

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White coats and greenbacks

Want to boast of studying at an Ivy League institution, but don’t have the grades? Paraguay may have the place for you.

Until recently, “Harvard University Paraguay” doled out cut-price, fast-tracked medical degrees and law qualifications from a tower block in the smuggling and shopping hub of Ciudad del Este.

In 2023, Paraguay’s higher-education authority Cones finally issued a warning that the so-called college — complete with crimson branding, but with zero connection to the more famous Harvard — didn’t legally exist.

Still, dozens of doctors and lawyers with bogus Cantab credentials may now be plying their trade across Paraguay and neighbouring Brazil. And Paraguay’s pay-to-practice doctor mill, with poorly regulated institutions churning out barely-qualified physicians, is bigger business than ever.

Last week, Cones approved three new medicine programmes after a two-year freeze. The new smalltown institutions tasked with turning out the trusted white coats of tomorrow are the Universidad Nacional de Pilar, the Universidad Nacional de Misiones and the Universidad Interamericana in Pedro Juan Caballero.

But critics claim the Hippocratic Oath — especially the injunction to do no harm — is on life support in Paraguay, as med-school mafias with political patrons flood the sector with poorly trained professionals.

According to the Paraguayan Medical Circle, the country (pop. 6.1 million) already has 43 medicine programmes with over 43,000 students — most of them Brazilians studying in border towns like CDE and Pedro Juan.

The guild says students from as many as six universities are jostling for teaching space in single public hospitals: slashing one-on-one supervision hours, and even producing a “simulation” of clinical practice in place of real patient contact.

Around 1,500 doctors compete each year for half as many residency slots. And by mid-2025, just half of all Paraguay’s medicine programs had passed mandatory evaluation by the national higher-ed accreditation agency.

In March 2024, Cones imposed a temporary suspension on new medical offerings after mounting outcry over the speed and quality of approvals. In 2022, it shut down two medicine programmes accused of peddling falsified academic certificates and graduating students after less than six years’ study.

Waving through dodgy doctors with patchy seminar attendance is commonplace in Paraguay. A 2021 study found a sharp rise in Brazilian enrollment in Pedro Juan Caballero, where the number of medical students jumped from around 10,000 in 2018 to 20,000: this, despite lacklustre infrastructure and teaching.

The attraction for Brazilian students is obvious. Becoming a doctor back home now costs more than US$2,000 per month on tuition alone. Paraguayan border cities meanwhile benefit from the influx of students spending on rent, food, and services.

Such is the profit incentive that Cones has been reviewing a regime of “conditional” authorisation, under which new med-school programs could begin operating and only be required to guarantee clinical training two years later.

But what looks like local development can quickly become dangerous. The Medical Circle has already accused the Health Ministry of hiring graduates from non-accredited programs in Concepción, warning that doctors without bare-minimum competencies are illegally entering the public system.

The Circle has also asked President Santiago Peña to audit the process by which the latest three universities have been permitted to train doctors. Senior physicians allege the new programmes were greenlit despite an adverse technical opinion from within Cones itself.

What’s changed? Notably, each of the new programmes has a political sponsor.

Colorado Party Senator Derlis Maidana has celebrated the Misiones offering. Vice President Pedro Alliana and Supreme Court Justice Víctor Ríos (also part-time rector of the local university) have hailed the one in Pilar. The rector of the Interamericana in Pedro Juan doubles up as a cartista candidate for city council.

If all this sounds worrying — third-rate medical professionals given licence to practice for political and clientelistic motives — Education Minister Luis Ramírez has some words of reassurance.

When it comes to evaluating med schools, the minister says, “we cannot function with restriction and negativity as our only guiding logic.”

Or, as the under-qualified twenty-something wielding a scalpel or dialling up your anaesthetic dosage might put it should you find yourself in a Paraguayan emergency room: “Trust me, I’m (kind of) a doctor.”

THE POST TAKE:

Paraguay has for years tolerated a broader ecosystem of “garage universities”: dozens of thinly regulated private institutions selling paper qualifications in fields where incompetence is not merely embarrassing but lethal.

Some of these for-profit institutions have been accused of serving as conduits for money laundering — and worse. In 2021, Brazilian federal police investigated the Universidad Central del Paraguay (UCP), allegedly used by PCC drug traffickers posing as medical students to cross the border freely.

Aparecido Carlos Bernardo, the rector of the UCP, surfaced in the infamous Lalo Gomes chats in 2023. The Colorado congressman — killed during a police raid for alleged ties to traffickers — was recorded negotiating the lease of a ranch seized from border kingpin Jarvis Pavao in favour of Bernardo.

Last year, cartista Senator Hernán Rivas was ordered to stand trial over the alleged use of a fake law degree to become a member — and eventually the short-lived president — of the Jurado de Enjuiciamiento de Magistrados: the public body in charge of disciplining and removing judges and prosecutors.

Paraguay is not just producing too many doctors, lawyers, and officials from shady institutions. It is asking the public to trust authority figures whose credentials are often dubious — and sometimes outright fabricated.

A few diploma mills on the margins may be normal. But unqualified and unscrupulous individuals exercising life-and-death power over patients, defendants, and citizens should set off alarms for the health of the nation.

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Indigenous demonstrators blockade highway

Over a hundred members of the native Ayoreo people blockaded a major highway in the Chaco in northern Paraguay on March 11 in protest of the “destruction” of their ancestral forest home.

Photos shared by Survival International, an NGO, showed Ayoreo elders wearing jaguar-hide caps — traditionally reserved for the fiercest warriors — and bearing spears and axes fanning out across the two-lane Bioceanic Road Corridor.

The Indigenous demonstrators also parked a tractor and laid tree trunks across the recently-asphalted route connecting agribusiness hubs in the central Chaco with ports on the Paraguay River.

“After forced contact, we have been abandoned by our government, which ignores our rights while allowing big companies to destroy our forest,” said Porai Picanerai, one of the Ayoreo leaders.

“Our uncontacted relatives depend on the forest,” he added. “We also depend on the forest. But it’s being destroyed by bulldozers and fires. Others make money from our forest while we are left with nothing, and our needs and rights are ignored.”

Demetrio Picanerai, a teacher from the Ayoreo community of Chaidi, also said the government had promised and failed to deliver emergency food supplies — as well as finish improvements to their school and drainage for their floodprone access road.

The Ayoreo — nomads who have long roamed the thorny Chaco outback between Bolivia and Paraguay — were one of the region’s last native cultures to enter into regular contact with the outside world. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, evangelical groups kidnapped them; Mennonite ranchers enslaved them. Many were killed or perished.

That process is still ongoing: the most recent group left the forest in 2004. And settled Ayoreo villagers say small groups of their isolated relatives are still out there. They are said to leave signs, tools, shelters — and are sometimes spotted flitting between the last patches of vegetation. They are the only group of their kind in the Americas outside of the Amazon.

“The satellite photos of western Paraguay paint a harrowing picture: just a few decades ago this was a vast area of Indigenous forest – now it’s a wasteland of destruction,” said Survival’s director, Caroline Pearce. “The uncontacted Ayoreo are trapped in a forest island that’s being destroyed by the day.”

The Chaco is by some counts the world’s fastest-vanishing forest. Around 27% of Paraguay’s portion of the little-known, arid ecosystem — a major carbon sink, and home to tapirs, jaguars and giant anteaters — equivalent to some 65,000 square kilometres has gone up in smoke since 1987.

The main culprit, say campaigners, are ranchers that fell the undergrowth to rear cattle for beef and leather that ends up in supply chains around the world. Pasubio, a leading European leather manufacturer that supplies luxury car brands like Porsche, recently said it was divesting from suppliers linked to deforestation in Ayoreo territory.

But Paraguay’s government has been slower to take action. The protestors accused it of failing to abide by a 2016 decision by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that called on the state to protect the Ayoreo, prevent incursions into their territory, and halt ongoing deforestation in the area.

Paraguayan law allows landowners in the Chaco to tear down 75% of vegetation on their property, providing small patches are left as windbreaks and beside roads and streams.

And previous protests by Ayoreo communities over lack of food and drinking water amid punishing droughts have been met not with assistance but with lawsuits – filed by the very officials tasked with protecting them.

It was unclear how long last week’s protest lasted or how much disruption it caused to transit. Similar picket lines imposed by native groups across Paraguay often function more as go-slows – with traffic allowed to pass every few hours – than permanent protest camps.

But while the protestors stood in the way of trucks, other Ayoreo leaders were delivering their message to policymakers and investors gathered in Asunción for the Annual Meetings of the Boards of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Group.

Longwinded title aside, this year’s conference was an opportunity for the government of Santiago Peña to pitch Paraguay as a top destination for investment – and for the lanyard class to mingle at the Palacio de López and reassure each other that Peña’s Paraguay is on the up.

Yet taking the microphone in roundtables on the summit’s sidelines, Ayoreo elders punctured the rosy picture — and slammed the development bank for providing $200m to pay for major new extensions of the Bioceanic Highway that will further bisect their territories and pile greater pressure on native ecosystems.

“The highway affects families, our uncontacted brothers,” said Ronald Sereda Picanerai, the secretary of Ayoreo federation UNAP. “The authorities should talk with us and listen beforehand.” The new road will “benefit the soybean farmers,” he added, but for us, the Ayoreo, the highway brings negative as well as positive things.”

According the IDB, which is headquartered in Washington DC, the latest batch of tarmac will improve the access of around 28,700 people to hospitals: including more than 1,700 from Indigenous communities. And 99 population centers, including 23 Indigenous villages, will reportedly be able to reach secondary schools more easily.

In a statement, the bank said in addition to consultations held in 2017 when the Bioceanic Highway was planned, throughout 2025 it supported 36 free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) meetings with eight local Indigenous communities to discuss the road extension. Led by Paraguay’s public works ministry (MOPC) with the Indigenous institute (INDI) and with an Ayoreo translator, these ongoing meetings sought to understand and address the needs of the community.

Steps were taken, the IDB adds, to minimise the environmental impact of the new section of road – including rerouting it at certain points and installing underpasses for animals – which it says will generate “holistic human development” for locals.

Carlos Diri Etacore, an elder from the Ayoreo community of Ijnapui, expressed concern that future road projects would run through the Defensores del Chaco National Park: perhaps the largest remaining fragment of the forest, and known to be a refuge of uncontacted groups. “Everyone knows that the Ayoreo people survive from the forest,” he explained. “It contains lots of food and natural medicines.”

Aquino Picanerai, a leader from Campo Loro, said the IDB had “supported the government and given them tools to deforest [some of] the last forests in the world” rather than listen to the Ayoreo’s concerns. “I’m outraged,” he added, referring to plans to build a new paved road through 100 kilometres of pristine forest between Agua Dulce, Paraguay and Roboré in Bolivia. “They’re not consulting the people whose ancestral territory it belongs to.”

The IDB told the Post it wasn’t involved in any Ruta 16 project and referred questions on the topic to the MOPC.

In a separate development, a statement issued on Sunday warned that outsiders with tractors, trucks and chainsaws have been carrying out “illegal mass deforestation” in the territory of Yvy Pyte, a native Pãi Tavyterã village in Amambay, northeast Paraguay.

The press release — signed by seven NGOs and multiple prominent figures from the Church, the arts, left-wing politics and academia — said the destruction had surged since the start of this month and threatened to reach Jasuka Venda, a sacred forested hill considered by the Pãi, a Guarani-speaking people, to be the centre of the earth.

Logging of primary forest is technically illegal anywhere in eastern Paraguay, where a zero-deforestation law was passed in 2004 — but not before 75% of its biodiverse Atlantic Forest had already been chopped down, bulldozed and burnt.

The statement was accompanied by images of felled tree trunks beside a local school, and contained a single, collective quote from an assembly of Pãi leaders: “Our forest is being hollowed out before our eyes.”

THE POST TAKE:

The Ayoreo roadblock in the Chaco — and the Pãi Tavyterã’s denunciation of illegal deforestation on their territory in Amambay — should concern Paraguay’s government and would-be investors for multiple reasons.

The most important is that Paraguay’s Indigenous peoples, who make up less than 2 percent of the country’s population, rarely raise their voices unless the situation is absolutely critical.

A day spent holding up traffic is a day without hunting or working — typically hard labour on a nearby ranch — and often means going hungry. It can earn the disapproval of powerful groups and employers, be it Mennonite cooperatives or ranchers’ associations. And calling out illegal activity is a risky and even deadly business when you’re surrounded by armed groups: uniformed and otherwise.

So when the Ayoreo and the Pai say they are starving and fearful for the future of their territories, it should give pause to policymakers like Santiago Peña who claim to be making Paraguay great again and building a better tomorrow for all its people.

But the protests also underscore enduring weaknesses in Paraguay’s business environment and its adherence to the rule of law: especially in northern regions that are touted as future motors for the national and even regional economy.

Standstills on the Corredor Bioceánico are disruptive enough when it only affects through-traffic from central Chaco towns like Loma Plata to riverside settlements like Carmelo Peralta and Fuerte Olimpo.

But when the international bridge linking Carmelo Peralta with Porto Murtinho, Brazil is completed — either this year or next — the 3,800 km highway will supposedly connect the Atlantic with the Pacific and become one of the continent’s major agribusiness corridors, funnelling thousands of trucks laden with beef, soybean and minerals towards Chilean ports with their cargoes bound for Asia.

That’s a lot of upheaval — and leverage — that barely a dozen native communities can bring to bear unless their complaints are heard. Add in the possible gas pipeline projected to hug the western portion of the highway, recently backed by the CAF multilateral bank, and the potential for disruption becomes even greater.

The northeast, too, is registering a spurt of private-sector activity: not just from traditional mainstay ranching, but especially forestry. The plantations of the eucalyptus and pulp giant Paracel extend from neighbouring Concepción into the dramatic table-top hills and patchwork native forests of Amambay.

If the land titles of communities that have lived here since time immemorial aren’t respected — foreign investors may reason — what guarantee is there that foreign businesses managed from thousands of miles away will be left to operate in peace?

The government of the day may promise streamlined paperwork, generous tax breaks, and enhanced security protection: including from U.S. military rotations.

But for all the sunny macroeconomic headlines of late, Paraguay’s greatest Achilles’ heel continues to be its lack of predictability: juridical, political, or social.

That uncertainty can translate into not knowing where your next meal is coming from, whether your community’s ancestral forest or your urban neighbourhood’s last green space will be here tomorrow – or if your multi-million dollar investment will turn out to be built on quicksand.

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Shield & SOFA

Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, was one of a dozen Latin American leaders to visit Florida on Saturday to sign a military pact with Donald Trump’s White House to take the fight to “narcoterrorist” groups across the hemisphere.

The deal — which creates a 16-member security organisation called Shield of the Americas — seeks to “train and mobilize partner nation militaries” in order to “dismantle cartels and their ability to export violence and pursue influence through organized intimidation”.

The other signatories included conservative US allies like Argentina’s Javier Milei, Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele, Bolivia’s new conservative leader Rodrigo Paz, and Chile’s incoming president José Antonio Kast.

Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico — home to several of the hemisphere’s largest and most powerful criminal organisations, but all ruled by left-wing leaders that have publicly rejected Trump’s military interventionism — did not take part.

“Just as we formed a coalition to eradicate ISIS, we now need a coalition to eradicate the cartels,” said Trump. “The courage and resolve of the great leaders here” — he added — “will make our nations safer, stronger, richer.”

Peña, whose nation has one of the lowest homicide rates in Latin America, previously praised Trump for restoring “hope” to the region’s struggle against transnational drug gangs. “Thanks to your leadership,” he added, “we’re solving the issues.”

Thousands of miles away, a separate deal heralding a greater presence of US troops in Paraguay was signed into law.

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) was approved by Paraguay’s senate on March 5 and the chamber of deputies on March 10. The lower house passed it with 53 votes in favour, eight against, and four abstentions.

Peña gave the bilateral agreement his signature on Wednesday — along with Paraguay’s foreign minister and senior US diplomat Christopher Landau.

Paraguayan and US officials say the SOFA provides an off-the-shelf legal framework that makes it easier for members of the United States armed forces to visit for training, diplomatic, and humanitarian missions.

They deny that a permanent US military base is planned in Paraguay, and say that SOFAs have been signed with dozens of other nations.

But the agreement itself describes how visiting US military personnel and civilian contractors will be immune from prosecution in Paraguay for any crimes they commit on Paraguayan soil — akin to the privileges enjoyed by diplomats.

Opposition figures said this amounts to an unacceptable surrender of sovereignty: and a subordination of Paraguay’s foreign policy to US interests.

“We’re officially becoming the back yard of another country,” said congresswoman Johanna Ortega.

She claimed the SOFA was a bargaining chip for the removal of US sanctions on ex-president Horacio Cartes, Peña’s patron. “The Paraguayan people are still paying for the pardons,” she added.

As part of the deal, Paraguay’s Congress is meanwhile fast-tracking the purchase of US weapons: bypassing normal public bidding processes.

The deal has also angered the Lula administration in neighbouring Brazil: Paraguay’s most important partner for trade, investment, and energy.

And beyond routine training exercises, recent experience suggests that the SOFA could ramp up military operations against criminal groups in Paraguay — directed on the ground by US troops.

Ecuador signed a similar security arrangement with Washington in 2023 and recently carried out joint operations with US support attacking alleged narco-terrorist camps.

THE POST TAKE:

Violent criminal gangs are a very real scourge across Latin America.

Mafia groups fell forests, extort small businesses, recruit teens as footsoldiers, and get kids hooked on drugs — all with the collusion of corrupt officials.

A fifth of Latin Americans say crime is the most important issue facing their countries. The region is host to just 8% of the world’s population but 37% of its homicides.

But far from heralding a partnership of equals to tackle the issue, the Shield of the Americas summit seemed more like a show of submission by Latin American leaders desperate to avoid falling foul of the so-called Donroe Doctrine.

Not only did Trump engage in his traditional handshake machismo, yanking Peña’s arm back and forth as Paraguay’s president maintained a rictus-like grin.

He was also dismissive of Spanish — spoken by most of his guests, as well as hundreds of millions of Latinos across the hemisphere — which was widely used in what is now the United States long before English got a foothold in the Americas.

“I’m not learning your damn language,” Trump chuckled. “I haven’t got time.”

And he reportedly reneged on a promise to sit down for brief one-on-ones with each leader, where they could have shared concerns and ideas.

Instead, after leaving behind their duties at home and travelling for hours to Doral, they were restricted to a minute-long photo-op: handshake judo included.

The summit’s one-sided optics are mirrored by the wording of the US-Paraguay SOFA.

U.S. soldiers and contractors will not be subject to local laws or taxes. Any legal responsibility for crimes they commit will be determined exclusively in US courts.

This could make securing justice all but impossible for regular Paraguayans whose rights are violated by visiting troops – especially in the poor, rural communities where people often turn to marijuana production and drug smuggling to feed their kids.

The growing militarisation of the region’s security debate has also caught Lula’s attention.

The veteran leftist president recently warned that Brazil’s borders remain dangerously vulnerable, saying “one day someone could simply invade us”: a comment likely referring to the U.S. invasion of Venezuela in February to snatch alleged cartel leader Nicolás Maduro.

Asunción and Buenos Aires designated Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho as terrorist organisations last year. Reports suggest the United States is about to do the same: a move that would escalate the range of financial and military tools that can be used against them.

Brazil, where both drug-trafficking groups are headquartered, is trying to persuade Washington against the idea.

An alarming possibility is now swimming into view: of Paraguay being used as a launchpad for cross-border military operations without the consent of its largest and most powerful neighbour.

And as Trump rains missiles down on Iran — producing serious collateral damage and civilian casualties along the way — there is no telling how far he is prepared to go in what he clearly considers his backyard.

The Americas, as one State Department post recently put it, “is OUR hemisphere.”

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Horacio Cartes undergoes emergency heart surgery

Paraguay’s powerful former president Horacio Cartes, 69, was rushed to a private hospital on Feb. 26 after suffering a severe spike in blood pressure, a serious heart rhythm issue, and a brief interruption of blood flow to the brain.

Doctors at the Sanatorio Migone in Asunción said that the tobacco and beverages magnate – who is also president of the governing Colorado Party (ANR) – had suffered a hypertensive crisis with convulsions and cardiac complications.

Expressions of concern came from across the long-ruling conservative political movement, including its dissident factions. President Santiago Peña said that “all our support and prayers” were with Cartes, while former president Mario Abdo Benítez wished him a “speedy recovery.”

On Feb. 28, Cartes was taken off sedatives and ventilator support, with doctors saying he was awake, stable, and showed no signs of brain damage. They said that he had been fitted with a pacemaker which was performing “excellently”.

After visiting him in the expensive private clinic, Peña said that “our prayers have been heard”.

He also asked the press and public to “leave aside hypothetical scenarios” in which Cartes would no longer lead the Colorado Party: a sprawling clientelistic machine with 3.3 million members – equivalent to half the national population – that has shaped the contours of Paraguay’s politics, economy and society for nearly 150 years. “We'll have Horacio Cartes for a while yet”, he added.

The conservative former leader was discharged on Monday to continue his recovery at home. Antonio Barrios, Cartes’s personal physician, said his improvement had been “rapid” and “exceptional” – but that he would require strict rest and ongoing medical monitoring before he could resume public duties.

A statement posted to Cartes’s social media channels thanked God, his family, doctors, fellow party members, and members of the public who had prayed for him. Photos or videos of Cartes during or since his hospitalisation have not been released.

THE POST TAKE:

Cartes’s delicate condition has conjured up a prospect familiar to the people of Venezuela, Mexico, and Iran in recent weeks: a succession struggle.

Cartes, it’s true, lacks the fanatical religious following of the late Ayatollah Khamenei, the sweeping territorial control of slain narco kingpin El Mencho, or the gangs of armed enforcers once wielded by captive Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro.

Especially since the Biden administration accused him of alleged mass corruption and slapped him with visa and banking sanctions — dropped last year by the Trump White House — Cartes’s followers have been at pains to paint the former Club Libertad boss as a God-fearing public servant and legitimate business figure.

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Soledad Núñez Wins Poll to Lead Asunción Mayoral Bid

The opposition alliance Unidos por Asunción has chosen Soledad Núñez as its unified candidate for mayor of Paraguay’s capital, following an open poll designed to avoid the kind of fragmentation that has long benefited the ruling Colorado Party.

In a survey of 1,000 homes over the weekend, ex-housing minister Núñez emerged as the clear winner over Johanna Ortega, a centre-left congresswoman, who conceded defeat and pledged Núñez her support. The poll was less a primary than a show of unity ahead of the race for City Hall, due to be held on October 4, that could serve as a bellwether for national elections in 2028.

Núñez, 42, is no newcomer to high office. A trained architect, she served as Senavitat minister under former president Horacio Cartes between 2014 and 2018, where she oversaw social housing projects and urban development programs. In 2023, she ran as a vice-presidential candidate on an opposition ticket against her former boss’s protégé, current president Santiago Peña. Before entering politics, she worked in the private sector and civil society on urban planning and public policy, building a technocratic reputation that she has sought to translate into cross-party appeal.

Her campaign message is blunt: Asunción is not doomed to decay. Núñez argues that the capital suffers less from lack of resources than from mismanagement and entrenched interests. She has pledged to “retire the outdated model” of municipal governance, promising administrative reform, transparency in public spending, and a professionalization of city services. Cleaning up public finances and restoring basic service delivery — from waste collection to infrastructure maintenance — sit at the center of her pitch.

She has also placed urban recovery high on the agenda, vowing to reclaim neglected plazas and public spaces, some of which she says have effectively fallen under the control of party-political groups. Improved public transport, safer neighborhoods, and a revitalised historic center are recurring themes. Núñez has warned that “putting a bankrupt institution in order” could ruffle feathers, signalling that she would confront racketeering, clientelistic networks accustomed to operating within City Hall.

Whether this unified front holds will determine much of the race’s trajectory. Asunción has grown weary of dysfunction, yet remains politically fragmented. Núñez’s challenge now is to convert a poll victory into a durable coalition — and to convince skeptical voters that managerial competence can triumph over grubby politics-as-usual in the madre de ciudades.

THE POST TAKE:

The opposition’s polling experiment was not a primary in the formal sense. There were no binding rules, no televised debates, and no obligatory participation beyond political goodwill. Yet it passed a basic legitimacy test: every major political force that signed up to the mechanism accepted the result. In Paraguay’s fractious opposition ecosystem, that’s no trivial achievement.

Still, it would be generous to call this a full-blooded electoral dispute. The lack of debates deprived voters of a direct clash of ideas. Ortega, for her part, outperformed expectations, finishing roughly 15 points behind Núñez — close enough to demonstrate a consolidated base and a capacity to mobilise beyond the activist niche.

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Paraguay convicts three Stroessner-era torturers, half a century later

A Paraguayan court has sentenced three former police officers for the torture of political prisoners during Alfredo Stroessner’s 1954–1989 dictatorship. Eusebio Torres Romero and Fortunato Lorenzo Laspina received 25 years, while Manuel Crescencio Alcaraz got 20 years.

The case was initially filed by Domingo Guzmán Rolón, who had fled the regime into exile in northern Argentina and was illegally detained in Formosa in October 1976, transported to Asunción, and then held and tortured at the infamous Departamento de Investigaciones until late 1977.

Prosecutors combined victim and witness testimony with the dictatorship’s own records preserved in the Archivos del Terror: an official paper trail of repression that still haunts courtrooms and survivors.

Carlos Portillo, a psychiatrist who worked as an investigator for Paraguay’s 2008 Truth and Justice Commission report told El País: “It’s historic. Even though it’s late, this trial matters a lot, because the possibility of being tried still exists, even 50 years later.”

This is only the second oral trial for torture under Paraguay’s current procedural system, underscoring how rare these rulings remain. In 2024 another Stroessner-era case resulted in a 30-year maximum sentence for Torres, but is still under appeal.

THE POST TAKE:

This conviction lands in a weird split-screen Paraguay.

On one side: a state court acknowledging, in no uncertain terms, that state agents tortured dissidents — and that these crimes can still be judged decades later.

On the other: a resurgent genre of dictatorship apologetics, increasingly voiced by people who aren’t random uncles at an asado but hold top government jobs. In January, José Duarte Penayo, head of Paraguay’s higher-education accreditation body ANEAES, called Stroessner a “constitutional president”.

Duarte even argued the regime was “benign” compared to earlier Liberal-era violence at the turn of the 20th century.

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Déjà Vu on Rails

The long-promised suburban train linking Asunción with surrounding cities is back in the spotlight. After negotiations with South Korea fell apart in late 2024, President Santiago Peña announced this week a new partnership with the Emirates, claiming it will finally bring the project off the drawing board.

During a trip that included test drives of Aston Martins and Bugattis, Peña signed a deal under which Paraguay’s (trainless) railway operator Fepasa and the Emirati state firm Etihad Rail will form a joint company to build and operate a 43-kilometer passenger line from Asunción to Ypacaraí.

Initial construction would focus on the first 18-kilometer stretch to Luque, estimated to cost US$400–450 million. Emirati capital would contribute roughly US$150 million, while Paraguayan is on the hook for US$50 million; the rest will be procured through external financing. Studies are slated to begin immediately, with works targeted for early 2027 and then a three-year construction period.

There are just a few problems, however. In 2025, Congress passed a law to govern the Tren de Cercanías that requires a public bidding process — a safeguard to guarantee transparency and competitive pricing. To pave the way for a direct award to Etihad Rail, Congress must first amend the legislation.

Adding to the friction, Etihad Rail itself is not a manufacturer of trains, meaning the locomotives, carriages and other equipment will have to be sourced from elsewhere. Paraguayan officials are spinning this as an advantage — freeing Paraguay from depending on any single producer — but it also underscores how much of the project still depends o contracts that have yet to be negotiated.

On the ground, the biggest roadblock are the rights-of-way surrounding the old railway tracks across the metropolitan area. The 14 metres on both sides have never been fully freed from encroachments: including a stadium belonging to soccer club Libertad, which Horacio Cartes — Peña’s political mentor and ruling Colorado Party chief — presided over and bankrolled (2001–2012). Without major progress on land access, even a fully financed project may fail to materialise.

The government casts the project as a breakthrough investment that would modernise, green, and de-congest Greater Asunción’s transport system. Critics, however, see a recurring pattern: legal impediments being redrawn to fit political ambitions and big promises predicated on unresolved technical questions.

How these tensions are resolved — in Congress, in contract negotiations, and in community engagement over the rail corridor — will determine whether the commuter train becomes reality or another chapter in the long-delayed infrastructure saga.

THE POST TAKE:

If this all feels familiar, that’s because it is.

The sudden resurrection of the Tren de Cercanías is another attempt by the Peña administration to have something to point to after two years of globe-trotting diplomacy, whose tangible returns have so far been thin back home. A commuter train—green, modern, Instagrammable—is an attractive symbol to justify all those taxpayer-funded foreign trips and photo-ops with Scandinavian and Gulf royals.

But strip away the rhetoric, and the project already displays several of the warning signs that doomed Metrobús, the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) scheme launched during Cartes’s presidency that ripped up Eusebio Ayala avenue, bankrupted shops, burned through public trust, and ultimately collapsed without ever carrying passengers in 2018.

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Paraguay’s pensions time bomb

Paraguay’s Congress has been recalled from its summer break for an extraordinary session this Thursday to deliberate a major pensions reform.

Outlined by Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, on December 30, the changes would impose a minimum retirement age of 57 for schoolteachers, university professors, judges, police officers, and soldiers, increase the amount they have to contribute to their pensions, and reduce eventual payouts.

The Peña administration says the reform is urgently needed to plug a $380m black hole in public finances. It claims the cost of supporting retirees from these professions — via a public pensions pot known as the caja fiscal — could swell to $10bn by 2030.

In a legislative proposal submitted to Congress, Peña and economy and finance minister Carlos Fernández Valdovinos cite the need to “grasp the rattlesnake” and “think of future generations” in order to “transform Paraguay into the great nation it is destined to become.”

Unions have reacted with fury to the proposals, calling them rushed, lacking in consensus, and unfair to hardworking people who have paid into the system for years. Teachers have declared themselves on a “war footing” and threatened to boycott classrooms when schools return at the end of the month.

Retired police and military associations have meanwhile called for taxes on producers of soybeans, one of Paraguay’s top agribusiness exports, to help pay for pensions. They are supported by José Rodríguez, a congressman from the ruling Colorado Party.

Carlos Fernández Valdovinos, Paraguay’s economy and finance minister, has suggested that the only alternative is to raise VAT from 10 to 14 percent — an outcome which he subsequently ruled out, saying “this government is not going to raise taxes.”

President Peña has made progress on reducing the fiscal deficit, the difference between annual government spending and income, to an official target of 1.5% of GDP. The deficit ended 2025 at 2% of GDP, down from 2.5% a year earlier.

But international lenders — including Peña’s former employer, the IMF — and credit ratings agencies like Fitch are pressuring him to maintain momentum. Both have warned that the ballooning caja fiscal could seriously deplete Paraguay’s treasury and ultimately damage its creditworthiness.

Paraguay’s corporate media and political class are also in broad agreement that the country’s complex tangle of public pensions perks represent a looming crisis, two decades in the making, which can no longer be kicked down the road. Some experts say the reforms need to go even further to truly cover the cost of an aging population.

But as local elections loom in October, soon followed by party primaries for national polls in 2028 — and with the Colorado Party splintering in Congress — the Peña administration may have left it too late to pull off its most controversial reform to date.

THE POST TAKE:

Told by politicians to make sacrifices for the common good, Paraguay’s law enforcement officials and educators could reasonably respond: you first.

While seeking to trim the entitlements of ordinary workers, Peña has continued to fund the caja parliamentaria, which allows senators and congressional deputies to draw a lifetime pension from the age of 55 after only 10 years of contributions.

This arrangement, branded “VIP retirement” by critics, has cost taxpayers $5m since 2015 — a figure which experts say could grow to $100m by 2040.

“We have to reflect deeply on our own privileges,” opposition congresswoman and Asunción mayoral pre-candidate Johanna Ortega said last week. “We can’t ask one or several groups to tighten their belts without thinking about ourselves.”

A video that circulated on Friday — showing Peña taking off from a golf course in an Air Force helicopter — has meanwhile redoubled criticism of the president’s lavish lifestyle, soaring personal wealth, and frequent taxpayer-funded travel at home and abroad.

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Read in English

Al conducir por la Costanera —la explanada ribereña que rodea la capital de Paraguay, Asunción—, uno se encuentra con una vista inusual.

En primer plano, chabolas derruidas de ladrillos y madera contrachapada, encaramadas junto a arroyos contaminados y pantanos proclives a inundaciones. Detrás de ellas, a escasa distancia de una milla, un bosque de grúas y rascacielos, coronado por jardines frondosos y piscinas infinitas.

Este es quizás el símbolo más llamativo de la transformación económica que sacude al Paraguay sin litoral. El PIB de este país sin salida al mar creció un seis por ciento en 2025: el ritmo más rápido de cualquier economía en el hemisferio occidental, excepto la rica en petróleo de Guyana.

Y en barrios de Asunción como Manorá, Ykua Sati, San Jorge, Las Mercedes y Mburucuyá, un selecto grupo de inversionistas y residentes está disfrutando claramente de los beneficios. Los nombres de los imponentes proyectos, por sí solos, hablan de aspiraciones elevadas, incluso de la realeza: El Palacio de Los Patos, SkyTower, Edificio Eminent, More, Domus.

Luego está Petra Imperiale —que, con 73 pisos, promete ser uno de los edificios más altos de Sudamérica cuando se termine en 2029— o Distrito Perserverancia, un exclusivo vecindario privado que ocupa aproximadamente cinco cuadras con tiendas boutique, un supermercado gourmet Casa Rica y áticos valorados, según se informa, en 700.000 dólares.

“Hoy Asunción emerge de la mano del sector privado, con estas inversiones”, dijo el presidente de Paraguay, Santiago Peña, en la inauguración de Distrito Perserverancia en noviembre.

“Y realmente, hoy vemos esta obra magnífica”, añadió, “es sentir que nos estamos acercando rápidamente a ese sueño de tener una Asunción, no solamente una ciudad agradable, amena, incluyente, sino que sea también la capital latinoamericana más linda”.

Solo en 2024, la Municipalidad de Asunción aprobó 280 nuevos edificios de varios pisos. El tornado de ladrillo y cemento se refleja en los ingresos fiscales del sector de la construcción, que se cuadruplicaron en cuatro años hasta alcanzar los 85 mil millones de guaraníes (12,6 millones de dólares) ese mismo año.

Sin embargo, más allá del brillo del cemento recién vertido, persisten preguntas sobre el extravagante mercado inmobiliario de Paraguay.

¿Está experimentando Asunción actualmente un auge inmobiliario o una burbuja? ¿Quiénes exactamente están comprando todos estos nuevos edificios de apartamentos —algunos de los cuales están casi completamente vacíos— y realmente valen lo que cuestan?

¿Cuánto del polvo de ladrillo y de los andamios están encubriendo dinero sucio, mientras los narcotraficantes utilizan los controles relativamente laxos de Paraguay para lavar su efectivo?

¿Y podría estar gestándose un rechazo entre los paraguayos, quienes cada vez se encuentran más excluidos del mercado al buscar un lugar donde vivir debido a los precios?

Un refugio seguro en ladrillos

“El mercado actual está bastante diversificado”, explica al *The Paraguay Post* el asesor inmobiliario Aldo Zarza, de Oficina Re/Max Conexión.

“Hay muchos extranjeros, de Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile y Argentina, pero también bastantes inversionistas locales”, añade, además de consorcios formados por ambos.

Su firma estima una tasa de vacancia de alrededor del 30 % de las unidades en todo el mercado inmobiliario de la capital: “Si alcanzáramos el 50 %, eso sería un poco preocupante”, reconoce Zarza.

Pero explica las bajas tasas de ocupación señalando a los inversionistas que ven los departamentos de obra nueva como una caja fuerte a largo plazo para su riqueza.

“A veces prefieren no alquilarlo de inmediato, para que el precio no baje”, sostiene Zarza.

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Leé en español

Drive along the Costanera — the riverside esplanade that loops Paraguay’s capital, Asunción — and the contrast is stark.

In the foreground, tumbledown shacks of bare brick and plywood, perched beside polluted streams and flood-prone swamps. Behind them, barely a mile distant, a forest of cranes and skyscrapers, topped with verdant gardens and infinity pools.

It’s perhaps the most striking symbol of the economic transformation gripping Paraguay. Powered by agriculture, services, and construction, the landlocked South American nation’s GDP grew by six percent in 2025: perhaps the fastest of any economy in the Americas except oil-rich Guyana.

And in Asunción neighbourhoods like Manorá, Ycuá Satí, San Jorge, Las Mercedes and Mburucuyá, a select few investors and residents are clearly enjoying the benefits. The names alone of the towering new developments speak to lofty ambitions: El Palacio de Los Patos, SkyTower, Eminent, More, Domus.

Also reshaping the capital’s skyline are the Petra Imperiale — which at 73 floors promises to be one of South America’s tallest buildings when finished in 2029 — and Distrito Perseverancia, an upscale private neighbourhood which occupies roughly five city blocks with boutique stores, a Casa Rica gourmet supermarket, and penthouses worth a reported $700,000.

“Today, Asunción is on the up, thanks to the private sector,” said Paraguay’s president, Santiago Pena, at the inauguration of Distrito Perseverancia in November.

“Seeing this magnificent project,” he added, “is to feel that we’re getting closer to the dream of a pleasant, enjoyable, inclusive Asunción that is also the most beautiful capital in Latin America.”

In 2024 alone, Asunción City Hall approved 280 new multi-storey buildings. The tornado of bricks and mortar is reflected in tax receipts from the construction sector, which quadrupled over four years to reach 85 billion guaraníes ($12.6m) in the same year.

Yet beyond the shine of freshly-poured cement, questions hang over Paraguay’s real-estate extravaganza.

Who exactly is buying all these new apartment buildings — some of which are almost entirely empty — and are they really worth the price tag? Is Asunción experiencing a property boom, or a bubble?

How much of the brick dust and scaffolding is covering up dirty money, as narcotraffickers use Paraguay’s lax controls to launder their cash?

And could a backlash be brewing among regular Paraguayans, who increasingly find themselves priced out of a place to live?

A safe haven in bricks

“The market today is pretty diversified,” real-estate advisor Aldo Zarza of Oficina Re/Max Conexión tells The Paraguay Post.

“There are lots of foreigners, from Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina, but also plenty of local investors,” he adds, as well as consortia formed of the two.

Under Ley 60/90, Paraguay’s long-standing investment-promotion framework, real estate projects are exempted from taxes on imports and local purchases of machinery, while those worth more than $13m don’t have to pay tax on the first ten years of profits.

Developers who reinvest earnings can further slash their tax bill, as well as enjoying municipal tax perks in Asunción. And a recent update to the investment incentives, Ley 7548/25, explicitly widens tax breaks to cover purchases of raw materials and to benefit local developers alongside foreign investors.

Such freebies go some way to explaining why builders are happily throwing up apartment blocks without guaranteed buyers.

Zarza’s firm estimates a vacancy rate of around 30% of units across the capital’s property market: “If we reached 50%, that would be a bit worrying,” Zarza concedes.

But he explains the low rates of occupancy by pointing to investors who see new-build apartments as a long-term lock-box for their wealth.

“Sometimes they prefer not to rent it out right away, so the price doesn’t fall,” Zarza argues.

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It’s the trade deal that (nearly) nobody in Paraguay wanted.

Ecologists warn it will accelerate deforestation. Human rights monitors say it has already stoked conflict over land. Paraguay’s trigger-happy soybean farmers and chainsaw-happy ranchers are squirming at the prospect of a greater spotlight on the supply chain.

One influential alt-right broadcaster meanwhile brands it “one of the most dangerous agreements ever signed by our country.” The EU–Mercosur Association Agreement, Enrique Vargas Peña argues, is a “colonial” power-grab imposed by the “dictatorship” of Brussels.

Foreign minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano said only last week that Paraguay was “dissatisfied” with the agreement for its “lack of ambition”, complaining that it gives the South American trade bloc only limited access to European markets.

Just about the only outspoken fan of the deal – inked on Saturday at a ceremony at the Central Bank of Paraguay in Asunción – is Paraguay’s president.

“This is a genuinely historic day,” Santiago Peña told dignitaries including Javier Milei, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, Uruguay’s president Yamandú Orsi, and Brazilian foreign minister Mauro Vieira.

The signing of the deal after 25 years of painstaking negotiations, Peña argued, will “substantially benefit” millions on both sides of Atlantic.

“In a complex, unstable, dangerous world,” he added, “where the old certainties fall away before our eyes, Europe and South America should unite to show a different way forward.”

A historic agreement

At least on paper, the Association Agreement is a seriously big deal.

It envisions the world’s largest free trade zone: a shared market of 31 nations and 720 million people worth $22tn and accounting for 25% of global GDP.

The politics behind it are just as important.

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Varios años atrás, una autora colombiana me escribía preguntándome por autores paraguayos. Me decía que había logrado rastrear nuevos escritores de toda la región latinoamericana y caribeña, salvo por una acostumbrada incógnita: el -Guay más desconocido.

Así, por primera vez, me di cuenta de que quienes estamos en Paraguay vivimos en un paraje infranqueable, más inaccesible aún para nuestros lectores de habla inglesa, que deben orientarse sin mapas ni brújulas.

¿Cómo navegar las páginas de un no lugar que se percibe como utopía o distopía según a quién se le pregunte? Esta es una nación de paradojas: su economía, su política. Aún en las letras vemos esa característica tan propia de lo paraguayo: lo contradictorio e inverosímil. Aunque subrepresentados en el mundo editorial de habla hispana e inglesa, y a pesar de los bajos índices de lectura que se encuentran entre los peores de América Latina y el Caribe, los libros paraguayos se imprimen cada vez más que nunca dentro de las fronteras paraguayas.

Mi propuesta de lectura no es un ranking; es apenas una selección, a modo de invitación, no exhaustiva, de una variedad de géneros que tal vez pudiera ayudar a los lectores internacionales. A pesar de la dificultad, he intentado seleccionar materiales con traducción al inglés y también lograr incluir voces femeninas. Autores de los diferentes pueblos indígenas, así como de poblaciones LGBTI+, merecen sus propias selecciones que difundiremos próximamente.

“Hijo de Hombre” de Augusto Roa Bastos

La clásica introducción segura a las letras del Paraguay. Integrante del boom latinoamericano, premio Cervantes, Roa es el autor paraguayo por antonomasia, adorado, detestado, no superado e insuperable, quizá. Su nombre bautiza todos los espacios culturales y es referencia obligada apenas se sale de las fronteras. Su obra captura la esencia paraguaya: una nación signada por el autoritarismo, la desgracia y la desigualdad, que también se refleja en el idioma. Es un autor para lectores adiestrados y escritores. La obra puede seguirse con “Yo, el Supremo”, el magnum opus del escritor paraguayo más universal.

Poesías completas de Josefina Plá

Es difícil elegir una sola obra de Josefina Plá, pero es imposible prescindir de ella cuando de cultura paraguaya se trata. La española adoptada por el Paraguay marcó un antes y un después en la vida cultural de este país en el siglo XX. Escritora todoterreno, artista plástica, periodista, investigadora, conocerla es dar con la llave para descifrar el acervo cultural de este país. Su obra ha sido traducida a varios idiomas, y su poesía ilustra toda una época. Y como la poesía no puede estar ausente en estas sugerencias, quién mejor que Josefina.

“La babosa” de Gabriel Casaccia

A mi parecer la mejor novela paraguaya, aunque enoje a los fans de Roa. Ambientada en Areguá, un pueblo veraniego a 22 km de la capital, a orillas del lago Ypacaraí, La babosa —tristemente aún no traducida al inglés aunque sí al francés— contiene todos los elementos para captar la atención de Netflix, que ya ha adaptado “Pedro Páramo” y “Cien años de soledad”. Costumbrismo paraguayo con humor, romance, culpa, deseo y el deporte favorito de todos los paraguayos: el chisme.

“El dolor paraguayo” de Rafael Barrett

El rebelde anarquista español Rafael Barrett sacudió la vida intelectual de Argentina, Uruguay y Paraguay a principios del siglo XX. Especialmente en Paraguay, país donde amó y al que dedicó casi toda su obra, fundó toda una tradición de pensamiento social, de crítica y de periodismo comprometido con los desposeídos. Influenció profundamente a Roa Bastos y a varias generaciones de escritores, artistas visuales, periodistas y luchadores sociales. La magnífica traducción al inglés de William Costa, publicada por Monthly Review Press, incluye un estudio preliminar imperdible.

“Huellas del Futuro” de Benno Glauser

El libro contiene la experiencia de vida de más de tres décadas del autor en el Chaco paraguayo, uno de los sitios de mayor deforestación del planeta. Nos confronta con la realidad de la existencia de grupos Ayoreo que han decidido no entrar en contacto con la sociedad blanca, derecho que debe ser respetado.

Bellamente escrito, con sensibilidad, sencillez y profundidad, Glauser nos introduce en los últimos bosques chaqueños y nos recuerda la multiplicidad de mundos que coexisten con el nuestro. Disponible para la venta en El Granel, es una lectura necesaria en tiempos en que el Chaco se encuentra amenazado por la voracidad de numerosos intereses.

“En los sótanos de los generales” de Alfredo Boccia Paz, Miguel H. López, Antonio V. Pecci y Gloria Giménez Guanes

Una buena introducción para principiantes a lo que fue el Plan Cóndor y el rol del stronismo. Los “Archivos del terror”, descubiertos en Asunción en 1992, constituyeron evidencia del operativo en el que se coordinaron los diferentes regímenes cívico-militares de Sudamérica con el apoyo de los EE.UU. Disponible solo en español. Recomiendo, además, la película “Bajo las banderas, el sol” del director Juanjo Pereira, que contiene potentes imágenes inéditas de la dictadura más larga de Sudamérica, un acompañamiento indispensable para comenzar a entender el rol geoestratégico que han asignado a este país desde la Guerra Fría.

“Subtropical essays” de Ysanne Gayet

Disponible solo en inglés. Los Ensayos Subtropicales contienen las memorias del andar de décadas de la artista visual y gestora cultural británica residente en Paraguay, Ysanne Gayet, fundadora del Museo del Barro y del Centro Cultural del Lago. Una lectura divertida y fascinante, casi una película documental que muestra la variedad de experiencias de Gayet disfrutando de las fiestas populares, conociendo lo mejor del arte popular e indígena local y de su labor incansable y comprometida con la cultura paraguaya a lo largo de casi una vida.
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“1811” de Robin Wood y Roberto Goiriz

No podía dejar de hablar de historieta desde el país que vio nacer a Robin Wood, el exitoso guionista del cómic argentino y europeo. “1811” es una conmemoración de la independencia del Paraguay en su bicentenario. Como gran parte de la producción editorial paraguaya es sobre historia local, y quizá el formato cómic sea una buena primera aproximación a esta temática, a partir de las viñetas de uno de los veteranos dibujantes del cómic paraguayo, Roberto Goiriz.

“La masacre de Curuguaty” de Julio Benegas Vidallet

Una de las mayores tragedias ocurridas en la transición democrática, que desembocó en un golpe de Estado contra el único gobierno progresista que tuvo este país, narrada por quien considero el mejor escritor paraguayo de crónica. “¿Qué pasó en Curuguaty?”, decían los grafitis en las calles. Más de una década después, persiste la duda, así como la lucha por la tierra de campesinos e indígenas, en uno de los países con los mayores índices de desigualdad en la tenencia de la tierra del mundo.

Serie de “Contar el Arte” de Fundación Texo

Hasta la fecha, se han publicado tres volúmenes de entrevistas realizadas a lo largo de varios años por el artista y director artístico de la Fundación Texo, Fredi Casco, a diversas personalidades del arte y la cultura del Paraguay. Contiene un gran esfuerzo por acercar el acervo cultural paraguayo al mundo, con notas al pie pensadas para lectores internacionales que desean acercarse por primera vez a lo que acontece culturalmente en Paraguay.

BONUS TRACK

Cierro la invitación con una propuesta de tres novelas y una serie de cómics recomendadas, publicadas por editoriales pequeñas y autogestivas, para el público hispanoparlante y/o que se encuentre aprendiendo dicho idioma:

• “Perros del Pantano”, de Cave Ogdon, buen cultor de la novela, nos presenta una obra de humor y crítica social desde las clases trabajadoras del tradicional barrio Sajonia de Asunción.

• “Mujer Ave”, de Estela Asilvera, gustará a lectores de Isabel Allende: tres generaciones de mujeres que se debaten entre sus sueños y las injusticias en medio de la dictadura stronista.

• “La mujer del cuadro”, de Ana Miranda, es una refrescante propuesta de ciencia ficción desde la vivencia de las mujeres.

• Por último, “Hambro” de Gustavo Baéz Rolón, una innovadora serie de cómics inspirada en la estética de los filmes de acción de los 80, que constituye una aguda sátira de la realidad social paraguaya.

La modorra de enero es ideal para un entretenimiento de bajo costo en tiempos en que gran parte del día nos pasamos confinados por las altas temperaturas. Es la oportunidad perfecta para nadar en nuevas páginas y conocer Paraguay desde otras perspectivas, a través de sus mares inexplorados: los libros.

¿Qué más debería estar en la lista? ¿Cuál es tu clásico paraguayo de culto que no podés dejar de releer? Dejanos un comentario:

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Leé en español

A few years back, a Colombian author wrote to me in search of writers. She had managed to track down published works of literature from every country in Latin America and the Caribbean, with one exception: Paraguay.

I realised that, here in the lesser-known -guay, we live in uncharted literary territory. How to navigate the pages of a place that shifts from utopia or dystopia according to who you ask?

This terra incognita is harder still to traverse for non-Spanish speakers: let alone the question of the Guaraní and other Indigenous languages — and their poetry, culture, and mythology — which deserve a separate review entirely.

Paraguay is a nation of paradoxes: its economy, its politics. That sense of contradiction reigns even in the world of letters. Although Paraguayan books rarely break out of containment to reach readers abroad — and despite Paraguayans reading far less than their regional peers — more titles are being printed in Paraguay than ever before.

So here’s my beginner’s guide to the blooming field of writing from and on Paraguay in English and Spanish. It’s not a definitive ranking, nor an exhaustive digest. Take it as an invitation to flick through a variety of genres and voices — a perfect pastime for the sleepy summer months.

Son of Man (Augusto Roa Bastos)

Roa Bastos is the classic introduction to Paraguayan fiction. A pioneer of Latin America’s mid-century literary “boom” alongside figures like Gabriel García Márquez, Roa is the Paraguayan writer’s writer: adored, detested, unmatched. He is also perhaps the only local writer familiar to foreign readers, having won Spain’s Premio Cervantes in 1990.

Son of Man (1960), Roa’s first published novel, mixes Christian mysticism with a deft pen-portrait of oppression in the early 1900s. It captures the essence of Paraguay: a nation imprinted with authoritarianism, “beloved of misfortune.” For a challenge, try I, the Supreme. Written from exile in 1974, the book inhabits the mind of revolutionary leader Dr. Francia (1766-1840) to explore how dictators, by controlling language, seek to bend society and reality to their will.

Poesías completas
(Josefina Plá)

Though born in the Canary Islands, Josefina Plá (1903-99) marked a before and after in Paraguayan culture. Relocating to South America with her husband, Paraguayan sculptor Andrés Campos Cervera, in 1926, she quickly established herself as a journalist, art critic, playwright, ceramicist and historian. Encountering her work, which has been translated into multiple languages, is like finding the key to deciphering the country’s cultural richness. And her vanguardista poetry, intimate and nostalgic, is illustrative of an entire era.

La Babosa (Gabriel Casaccia)

To me, Paraguay’s best novel (sorry, Roa fans), this book — set in the sleepy lakeside town of Areguá — has all the ingredients for a Netflix adaptation alongside Pedro Páramo and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Capturing the idiosyncrasies of smalltown Paraguayan life, it blends humour, romance, guilt, desire, and the favourite pastime of every Paraguayan: gossip. Though sadly yet to be published in English, La Babosa — the nickname of the rumour-spreading Doña Angela — is available in French as la limace.

Paraguayan Sorrow (Rafael Barrett)

The rebellious Spanish anarchist Rafael Barrett shook up the intellectual life of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Paraguay, the country he loved and to which he dedicated most of his output — especially workers toiling in the country’s rapacious yerba mate industry — he founded a tradition of critical journalism dedicated to the dispossessed. Barrett’s sharp pen and sharper conscience was a profound influence on generations of writers, artists, and activists, including Roa Bastos. William Costa’s magnificent translation, published in 2024 by Monthly Review Press, contains an essential introduction to Barrett’s life and reception after his death aged just 34 in 1910.

Trails from a World Beyond (Benno Glauser)

Part-memoir, part-anthropology, this book contains three decades of the author’s experiences in the Paraguayan Chaco, one of the fastest-vanishing forests on the planet. He confronts us with the existence of nomadic Ayoreo groups that have decided not to make contact with outside society — a right which should be respected.

Beautifully written, with great sensitivity, simplicity and depth, Glauser leads us through the surviving natural wonder of the Chaco and reminds us of the many worlds that exist alongside our own. Available for purchase at El Granel, this book is a must-read at a time when the Chaco faces dire threats from agribusiness, narcotrafficking, and the climate crisis.

En los sótanos de los generales (Alfredo Boccia Paz, Miguel H. López, Antonio V. Pecci, Gloria Giménez Guanes)

This book, available only in Spanish, compiles key documents from Operation Condor — the mass murder of dissidents by the regime of Alfredo Stroessner and neighbouring autocrats, supported by the United States — including the archivos del terror discovered in an Asunción police station in 1992. To get a handle on this dark period of recent history, I also recommend Under the Flags, the Sun, a recent documentary charting the rise and fall of Stroessner through rarely seen footage, stitched together by director Juanjo Pereira.

Subtropical essays (Ysanne Gayet)

This is a beguiling memoir by Ysanne Gayet, the British co-founder of the Museo del Barro and the Centro Cultural del Lago in Areguá, two of Paraguay’s finest art museums. The volume immerses the reader in a documentary-like journey through village festivals, popular art, and Indigenous celebrations. Gayet’s decades-long commitment to championing Paraguayan culture in all its exuberant expressions shines through in every page.

1811 (Robin Wood and Roberto Goiriz)

Graphic novels, without doubt, deserve a mention in any round-up of literature in Paraguay: the birthplace of acclaimed comic-book writer Robin Wood. Published to mark the bicentenary of independence, 1811 is a dramatic retelling of Paraguay’s struggle for freedom from Spain. The life-and-death stakes and vivid characters are ably brought to life by the brushstrokes of veteran graphic novel artist Roberto Goiriz.

La masacre de Curuguaty (Julio Benegas Vidallet)

Paraguay’s best writer of journalistic chronicles turns his pen to the Curuguaty Massacre: a clash over land rights in rural Paraguay that resulted in the deaths of 11 campesinos and six police officers. The tragic episode in June 2012 led to a congressional coup that unseated the only progressive government in modern Paraguayan history. ¿Qué pasó en Curuguaty? read the graffiti in the streets at the time. More than a decade later, questions about what took place at Curuguaty still remain: as does the struggle for land by Indigenous and peasant communities in Paraguay, one of the world’s most unequal countries for land ownership.

Contar el Arte (Fundación Texo)

Fredi Casco, artistic director of the leading contemporary art institution Fundación Texo, has published a fascinating series of annotated interviews with leading cultural figures in Paraguay. While published only in Spanish, the three volumes of Contar el Arte to date represent a major effort to bring Paraguayan musicians, artists, filmmakers, architects, and performers to the world, with footnotes offering key context to international readers seeking to better understand Paraguay’s cultural offering.

INDIE PRESS BONUS:

• Perros del Pantano (Cave Ogdon)
  Mixes humour and social critique straight out of Sajonia, a traditional working-class neighbourhood of Asunción.

• Mujer Ave (Estela Asilvera)
  For fans of Isabel Allende, three generations of women discuss their dreams and the injustices of the Stroessner dictatorship.

• La mujer del cuadro (Ana Miranda)
  A fresh and unique science-fiction story told from women’s lived experience.

• Hambro (Gustavo Baéz Rolón)
  Inspired by the aesthetic of 1980s action films, this innovative comic series keenly satirises contemporary Paraguayan society.

What else should be on the list? What’s your cult Paraguayan classic you can’t stop re-reading? And is Roa Bastos overrated, or rightly famous? Let us know what you think:

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While Congress may have decamped to Brazilian beaches and summer houses in San Bernardino, Paraguay keeps making headlines: not least the news that it boasted Latin America’s fastest-growing economy and best-performing currency in 2025.

Elections are looming later this year – to say nothing of Paraguay’s return to the World Cup after 15 years – and new political forces are rising to contest the Colorado Party’s eight-decade control. Events far away, from Caracas to Beijing and Washington, will have far-reaching consequences for Paraguayan politics and foreign policy.

Meanwhile, the demands of the energy transition, and a wave of foreign investment, are creating billion-dollar opportunities in emerging sectors and once-remote regions like the Chaco. Below, I drill down into some of the top developments you need to know about in 2026.

1. The Brazilian exodus accelerates

Relations between the Peña and Lula administrations have turned frosty lately. But Brazilian investors and immigrants can’t get enough of Paraguay.

Viral videos show expats from Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul praising Paraguay’s cheap cost of living, lox taxes, laid-back lifestyle and affordable workforce. Some 21,000 Brazilians successfully applied for residency in in 2025, driving a record total of 44,000 applications. Recent major moves in the maquila sector include $3m and $6m investments from textile producers Fiasul and Grupo Lobo. But forestry firm EFISA also plans to install a $9m packaging plant, while slaughterhouse giant JBS is returning to Paraguay with a $70m investment.

Brazilian enthusiasm for Paraguay is nothing new: Stroessner’s “march to the west,” and the construction of the Itaipú dam, unleashed a tide of Brazilian colonists into Paraguay: today home to as many as 400,000 brasiguayos who often live in Portuguese-speaking enclaves. President Horacio Cartes (2013-18) famously invited Brazilian investors to “use and abuse” Paraguay.

But both “push” and “pull” factors will intensify this trend in 2026. Lula has just hiked taxes on top earners, and now seems likely to win re-election this October. The completion of the Bioceanic Bridge by June will speed the influx of Brazilian agribusiness to the Chaco.

Finance and economy minister Carlos Fernández Valdovinos has meanwhile vowed to maintain Paraguay’s user-friendly 10-10-10 formula (on corporate/income/VAT rates), and expanded the maquila regime to cover services. He has described Brazil as “our China”: a market of 300 million people right next door, and hungry for goods that Paraguay can produce cheaply with Brazilian financing. The flight of Brazilian investors to Paraguay, Peña predicted in a recent press conference, “will only grow.”

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Millions worldwide were glued to their screens as news broke this morning that U.S. special forces, in cooperation with the CIA, had seized Venezuela’s autocratic leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife in an early-hours raid – and flown them to a warship bound for the United States.

Videos on social media showed fiery explosions from U.S. strikes on military bases across Caracas, the mountain-ringed capital. A few hours later, President Donald Trump posted a picture of Maduro blindfolded and in U.S. custody aboard the USS Iwo Jima.

Speaking to reporters, Trump claimed that Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, had built an international cocaine-trafficking ring that had led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens, and said they would face justice in a New York court.

U.S. officials will “run the country” and secure U.S. interests in Venezuela – which has the largest proven oil reserves on earth – until a democratic transition can take place, he added, promising “to do what is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”

The dramatic military intervention by the U.S is the only clear-cut case of its kind in South American history – and the first in Latin America since the 1989 toppling of Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega. Trump said it represented a revival of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, arguing that Maduro’s removal was necessary to prevent hostile foreign countries from taking over Venezuela.

The U.S. military, Trump added, was poised to carry out a “second wave” of attacks to return democracy to the Andean-Caribbean nation – but that renewed strikes would probably not be necessary. He said that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken via telephone with Venezuelan vice-president Delcy Rodríguez, and that she had agreed to cooperate.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado – whose party is widely accepted by observers to have won an election in July, in which Maduro claimed victory without proof – said “the hour of freedom” had come, and called on her supporters “to be ready” for her instructions.

The images of U.S. helicopters hovering over a South American capital, and foreign troops standing guard over a captured head of state, provoked alarm across much of Latin America.

For roughly a century, the region has been the world’s strongest defender of international norms that explicitly prohibit military incursions into another country’s territory.

Condemnation came from the Lula administration in Brazil, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, and Gustavo Petro of Colombia – whom Trump accused in his press conference of overseeing “factories where he makes cocaine”, saying he should “watch his ass.”

A statement posted by Sheinbaum said Mexico “energetically condemns and rejects” the U.S. intervention, and described Latin America and the Caribbean as a “zone of peace.” Any military action, it added, “puts regional stability at grave risk.”

Yet a small group of U.S. allies defended the armed nocturnal incursion on Venezuelan soil, which Rubio painted as a “law enforcement operation”.

Among those celebrating Maduro’s ouster were Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Argentine president Javier Milei – and Paraguay’s conservative leader, Santiago Peña.

In comments posted to social media site X, Peña said Maduro’s fall “could only be a good thing.”

“Paraguay’s government has always had an unnegotiable commitment to democracy” in Venezuela, Peña wrote. “That’s why it has warned for a long time about … the illegitimate, rapacious, and dictatorial regime of Nicolás Maduro, who has caused so much harm to that noble people.”

Peña – who lead the ruling Colorado Party to victory in elections in 2023 – called for “democratic means” and the “wellbeing of Venezuelans” to be prioritised in the “decisive hours” to come.

He also made an unlikely pitch for Paraguay to play a role in Venezuela’s rocky road ahead.

“As a country that has successfully transitioned from an authoritarian regime to a full and vigorous democracy,” he added, “Paraguay offers the international community its cooperation and experience so the change of regime leads to the full enjoyment of rights and freedoms.”

“We stand with the Venezuelan people, who deserve to live better days in democracy, freedom and peace.”

THE POST TAKE:

The full-throated support by Peña for the “snatch-and-grab” seizure of Maduro is the latest confirmation of Paraguay’s lockstep alignment as Trump deploys gunboat diplomacy and naked force across the hemisphere.

Last month, the government of Peña – who has a warm personal relationship with Rubio – signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) which paves the way for greater U.S. military deployments to the landlocked South American nation. U.S. officials denied that a permanent base is planned.

In August, Paraguay designated the so-called Cartel de los Soles – a loose drug-trafficking scheme with ties to Venezuelan military officials – as a “terrorist organisation,” three months before the Trump administration. A statement today by Paraguay’s foreign ministry described Maduro as “the ringleader” of the group.

Peña’s Paraguay has meanwhile been one of the loudest defenders of U.S. allies Taiwan and Israel, and ruled out establishing formal diplomatic relations with China – making it one of barely a dozen countries to maintain this stance worldwide.

Yet this double-or-nothing bet on Trump’s fickle friendship – and Peña’s offer to support the transition in Venezuela – raises several questions.

One is whether Paraguay really is a paragon of democracy that can lecture anyone about the rule of law.

The military dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner ruled Paraguay with U.S. financial and military support for nearly 35 years before being toppled by a palace coup in 1989. But Stroessner’s Colorado Party has continued to hold power ever since, with one brief exception between 2008 and 2013.

Peña, who joined the Colorado Party not long before his election in 2023, has vacillated on Stroessner’s record. At times he has condemned the general’s abuses – he had over 400 people murdered and “disappeared,” and tortured thousands more – while also praising him for bringing “stability” to a crisis-torn nation.

Analysts have in recent years described Paraguay as a “hybrid regime.” It has a more-or-less independent press and largely free elections – but the odds are firmly stacked in the Colorado Party’s favour through corruption, clientelism, and legal chicanery.

And ex-president Horacio Cartes (2013-18) – the leader of the Colorado Party, Peña’s patron, and the financial and political power behind his presidential sash – was only recently exonerated from U.S. sanctions.

The Biden administration accused him of leading a mass bribery campaign to shore up his anti-democratic control of Paraguayan politics. Cartes has denied any wrongdoing.

More far-reaching is the question of whether supporting a return to the era of powerful countries throwing their weight around in the Americas is really in Paraguay’s long-term interests.

It’s only a few generations ago that Paraguay was nearly wiped off the map by invaders. The 1864-70 War of the Triple Alliance saw Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil wipe out 90 percent of Paraguay’s male population, annex nearly half of its territory, and seize swathes of its natural resources: claiming all the while to be freeing the country from the “tyranny” of Francisco Solano López.

Constructing a web of institutions, norms and treaties to restrain the behemoths next door – and prevent such a cataclysmic conflict from ever happening again – has been the cornerstone of Paraguayan foreign policy ever since. If this culture of peaceful resolution of disputes breaks down, Paraguay could be left extremely vulnerable.

Argentina could throw up restrictions along the Paraguay-Paraná waterway, choking Paraguay’s access to two thirds of its foreign trade. China could ramp up its alleged cyberattacks on Paraguayan state institutions.

Brazil – which already wields nuclear-powered submarines, and has hundreds of thousands of dual nationals and descendants living in Paraguay’s eastern border regions – may conclude it now needs atomic weapons to defend its sovereignty: upending entirely the regional balance of power.

There are signs that Peña is trying to pull off this difficult balancing act – staying on Trump’s good side without abandoning international law and angering neighbours like Brazil, on whose cooperation for investment, trade, and energy Paraguay depends.

“I’m very worried about a military incursion on [Latin] American soil, and I’ve transmitted that concern to the U.S. government,” he told a press conference earlier this week. “I would rather it didn’t happen.”

“We would love for a peaceful solution to the conflict to be found,” he added, but that failing that “without doubt” a military incursion would take place.

As that prediction comes to pass, some in Paraguay are recalling the words of statesman Manuel Gondra (1871-1921), who helped rebuild the country from the ashes of invasion: “The just are not always strong, so we have strived to make it so the strong are always just.”