Al terminar sus estudios secundarios, viajó a São Paulo, centro financiero e industrial de Brasil que alberga cerca de 22 millones de personas, para trabajar en un taller de costura con el sueño de volver a Paraguay y estudiar ingeniería agronómica. Pero no imaginó que tendría que trabajar 14 horas diarias y se quedaría 17 años allá.

Evaristo Romero Troche es un hombre alto y de sonrisa fácil. Tiene el cabello corto y enrulado, con vastas entradas que delatan sus 42 años. Está sentado tomando tereré en una “silla cable” azul y viste una remera del Club Flamengo de Brasil. Entre las dos cejas, tiene una cicatriz en forma de X. Dice que, intentando bajar un machete que estaba en la viga del techo de paja de la casa original de su familia, se le cayó en la frente; tenía 5 años y solo quería tomar “takuare´e” —caña dulce—.

Evaristo lo cuenta en una amalgama de jopará —mezcla de guaraní y castellano hablada en Paraguay— sumado al portugués paulista, que pone en evidencia sus años en Brasil. En el barrio Costa Rosada, en las afueras de Caaguazú, una ciudad con 98 mil habitantes en el interior de Paraguay, Evaristo vive con su esposa, su hija y su mamá.

Recuerda que, los primeros cuatro años en Brasil, trabajó en los talleres de costura de peruanos, bolivianos y paraguayos. Nunca para los brasileños. Con el tiempo, compró algunas máquinas y abrió para su local. Había progresado y detrás de él se mudaron su pareja e hija, dos hermanos y una tía.

De esos inicios trabajando para otros, Evaristo conoció del negocio y vivió en carne propia las condiciones de trabajo en las oficinas de costura —como se dice en portugués—. Los empresarios alquilan casas donde los extranjeros viven y trabajan. Las habitaciones se dividen con terciadas o telas para que funcionen como piecitas colectivas. “En un lugar donde trabajaba, había un casal —una pareja— que tenía un beliche —litera—. Usaban la parte de arriba para colgar un cobertor o una sábana para cubrirse y encerrarse en la cama de abajo”, dice Evaristo.

Las jornadas laborales son extensas, de 7 de la mañana a 9 de la noche. Incluyen desayuno, almuerzo y merienda. “Solo mediodía del sábado y domingo lo que gastás”, explicó. Era “todo libre”.

Sin embargo, estas supuestas facilidades ocultan el nulo cumplimiento de derechos laborales. Los talleres textiles operan de forma ilegal, no exigen documentación y pagan en efectivo. Dependiendo del acuerdo de palabra, un trabajador puede cobrar por día, mes o producción. Evaristo, que es muy hábil, trabajaba por producción porque así ganaba más dinero. Junto a tres compañeros, llegó a sacar 1.000 reales en un día. De lo que ganaba, cada semana enviaba una parte a su mamá en Paraguay para que construyera su casa de material.

A pesar de las ventajas económicas alcanzadas por las altas cargas horarias de trabajo, las oficinas también ocultan otras irregularidades. De acuerdo con una investigación de Reporter Brasil de 2024, 192 paraguayos fueron rescatados de trabajos análogos a la esclavitud en Brasil entre 2010 y 2023. El 12 % de ellos trabajan en oficinas de costura, 33 % en fábricas ilegales de cigarrillos y 51 % en el sector agroganadero.

El reporte también reveló que fiscalizaciones estatales encontraron a madres amamantando a sus hijos mientras trabajaban en las máquinas de coser; sin ninguna posibilidad de tener permiso por maternidad. Además, por cumplir con tareas de cocina y limpieza, las mujeres sufrían descuentos en sus salarios por no alcanzar la productividad requerida por los patrones.

Evaristo vio todo esto y más: Niños paraguayos de 10 y 12 años que dejan sus estudios y viajan con sus familias para trabajar cosiendo ropa en las oficinas.

Viajar a Brasil para trabajar en un taller de costura es muy sencillo. En Facebook, si se busca “costurero paraguay são paulo”, saltan cientos de publicaciones que prometen trabajos en la industria textil en el eje financiero de Brasil. Durante la recolección de datos para este artículo, escribimos a uno de los números de WhatsApp que figura en un anuncio y logramos contactar con la dueña de una oficina. Nos prometió trabajo seguro; sin embargo, aconsejó que viajemos entre varios para alquilar una casa. En este caso, el esquema es diferente, la empresa no pone residencia ni alimentación. Tampoco seguridad social ni contratos formales.

Pero no todo es explotación y sufrimiento. En medio de la ciudad más grande de Sudamérica, los paraguayos se reúnen en comunidad los fines de semana para hacer asado y jugar al fútbol. Esa unidad se vio reflejada en 2014, año en el que Paraguay no clasificó a la Copa del Mundo de Fútbol que se jugaría en Brasil. Evaristo y sus compañeros de oficina vistieron la casaca albirroja y conformaron la selección paraguaya que compitió en la Copa de los Refugiados, un torneo paralelo que congregó a selecciones de varios países, como Siria, Haití y Congo.

A diciembre de 2025, datos oficiales registran 56.648 paraguayos residentes en Brasil, de acuerdo con datos del Ministerio de Justicia y Seguridad Pública reportados por el periodista Pedro Prata de Estadão Verifica. De alguna manera, en la Copa de los Refugiados, los costureros representaron a todos esos paraguayos que viven en la tierra de Pelé.

Evaristo trabajó mucho. Quizás demasiado. Pero su objetivo era claro: progresar para dar un mejor futuro para su familia. “Che ndaipotái la che ahasa´akue ha´e ohasá” —no quiero que ella pase por lo que yo pasé—, dijo en guaraní refiriéndose a su hija que está estudiando enfermería en una universidad privada de Caaguazú. Lo dijo sin arrepentimiento; está agradecido por todo lo vivido en Brasil. Ahora anhela que en Paraguay existan más oportunidades de trabajo y salarios dignos para las familias.

Bajo la sombra de un árbol frente a la casa de su mamá, Evaristo recuerda que antes jugaba todas las tardes en la canchita de su barrio. “No hay más gente para jugar piki por acá ahora. Solo al final de año hay bastante, más ahora ya no. Todo el mundo se fue a trabajar a Brasil, Argentina, España, Chile y Uruguay”.

Al otro lado de la calle de tierra que pasa frente a la casa de su mamá, la casita de madera del vecino de enfrente está trancada con candado. Ellos también migraron para trabajar.

Este perfil forma parte de ¿Bienvenidos al paraíso?, una crónica de migración a y desde Paraguay realizada por The Paraguay Post:

“Ojalá que este presidente de aquí y ahorita esta presidenta (Delcy) Rodríguez puedan abrir la embajada en Paraguay. Porque hay muchísimas mujeres aquí que tienen sus hijos en Venezuela y querían traer este año y no pueden ahora por esta situación”, dice Yexis Guzmán, venezolana refugiada en Paraguay hace más de 5 años.

A principios de enero de 2026, luego del ataque de Estados Unidos a Venezuela y el secuestro de Nicolás Maduro, el gobierno paraguayo, alineado con la doctrina “Donroe”, aumentó los controles migratorios a venezolanos a través de un decreto. Venezolanos sin visa no pueden ingresar más al país por una cuestión de “seguridad” contra simpatizantes del régimen madurista.

Yexis, que llegó a Paraguay en búsqueda de una mejor vida para su familia, no está de acuerdo con la decisión del presidente Santiago Peña. Ella forma parte de los 3 mil venezolanos viven en Paraguay, según la Dirección Nacional de Migraciones.

Hace 10 años tuvo que dejar Venezuela y comenzó a migrar. Vivió en Colombia, Ecuador, Perú y, finalmente, Paraguay. En cada país trabajó en cocina. En Perú estuvo más de tres años, pero no aguantó la discriminación, la xenofobia, el machismo y la misoginia. Entonces decidió mudarse a Paraguay.

“El viaje para mí fue fatal”, dice Yexis. Salió de Perú en ómnibus el 18 de noviembre de 2020 con cuatro maletas en brazo, en la lancha de contrabandistas, cruzó el Lago Titicaca, frontera entre Perú y Bolivia, y llegó caminando al límite entre Bolivia y Paraguay el 10 de diciembre. En la frontera, oficiales de la Aduana boliviana le dijeron que no podía cruzar sin prueba de Covid. Llevaba días sin comer y le ardían la planta de sus pies. Pero la bondad se encuentra en todas partes, funcionarios de Migraciones la acogieron, le dieron una pieza y le prestaron una cocina. Yexis comenzó a cocinar para funcionarios y camioneros; así juntó el dinero para su test de COVID.

Con el aventón de una familia en vehículo, atravesó el Chaco paraguayo y llegó el 21 de diciembre de 2020 a la ciudad de San Lorenzo, Paraguay, donde un hermano suyo, que se había mudado antes, la esperaba. Al día siguiente, volvió a cocinar y salió a vender hallacas, una comida típica venezolana para las navidades. Juntó un poco de dinero y mandó a sus hijos en Venezuela para la cena de Navidad.

De 2018 a 2025, se estima que casi 7 millones de venezolanos han dejado el país, de acuerdo con la Plataforma de Coordinación Interagencial para Refugiados y Migrantes de Venezuela. Como la cifra se basa en datos oficiales, es probable que el número sea mucho mayor y ronde los 8 a 9 millones de exiliados.

Yexis tiene unos 40 años, las manos y boca pequeña, y los cabellos en largas trenzas africanas. Nunca titubea. Hoy, vive en la ciudad de Capiatá, en los alrededores de Asunción, capital de Paraguay. Las paredes de la casita son blancas, el piso es de ladrillo común y enfrente hay un antiguo pozo y un pesebre. En el patio, bajo la sombra fresca de los dos enormes árboles de mango, funciona Gastronomía Porteña, su restaurante de comidas típicas de los puertos venezolanos.

“Mira, agradecida con mi abuela que me enseñó a cocinar y con mis tías que me enseñaron muchos platillos”.

Aunque la cocina ha sido lo que le permitió sobrevivir en todos los países donde vivió, la verdadera profesión de Yexis es la herrería. En Venezuela trabajó 17 años en la estatal Diques y Astilleros Nacionales de Venezuela (Dianca). “Así se llama mi astillero y ese es mi astillero”.

En Venezuela, vivía con su familia en El Palito, un pueblito costero de Puerto Cabello donde las playas tienen arena blanca y el mar es azul, tranquilo, con aguas tibias. Allá en El Palito, la base de la comida era el pescado y los frutos de mar.

Hace unos cuatro años, juntó el dinero suficiente para enviarlo a su hijo Kevin para que viajara. Él tenía solo 16 años y cruzó solito Latinoamérica en ómnibus hasta Paraguay. Juntos abrieron el restaurante Gastronomía Porteña, Yexis se encarga de los platillos y Kevin hace atención al cliente y gestión de redes sociales.

Kevin es joven y tiene mucha energía. Es boxeador aficionado, crea contenido humorístico en Instagram y TikTok, y quiere tener un podcast en stream sobre liderazgo y superación. En su brazo derecho, tiene un tatuaje con las playas de Venezuela. Para él y su mamá, Gastronomía porteña es un lugar de encuentro, no solo para venezolanos, sino para migrantes de distintos países: Colombia, Argentina, Cuba y Ecuador.

Paraguay es un país sin litoral y su culinaria está basada en la carne vacuna y de pollo. Pero en los inicios del restaurante, Yexis se encontró con el poder que tiene la cocina para aquellos que extrañan volver a su tierra. Un fin de semana, preparó una torta de Jojoto, un postre de maíz típico de Venezuela, y le invitó a un cliente que había ido a pasar la tarde.

“Le di un pedazo al señor para que degustara. Y me dice llorando: “Mire, mi abuela murió hace más de 25 años y este sabor me hizo recordar toda mi niñez en Venezuela. Yo tenía más de 25 años que no he probado esta torta de Jojota””.

Aunque ahora la vida está más encaminada, cuando Yexis recién llegó a Paraguay, tuvo una experiencia difícil. En 2021, consiguió un trabajo como encargada de cocina en el Hotel Aspen de Asunción. Pero renunció al tercer mes de trabajo. “Fue lo peor, por el trato, el abuso, la explotación. Retuvieron mis documentos y me quedé sin ellos”.

Trabajaba de 6 de la mañana a 11 de la noche, dormía en una piecita detrás de la recepción y el dueño retenía los celulares de ella y sus compañeras para que no se comuniquen. Cuando renunció, le amenazaron con una demanda. Hasta ahora no le devolvieron sus documentos venezolanos originales. The Paraguay Post intentó contactar al Hotel Aspen vía correo electrónico, WhatsApp y llamadas, pero al cierre de esta publicación no obtuvo respuestas.

Todo esto llevó a que fundara la Feria de Venezolanos Qué Chevere, una asociación que asesora a venezolanos con sus documentaciones y organiza ferias gastronómicas y de artesanía en las plazas de Asunción.

Son como las 8 de la noche y han pasado unas 4 horas de entrevista. Antes de terminar, Yexis cuenta que su familia también sufrió las injusticias del régimen madurista tras las cuestionadas elecciones de 2024. Un familiar suyo fue encarcelado y torturado por publicar un meme sobre Maduro. En enero de este año, luego del bombardeo de Estados Unidos, su familiar fue liberado junto a otros presos políticos.

A pesar de tener una vida hecha en Paraguay, Yexis ve con esperanzas lo sucedido y quiere volver a Venezuela. “Me hace falta mi casa”.

Este perfil forma parte de ¿Bienvenidos al paraíso?, una crónica de migración a y desde Paraguay realizada por The Paraguay Post:

TOP STORY

Camilo Crowned Cartista Candidate

By Daniel Duarte Braga

Paraguay’s municipal primaries delivered a blunt message on Sunday: the Colorado Party is not just alive and kicking, but overwhelmingly loyal to former president (2013-18) and party boss Horacio Cartes.

Camilo Pérez — the sports executive picked by Cartes and his Honor Colorado faction to run for mayor of Asunción — won the ruling-party primary with ease, beating former mayor Arnaldo Samaniego by nearly 38,000 votes.

Pérez, president of the Paraguayan Olympic Committee and a member of the International Olympic Committee, took more than 81,000 votes or 61 percent — a striking haul for a candidate who entered the political arena a few months ago.

The result gives the Colorados their candidate for the October 4 municipal election in the capital, where Pérez will face Soledad Núñez, the former housing minister chosen by the opposition alliance Unidos por Asunción.

But rather than Pérez, the bigger story is the machine behind him.

More than 132,000 Colorado voters turned out in Asunción alone. That’s higher than the eventual vote total with which disgraced former mayor Óscar “Nenecho” Rodríguez won city hall in 2021. Honor Colorado also dominated the race for the municipal board, with its lists capturing roughly 70 percent of the ANR council vote in the capital.

The Colorado opposition, which included figures aligned with former president Mario Abdo Benítez and senator Lilian Samaniego, managed a respectable but politically insufficient showing. Samaniego quickly accepted defeat and said he would back Lista 1, while reminding the Cartistas that their camp still represented 43,000 votes. That was about as much rebellion allowed by the abrazo republicano, the Colorados’ traditional post-primary unity pact.

Raúl Latorre, president of the Chamber of Deputies and Pérez’s campaign chief, moved fast to declare unity. In less than 24 hours, both camps agreed to rally behind a single candidate in Asunción. Basilio “Bachi” Núñez, the Senate president and leading Honor Colorado enforcer, said HC won in 241 out of Paraguay’s 263 municipalities, strengthening Cartes’s hold over the party nationwide.

Honor Colorado swept most key cities, including much of the population-dense Central department. In several districts, like San Lorenzo, the real race was not between cartismo and dissidents, but between two candidates carrying the HC brand. The old Colorado habit of internal competition has not disappeared; it has simply migrated inside the dominant faction.

As for the opposition, the Liberal Party elected new authorities besides municipal candidates. Alcides Riveros, the outgoing mayor of Fernando de la Mora, won the presidency of the Liberal Party by a large margin. His victory strengthens the Nuevo Liberalismo faction led by Central governor Ricardo Estigarribia, the 2028 presidential hopeful who is trying to rebuild the PLRA. Dionisio Amarilla, the liberal senator seen as close to Honor Colorado, finished far behind.

Minor opposition parties also held primaries on Sunday, but without major surprises. Núñez’s candidacy had already been agreed upon by the coalition and was formally ratified under the Patria Querida banner, while the alliance also settled on a single joint list of council candidates.

The primaries were not short on local colour. Indigenous voters were, again, rounded up and transported to Fuerte Olimpo, the Tomáraho slept on the floor of a municipal shed before voting. Prosecutors reported a dozen arrests and described schemes including tiny cameras and voters being placed in wheelchairs to allow for “assisted” (i.e., controlled) voting.

In Alto Paraguay, voters and party operators openly discussed payments of 200,000 to 300,000 guaraníes. An influencer and his mother were arrested for flaunting a wad of bills at a voting station. A Luque council candidate was in preventive detention for money laundering while his name remained on the ballot.

Sleazy shenanigans aside, the core result is hard to miss. The ANR mobilised. Honor Colorado consolidated. Party dissidents wilted. And the opposition now has a much clearer picture of the wall it needs to climb in October.

THE POST TAKE

For Soledad Núñez, Sunday’s result complicates the script.

Her campaign was built around the idea that Asunción might be ready for a technocratic reset after years of municipal dysfunction, corruption scandals, unpaid bills, potholed roads, broken sidewalks, collapsing waste services, left by Nenecho. The hope was that a clean, managerial, nontraditional profile could win not only the usual opposition vote but also Colorados fed up with grubby machine politics.

Honor Colorado seems to have read the same memo. Pérez is not a ward boss, senator, or mayoral retread. He is a sports administrator with a résumé built around the Olympic movement and the successful hosting of major events. In other words, cartismo has chosen to fight Sole with a Sole-adjacent profile: technical, managerial, outside the usual municipal swamp — but plugged into the most powerful party structure in the country.

That matters because Núñez cannot win Asunción by uniting the opposition alone. She needs politically homeless voters, non-cartista Colorados, and people who dislike the ANR’s municipal record but are not ideologically opposed to the party. Pérez’s victory suggests Honor Colorado will try to muscle into that lane.

The numbers are sobering. The ANR’s roughly 132,000 voters in an internal contest are not a guaranteed ceiling for October, but they are a real mobilization floor. They also show that cartismo can still turn out its base even after Nenecho and the city’s finances became a national punchline.

Historically, Colorado primaries were the great internal watershed: the moment that revealed the opposition inside the party. Sunday suggests that era is fading. In today’s ANR, winning the general election increasingly means taking all the internal machinery, too. Honor Colorado is not just the ruling faction inside the Colorado Party but also the party’s operating system. Cartes himself seems to have bounced back from a mini-stroke earlier this year, noticeably slimmer but still trading barbs with the press.

One strategically useful result for the opposition came in Ciudad del Este, where the Zacarías dynasty lost ground. That matters because CDE remains Miguel Prieto’s national launchpad and the only major urban arena where the Colorados have recently been beaten.

Inside the PLRA, Nuevo Liberalismo’s victory strengthens Estigarribia and with it the argument that a Liberal should lead the 2028 presidential ticket. That may be good for rebuilding the PLRA’s self-esteem. It may be less useful for opposition unity: the PLRA is running its own council board list. And while Prieto, Estigarribia, Soledad, Kattya González, and other anti-cartista figures can all agree that the Colorados should go, they are much less likely to agree on who gets to drive.

October will test whether Asunción is genuinely ready to break with Colorado rule, or whether anti-Nenecho outrage has already been absorbed by a refreshed cartista brand. But 2028 is the larger prize.

The ANR emerged from Sunday looking more centralized, more disciplined, and even more under Cartes’s thumb. The opposition emerged with some promising municipal footholds but also the same old question: unity behind whom?

You’re reading The Weekly Post, your essential briefing on Paraguay.

Also in this issue:

Court blocks Kattya comeback · EPP hostage reappears · Paraguay’s next banking crisis? · Warning over bogus PhDs · La Albirroja prepare for World Cup glory · Starlink comes to schools · Smuggling weight-loss drugs · ATOME hiccup

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Mysterious Bolsonaro ads stoke patriotic backlash

Residents of Ciudad del Este reacted with fury on Friday morning after billboards along the Paraguayan border city’s main avenue displayed an AI-generated poster of Jair Bolsonaro mocking Paraguay.

An angry crowd tore down at least one of the adverts, which depicted the former Brazilian president aiming a punch at a bloodied, hunched-over Paraguayan football player resembling defender Gustavo Gómez.

“This is Brazil!” read Bolsonaro’s speech bubble: “Show some respect!”

A caption meanwhile boasted of Brazil’s diplomatic, economic and sporting prowess, predicting the country would take home its sixth FIFA World Cup this July.

As videos of the incidents went viral, top Paraguayan politicians demanded an explanation.

“We deplore the offensive billboards”, Paraguay’s conservative president, Santiago Peña, wrote on social media. “These kinds of actions don’t contribute to the understanding nor respect that should prevail between peoples.”

He suggested Paraguay’s current economic success — the country’s GDP grew by nearly 7% last year, compared to 2.3% in Brazil — is “making some people uncomfortable.”

Peña said the electronic billboards had been illegally erected on a public highway, and that he had ordered them to be taken down.

Flávio Bolsonaro, the son and political heir of the right-wing former leader, replied to Peña’s messages on X.

“I vehemently repudiate the criminal use of my father Jair Bolsonaro’s image to assault Gustavo Gómez and provoke the Paraguayan people,” he wrote.

Gómez is one of the “greatest active centre-backs in Brazilian football”, the senator continued. He noted that the Paraguayan plays for São Paulo club Palmeiras — “the team closest to my father’s heart.”

“May the Paraguayan authorities hold the perpetrators of this unacceptable aggression accountable,” concluded Bolsonaro junior, the leading opposition candidate in Brazil’s election this October.

It wasn’t immediately clear who had broadcast the inflammatory images along the main shopping street of Ciudad del Este, metres from the cross-border bridge to Brazil.

Pro-government press, politicians, and commentators claimed the local city council — which is loyal to former mayor Miguel Prieto, Paraguay’s leading opposition figure — was responsible for authorising the advertisements.

In a statement, Ciudad del Este city hall noted that the billboards stand on a strip of highway owned by the national public works ministry (MOPC), and said it would demand an explanation from those responsible.

A local PR chamber suggested the electronic billboards had been hacked.

Aldo Barrios, a regional councillor and Prieto ally, was filmed using a set of pliers to cut the wires to the overhead LED screens.

“Sorted,” he told his social media followers. “Not all Brazilians would do this, this is just one son of a b****.”

Barrios denied his party was to blame and accused the MOPC of striking a “dirty deal” to put up the adverts.

“How do they not expect people not to react?” he asked, as a cheering mob stamped on one of the dismantled screens.

THE POST TAKE

To understand why the crude cartoons caused an international scandal, it helps to know a little of the painful history between Brazil and Paraguay.

For centuries, Portuguese-speaking raiders from São Paulo rampaged over the hazy frontier into colonial Paraguay, attacking its Jesuit missions and enslaving Indigenous tribes.

During the Triple Alliance War (1864–70), Brazil’s invading armies helped wipe out half of Paraguay’s population, killed the president, seized chunks of Paraguay’s territory, looted the capital — and occupied Asunción for seven years.

The twentieth century saw Brazil’s military dictatorship strongarm Paraguayan despot Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89) into allowing a monumental infrastructure project to be built across the Paraná River.

The Binational Itaipú Dam submerged a set of waterfalls greater than Niagara, uprooted dozens of native villages, provided Brazil’s factories with cheap power for decades and imprinted a legacy of kickbacks and corruption in Paraguay.

Since then, some 250,000 Brazilians have settled in Paraguay: especially in eastern border departments, where many locals speak a mix of Portuguese, Spanish and native dialect Guaraní.

Following an espionage scandal involving Itaipú last year, relations between Peña and Lula have turned frosty. Paraguay has signed a military cooperation deal with the US, while Brazil’s president Lula has criticised Trump’s interventions across Latin America.

Community relations today are mixed. Many Brazilian migrants are students: especially would-be doctors and lawyers in search of quicker and easier degrees. But many brasiguayo farmers have drawn criticism for displacing Paraguayan smallholders, cutting down forests, and spraying chemicals.

“They’re creating a country within our country,” Paraguayan campesino leader Tomás Zayas recently told The Paraguay Post, referring to the Brazilian colonists. “This is a time bomb that at some point is going to explode.”

The numbers are rocketing, with over 20,000 Brazilians flocking to Paraguay in 2025 alone.

Many of those queuing up overnight in Ciudad del Este to get their residency papers with MigraMóvil, a mobile government immigration service, bemoan Brazil’s high tax burden and left-wing government — and describe Paraguay as something like the promised land.

Some have speculated the incendiary billboards were a false flag: an attempt by leftists to stoke nationalistic rivalry and turn public opinion against this latest wave of settlers.

Others think the ads could be a dead cat: an attempt to distract attention from the latest dodgy manoeuvres involving the Zacarías clan, a local family enmeshed with Paraguay’s ruling Colorado Party and cushy jobs at Itaipú.

Of course, it’s possible that a disgruntled Brazilian simply decided to lord it over Paraguay through the power of public advertising.

Yet the speed with which pro-government press, influencers, and Colorado top dogs sought to pin the blame on CDE city hall suggests a ham-fisted attempt to smear Prieto and his party as antipatriotic mercenaries.

The charismatic former mayor currently polls at 45% approval — compared to a dismal 17% for Peña’s heir apparent, vice-president Pedro Alliana — and officials are now openly panicking that he could unseat the Colorados in 2028.

An ABC Color investigation has recently linked former Peña administration officials to a dirty digital campaign — conducted via a shady Colombian ad agency — that targeted independent journalists and public figures.

Despite a recent probe finding no evidence of wrongdoing, Peña is also facing renewed questions over why his declared wealth skyrocketed by 1600% over six years to reach more than $3m when he became president in 2023.

And with just days to go until party primaries on Sunday ahead of local elections this October, many will be hoping for a distraction from the negative headlines.

To adapt cui bono, the age-old investigator’s question: who benefits from the billboards?

You’re reading The Weekly Post, your essential briefing on Paraguay.

Also in this issue: Could the US launch strikes in Paraguay? · Minister admits delays to deficit target · Paraguayan tennis star in sexism scandal · World Cup fever grips Paraguay · New US ambassador named · Mr Beast pilot in marijuana bust · Journalists slam “dangerous rhetoric” by Peña · Guarani pop album launched

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TOP STORY

Beautiful game, dirty money

Believe it or not, one of the most powerful men in world football is Paraguayan.

Alejandro Domínguez is not just president of CONMEBOL — the South American football confederation headquartered in Luque, just outside the Paraguayan capital, Asunción. He is also a vice-president of international soccer body FIFA and a central figure in the global game as the 2026 World Cup approaches.

That makes the latest allegations against him more than just a sports story. According to The New York Times, a FIFA whistleblower has accused Domínguez and another senior CONMEBOL official of pocketing more than $5m from money recovered after FIFAgate, a 2015 corruption scandal.

Domínguez has not been found guilty of wrongdoing; the procedural status of the complaint is unclear. But the allegation is not exactly surprising in a country where football, money, and power are even more tightly entwined than most.

In Paraguay, football clubs are prestige machines, political springboards, cosy business associations — and, at times, vehicles for laundering money and influence.

Start with Domínguez’s family. His father, Julio Osvaldo Domínguez Dibb — better known as ODD — was the legendary boss of Club Olimpia, Paraguay’s most decorated club. Under his long tenure, the magpie-striped Asunción side won three Copa Libertadores titles and the 1979 Intercontinental Cup.

Prior to their victory in the 2002 Libertadores final, according to Olimpia captain Julio Enciso, Domínguez Dibb flashed him a briefcase containing an estimated $300,000 in cash as an incentive to bring home the trophy. “With him, there were no signatures — you shook his hand,” Enciso later told local TV.

ODD was also a wealthy tobacco magnate — a counterfeiter, according to Brazilian police — and Colorado Party strongman who ran in the party’s 2002 presidential primaries and briefly presided over the ANR in 2008.

Alejandro Domínguez seamlessly followed in his father’s footsteps.

Before taking over CONMEBOL in 2016, he went from Olimpia board member to vice-president and then president of the Paraguayan Football Association. He also ran Grupo Nación de Comunicaciones, a media group founded by his father that included La Nación, Crónica, and Radio 970 AM. In 2015, Sarah Cartes, sister of then-president Horacio Cartes, acquired the group.

If the Domínguez Dibb story shows how football, media, and party politics often overlap, Horacio Cartes shows how far that combination can go. Before becoming president of Paraguay (2013-18), and later president of the Colorado Party (2023–), Cartes ran Club Libertad, one of Asunción’s major teams.

Like ODD, he made his fortune by churning out cheap cigarettes that have a strange habit of turning up all over Latin America without paying taxes. (Cartes’s representatives deny any wrongdoing, and say it’s not his responsibility what happens to his smokes once they leave the factory).

Cerro Porteño, Olimpia’s great rival, has also provided a springboard into politics. Abraham Zapag, a longtime financier of the opposition PLRA party and a presidential candidate in 1993, took over the club in the 1970s; his sons later filled his shoes. The wider Zapag Group is a major family conglomerate active in fuel distribution, river logistics, real estate — and now cellulose pulp, as the local partner of the Paracel project.

Cerro is now headed by Blas Reguera, grandson of the late Colorado caudillo Blas Riquelme, who was once also at the club’s helm. Another former Cerro president is sitting Colorado senator Luis Pettengill. President Mario Abdo Benítez (2018-23), Peña’s predecessor, even considered a run for Cerro’s leadership after leaving office.

That local pattern — football as a nexus to prestige, influence, and serious piles of cash — has a continental and global version.

In 2015, US prosecutors accused FIFA officials and marketing executives of netting more than $150m in bribes and kickbacks tied to broadcasting and marketing rights. The scandal helped bring down FIFA president Sepp Blatter and exposed CONMEBOL as one of the rotten cores of world football.

Paraguay was central to that story as home to two of the most prominent executives convicted in FIFAgate.

Juan Ángel Napout — a former Cerro Porteño, Paraguayan Football Association, and CONMEBOL president — was convicted and sentenced in 2018 to nine years in prison in the United States.

Nicolás Leoz, Napout’s predecessor and the long-serving Paraguayan boss of CONMEBOL, was also indicted by US authorities, but died in 2019 before his case went to trial.

After the scandal came the cleanup — and with it, a new fight over the money. CONMEBOL sought to recover the cash siphoned off by former bosses, including Leoz. But the new FIFA ethics complaint reported by the Times alleges that Domínguez and another official received undue bonuses from those funds.

And in Paraguay, the Leoz money trail is currently pitting two powerful economic groups against each other. On the one side, Domínguez and media aligned with Horacio Cartes. On the other, Banco Atlas, newspaper ABC Color, and their owners, the Zuccolillo business group.

THE POST TAKE

In Paraguay, football is rarely just football.

That may sound like a cliché in South America, where the sport is treated more like a religion. But in Paraguay, soccer clubs represent an unusual combination of social venues, business networks, campaign stages, prestige brands, and mass-contact platforms. Where political parties are distrusted, club loyalties can last generations.

For elite families, a football club offers something money alone cannot buy: popular legitimacy. A club president handing out trophies, signing strikers, and promising fans glory looks like a patron. That matters in a political culture where patronage is a key feature. Meanwhile, gangs of football ultras known as barras bravas often work as hired muscle during protests and organisers at election time.

The same logic helps explain why sports administrators keep turning up in politics. President Santiago Peña recently considered offering Domínguez a presidential bid in 2028. Another name in the hat to succeed Peña was Robert Harrison, from Club Nacional and the current Paraguayan Football Association boss. Camilo Pérez, the head of the Paraguayan Olympic Committee, has been tapped by Cartes’s Honor Colorado faction for the Asunción mayoral race.

Organized crime also has its uses for Paraguayan football. Sebastián Marset, the Uruguayan cocaine trafficker now in U.S. custody, famously bought — and played for — Deportivo Capiatá. Erico Galeano, the Colorado ex-senator tied to the same club, was convicted this year of collaborating with Marset’s criminal organization. Judges considered it proven that Galeano invested more than $1.6m of dirty money in Deportivo Capiatá.

The larger warning behind the Domínguez story is that FIFAgate was supposed to be a cleansing fire. CONMEBOL presented itself after 2015 as a reformed institution recovering stolen money and restoring credibility with new figures like Domínguez. Now, a whistleblower complaint reportedly alleges that recovered funds may have themselves been creamed off by current officials.

There’s a Paraguayan twist to the tale. Banco Atlas is currently being prosecuted in Paraguay for handling funds linked to Nicolás Leoz through trusts and certificates of deposit (CDA) after the FIFA scandal broke.

ABC Color claims that Domínguez and CONMEBOL are using the late Leoz and corrupt prosecutors to target Atlas — part of the Zuccolillo business group that also owns ABC — to punish the paper for investigating Domínguez.

The Cartes media ecosystem has backed CONMEBOL’s attack against Atlas, covering the case almost daily. CONMEBOL says the case is about alleged money laundering, not press freedom; Domínguez has emphasised that the accused are bankers, not journalists.

In a healthier institutional setting, those questions might be separated by independent courts, regulators and referees. In Paraguay, they collapse into the same scrum: a mix of corruption case, media war, and punch-up between rival power blocs.

For a country that sells itself as stable and business-friendly, the CONMEBOL saga is a reminder that in Paraguay, power rarely pools in Congress, the Central Bank — or even Mburuvicha Róga, the presidential residence.

To see where real influence lies, watch the football clubs: who funds them, who runs them, and who sits in the presidential box. The pitch is often where Paraguay reveals its true colours.

You’re reading The Weekly Post, your essential briefing on Paraguay.

Also in this issue: Prieto panic sets in · Paracel breaks ground · Argentine factories look north · Meat-packer feels financial squeeze · Paraguay’s new migration trends · Ysanne Gayet: 50 years in the arts · Trump’s anti-terror units · Indigenous candidate murdered

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TOP STORY

Paraguay plans its answer to Disney World

– By Laurence Blair

Some 1.5 billion people worldwide took trips abroad in 2025, contributing to an international tourism industry worth 11.6 trillion dollars.

But only 3.5 million made it to Paraguay: barely 0.2% of the global total. A little under half were day-trippers, mainly from Argentina and Brazil.

And where a record 1.5m people visited Cristo Redentor last year, and 1.6m flocked to Machu Picchu, Paraguay’s stand-out sights — its 18th-century Jesuit missions and the Itaipú hydroelectric dam — typically get a handful of visitors per day.

This might be about to change. Late last month, the new head of Senatur, the national tourism secretariat, unveiled an ambitious objective for Paraguay to host 10 million visitors a year by 2037.

Jacinto Santa María told local press that the president, Santiago Peña, has instructed him to “transform Paraguay into a world-class tourist destination.”

“We need to take an exponential leap in our efforts to encourage the benefits that tourism can generate,” Santa María added, mentioning the industry’s positive impact on economic growth and job creation.

And the Peña administration has recently announced an Investor Pass that offers fast-tracked residency for foreigners investing $150,000 in the local tourist industry.

There are signs that the world is starting to wake up to Paraguay’s potential as a travel and leisure location.

Last year saw a record number of both tourist arrivals and residency applications. Some 90,000 foreigners are forecast to formally relocate here in 2026.

The country is betting big on event tourism, hosting an eclectic mix of festivals and sporting competitions: including a leg of the World Rally Championship in August and the World Skate Games in October.

The South American Bird Fair, due to be held at the Centro Cultural del Puerto in Asunción in September, will also shine a spotlight on sub-tropical Paraguay’s 700 avian species: from the flamboyant bell bird to the expertly camouflaged urutaú.

Paraguay’s simple-yet-succulent cuisine — heavy on river fish, corn-based soufflés, and barbecued beef — has so far failed to draw international acclaim like Central in Lima or D.O.M. in São Paulo.

But The Paraguay Post can reveal that a senior representative of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants is visiting top Asunción spots like Óga and Cocina Clandestina this week — and is impressed by what she’s found.

The crowds cramming into downtown Asunción last week for the country’s Independence celebrations — 120,000 people reportedly attended — demonstrates how locals are also hungry for civic events, concerts, and shared cultural experiences.

Taken all together, Paraguay’s travel and tourism industry contributed an estimated 6.5% of GDP and 264,000 jobs in 2025.

Still, the authorities may struggle to convince millions more people to come and spend their hard-earned tourist dollars in faraway Paraguay: currently the only South American nation with no direct flights to the United States.

Recent talks to resurrect the Asunción-Miami route have so far failed to produce results: even as the Peña administration has reportedly offered American Airlines and Brazilian carrier GOL bungs of more than $3m per year.

Citizens of India and China — the world’s most populous nations, and increasingly big spenders overseas — have to apply for visas and secure a local letter of recommendation to even set foot in Paraguay.

The gringo backpacker trail usually misses the country altogether, running down the Andes from Colombia and Peru to Chile — sometimes detouring to Bolivia — before hopping over to Buenos Aires or Rio.

And even industry officials are downbeat about Paraguay’s prospects of entering the Bucket List big leagues in the short run.

“Paraguay still isn’t a touristic icon that demands your attention,” Santa María admitted. “We don’t have any striking landmarks like Machu Picchu or a world-class beach. So we’ll have to create one.”

THE POST TAKE

Paraguay has a public image problem.

Not many people know about it. Those that do often associate it with corruption and crime. This, despite Paraguay being one of Latin America’s safest countries.

The perception gap isn’t always helped by us journalists, for whom the occasional shootout or attempted coup are easier to pitch to editors than “things are pretty chill here.”

Over the years, I’ve tried to do my bit to counteract the stereotypes: penning a profile of Paraguay as one of the Lonely Planet’s Top 10 Countries to visit last year, and writing several guides to Asunción.

I’ve also reviewed the city’s best restaurants in these pages, and scored the capital a spot in the “36 Hours In…” segment for The New York Times — as well as a front-page Times feature on one of Paraguay’s most beloved gastronomic brands.

But sadly, it’s not always clear that officials understand what makes Paraguay so special.

Santa María, the Senatur boss, cited Orlando as a destination to emulate. He said Paraguay should attract investors willing to create huge theme parks to lure in Brazilian tourists who might otherwise go to Florida.

“When a park the size of a Disney or something similar starts being built, there is no turning back,” he elaborated to EFE last week.

Whether Paraguay can or should try to go up against the Magic Kingdom (Guaraní World or López Land, anyone?) is debatable.

And if Paraguay wants to attract more wealthy eco-tourists and birders like Colombia or Costa Rica, opening up the Chaco’s biodiverse national parks to mining and drilling — as members of the ruling Colorado Party have repeatedly proposed — probably isn’t a step in the right direction.

More promising are plans to work with Argentina and Brazil to set up a trinational tourist circuit in the Triple Border area.

Visitors to Iguazú Falls currently have to handle traffic-clogged border crossings, multiple buses and taxis, and separate entry fees for the Argentine and Brazilian sides. Few of those that hop over into Paraguay make it beyond Ciudad del Este’s duty-free shopping malls.

A trinational tourist pass — perhaps incorporating the existing passenger ferry between Presidente Franco and Puerto Yguazú — could make it easier to take in the falls, lesser cascades in Paraguay that get a fraction of the visitors, and the Jesuit ruins on both sides of the Paraná River.

Establishing routes like this will need improvements to Paraguay’s inter-city buses, which often move at a glacial pace, picking up passengers on every corner. One positive example is Peru Hop, a long-distance coach service that shuttles from Lima to Cusco with stops at key attractions along the way.

It will also require some serious investment in visitor facilities.

At Saltos del Monday — a stunning, 45-metre torrent just south of Ciudad del Este — tourists are currently treated to the smell of burgers sizzling on a grill just meters from the roaring drop.

Then, they descend through a cloud of water vapour to the base of the falls in a rusty elevator whose exposed wiring occasionally sparks.

Perhaps the most exciting project underway is a plan to create a national cycling and walking trail along Paraguay’s disused steam railway.

Pushed forward by non-profits and private philanthropy, the 420km route between Asunción and Encarnación takes in picturesque pueblos with grand old train stations. Volunteers have cleared vegetation off the tracks with machetes and rebuilt collapsed bridges over creeks.

While currently limited to a pilot stage, the Sendas project holds huge potential to spread the benefits of tourism among local communities. A network of homestay bed-and-breakfasts, like Cuba’s casas particulares, could be a good complement.

The pedal-based plan plays to Paraguay’s strengths: its rolling green landscapes, its charmingly time-worn towns, and its people, who surely rank among the friendliest and most hospitable in the world.

You’re reading The Weekly Post, your essential briefing on Paraguay.

Also in this issue: Bolivia crisis deepens · A DEA murder plot? · Q1 growth bounce · Re-election via the back door? · Maquila manufacturing boom · Peter Thiel in Paraguay · Stroessner’s fall in comic form · Narco chic · Ducks ‘n’ drivers

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TOP STORY

Paraguay sidelines Bitcoin — and announces “the world’s largest” AI hub

Paraguay is now the fourth-biggest Bitcoin mining jurisdiction in the world. So why are its largest crypto operations changing trades or packing up altogether?

According to a new survey of the local industry by Hashrate Index, Paraguay accounts for roughly 4.3% of global Bitcoin computing power: behind only the U.S., Russia, and China. It’s an incredible stat when you consider Paraguay’s comparatively tiny size.

The country’s attraction for miners is obvious: a 100% renewable electricity grid anchored by the Itaipú and Yacyretá dams, shared with Brazil and Argentina respectively. Paraguay’s half of Itaipú alone represents 7,000 MW of installed capacity — far more than the country has historically been able to consume, meaning power prices have long been among the region’s cheapest.

But the digital gold rush is entering a trickier, more expensive phase. In 2021-2, miners could reportedly secure electricity at an industrial rate of around $0.03/kWh. Medium-tension rates have since doubled, while Paraguay’s state electricity firm ANDE has imposed steep guarantee deposits: 40 MW operators have to set aside $4.5m before they can plug in. And the price of Bitcoin itself has also plunged in the past six months.

The result for Paraguay’s Bitcoin industry is not collapse but consolidation. ANDE expects crypto mining to bring in $350m in tariffs this year, up from $295m collected in 2025 and $100m in 2024. Yet the number of legal operators has nearly halved from 71 at the start of 2025 to 41 in 2026, largely reflecting tariff hikes squeezing out smaller projects.

The remaining 41 legal crypto clients now reserve 943.8 MW, equivalent to 13.5% of Paraguay’s share of Itaipú’s power. Four companies alone consume 730 MW: more than the output of one of the dam’s 20 turbines.

Crypto mining has become a major cash cow for ANDE, an underfunded state utility facing pressure to invest in the creaking national grid. But every current crypto contract expires on December 31, 2027: a deadline ANDE says is non-negotiable as it looks to recover power for domestic consumption and traditional industry, amid forecasts that Paraguay’s surplus electricity will soon run out.

Miners with deep local integration, high-tension infrastructure and close working relationships with ANDE are in a stronger position to negotiate fresh contracts. Operators relying on lower-voltage connections, thinner margins or looser Paraguayan ties are already diversifying or heading for the exit.

The split is visible among the sector’s big names. Penguin Group, which signed the country’s first 100 MW power purchase agreement, is now redirecting its Bitcoin mining facilities towards AI and high-performance computing. Alps — a European miner that invested around €40m to scale to 40 MW across 10 sites in Paraguay — is now reportedly looking elsewhere, including Bolivia and Venezuela.

The government is tightening the screws on the wider crypto ecosystem, too. Tax authority DNIT is now requiring taxpayers and non-registered individuals alike to declare crypto transactions that generate taxable gains. Officials say the goal is to detect evasion, apply Paraguay’s 10% income tax where relevant, and improve traceability. But Bitcoin enthusiasts say that easily-leaked public records could put them, their families, and their fortunes in danger.

Social and legal risks are also mounting. In Villarrica, the local representative of Canadian firm Bitfarms is currently facing trial: Paraguay’s first criminal proceeding tied to cryptocurrency mining. Prosecutors say the site operated some 16,000 machines around the clock in a residential neighbourhood, generating constant noise and causing mass insomnia.

For now, Paraguay remains a significant crypto-mining player. The cheap hydro, global hashrate, and money flowing to ANDE are all real. The state electricity firm is even exploring whether it can mine Bitcoin itself, using around 1,500 confiscated machines in conjunction with private partners.

But the easy-arbitrage era — plug in, get to mining, and court investors with tales of abundant, cheap and green energy — increasingly looks like yesterday’s story: not least because there’s a powerful new player on the block.

THE POST TAKE:

Bitcoin has long been sold as the little guy’s rebellion against centralised finance. But in Paraguay, mining is morphing into a game for operators with lawyers, cosy institutional relationships, and enough capital to absorb multimillion-dollar deposits, build private substations, and manage see-sawing regulations.

In other words: the libertarian dream has met the Paraguayan state.

From the government’s point of view, large industrial users are also easier to monitor and bill than hundreds of smaller farms — including those illegally tapping the grid. And it has given clear signs that it is moving on to the next big thing.

Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, has just signed a memorandum with Taiwan to build what he claims will be world’s largest AI data centre. Discussing what should happen when crypto contracts expire in 2027, national telecoms chief Gustavo Villate was blunt: “Unplug crypto and plug in AI.”

That pitch serves two purposes. It lets the government argue that Paraguay is moving up the value chain from the murky world of crypto mining to respectable-sounding “high-performance computing.” And it helps justify Paraguay’s increasingly lonely relationship with Taiwan as business groups, opposition figures, and even Colorado Party lawmakers ask hard questions about what Paraguay leaves on the table by shunning Beijing.

But AI data centers are not just shinier crypto farms. They need near-perfect uptime, serious cooling infrastructure, specialised talent, and a grid that can support them. Hashrate Index notes that Paraguay’s sweltering heat, bandwidth limitations, and infrastructure constraints — including regular blackouts — make the AI pivot a major technical challenge.

Local experts aren’t buying the hype. Luis Benítez, secretary of the Paraguayan AI Society, called Peña’s mega data-center plan “a delusion” designed to serve geopolitical interests.

The policy framework is also still shifting. The government has recently revised the rules for “convergent industries” — AI data centers, crypto mining, and green hydrogen — after complaints from the electricity workers’ union, Sitrande, that they were overly generous and would end up pushing up prices for residential users. The revised framework puts AI data centers on ANDE’s technical tariff, around $0.044/kWh, removes a 15-year price freeze, and imposes adjustments tied to US inflation and periodic generation-cost reviews.

Paraguay’s crypto honeymoon is ending — not because the country has stopped being attractive, but because its cheap electricity has attracted competitors with deeper pockets and greater (geo)political leverage. In a further sign of the times, this week Peña received Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel in the presidential residence. Government-aligned media suggested they were discussing AI data centres.

The question now is whether Paraguay can turn this latest wave of investor interest into a real tech ecosystem with lasting benefits — or whether it will simply swap one insiders’ industry for another.

You’re reading The Weekly Post, your essential briefing on Paraguay.

Also in this issue: Peña in Taiwan • Who really rules Paraguay? • Colorados ditch two senators • Independent macro forecasts • Fumigation nation • Independence Day parade to go ahead • Saving a feminist pioneer’s house from ruin • Milo J in Paraguay • Troll-gate scandal continues

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Read in English

Cuando Jess Simpson y Aric Genaw empezaron a buscar dónde rehacer su vida lejos del noroeste de los Estados Unidos, el corazón de Sudamérica no figuraba entre sus planes. La pareja, él de 50 años y ella rondando esa edad, tenía prácticamente decidido el traslado a Costa Rica hasta que los precios y la burocracia los disuadieron. Luego evaluaron Portugal, pero el invierno europeo tampoco les convenció.

“Hice una lista de todos los países”, cuenta Simpson, exoficial de la Marina estadounidense. “Fui descartando los que eran fríos, los que eran peligrosos, los que no hablaban español”.

Un lugar se destacó por encima de los demás: un programa de residencia que ella describe como “súper barato y fácil” y un clima subtropical que le recordó a su Luisiana natal. “Este lugar parece tan chill“, recuerda haber pensado. “Listo, nos mudamos a Paraguay.”

A fines de 2024, aterrizaron en Piribebuy —un pequeño pueblo del departamento de Cordillera, a unos 65 kilómetros al este de Asunción— con su Golden Doodle y dos perros Australian Shepherd. Con la ayuda de un amigo local, negociaron a buen precio un terreno en una suave pendiente, sombreado por mangos y aguacates, y comenzaron a construir su casa.

Genaw, mecánico de profesión, se define como introvertido. Simpson, en cambio, que trabaja como coach de negocios y contadora de forma remota, se volcó de lleno a la vida del lugar: corre por los cerros, da clases de inglés por las tardes y prepara mbejú con sus vecinas. “Engordé muchísimo”, ríe y menciona otro plato que le ha conquistado el corazón. “La chipa guazú: me la comería todo el día”.

Simpson también escribe con cariño en Substack sobre su nueva vida en común: las tormentas subtropicales que retumban durante horas, las fiestas que duran todo el día, los velorios que se extienden una semana entera. “En Estados Unidos todo es ruido, apuro y plata, y todo se trata de las apariencias. Yo no conocía a mis vecinos”, reflexiona. “Acá conozco a cada persona de cada casa”.

La segunda presidencia de Donald Trump —durante la cual agentes de seguridad e inmigración, hasta ahora, mataron a nueve personas en el marco de una campaña masiva de detención de migrantes irregulares— no hizo más que reafirmar su decisión.

“No nos dábamos cuenta de cuánto vivíamos en un estado policial”, dice Simpson, exfuncionaria municipal de Gold Hill, un pueblo de 1.335 habitantes en el condado de Jackson, Oregón. “Por eso vinimos a Paraguay: por la libertad, por la paz y la tranquilidad, para que nos dejen vivir... Cada mañana me despierto y pienso: qué paraíso”.

Un récord de solicitudes de residencia

La pareja forma parte de la mayor ola migratoria de la historia paraguaya moderna. Solo en 2025, un número récord de 47.687 personas solicitaron residencia: un 63 % más que el año anterior.

En las redes sociales, una creciente legión de influencers extranjeros —muchas veces amplificados por cuentas afines al gobierno— elogian la cultura del asado, la relativa seguridad de las calles y los valores familiares tradicionales del país. Y en una mañana reciente, la Dirección Nacional de Migraciones (DNM), en el centro de Asunción, era un hervidero de idiomas extranjeros y gestores paraguayos cargados de carpetas repletas de documentos.

De los 40.600 extranjeros que obtuvieron residencia el año pasado, 24.526 eran brasileños, muchos de ellos estudiantes. Los argentinos, con 4.366 solicitudes aprobadas, quedaron en un lejano segundo lugar. Y la tendencia no muestra señales de desaceleración: las solicitudes exitosas crecieron un 85 % entre enero y marzo en comparación con el mismo período de 2025, lo que pondría a Paraguay en camino de recibir casi 90.000 inmigrantes en 2026.

En su despacho del piso de arriba, el escritorio de Jorge Kronawetter, director de la institución, aparece casi oculto debajo de pilas de expedientes. “Estamos trabajando al límite”, reconoce Kronawetter, quien debe revisar y firmar personalmente alrededor de 150 solicitudes al día para cumplir con un plazo objetivo de 40 días.

El presidente Santiago Peña ha hecho de la atracción de extranjeros adinerados una prioridad de su gobierno. En abril, su administración anunció un nuevo Investor Pass que ofrece residencia permanente acelerada a quienes inviertan 150.000 dólares en el sector turístico paraguayo, o 200.000 en bienes raíces o en la bolsa de valores local.

Y en un mundo cada vez más convulsionado, muchos ven en la economía del Paraguay, en rápida expansión, el bajo costo de vida y la tasa impositiva fija del 10 % —que cae al 0 % para los ingresos generados en el exterior— un refugio seguro para su dinero. “El capital siempre busca donde más le puede rendir beneficios”, explica Kronawetter, con una sonrisa.

Entre los principales países de origen del año pasado figuraron también Alemania (1.652), Bolivia (1.357), España (1.023) y Venezuela (847). Cientos de personas más solicitaron desde Países Bajos, Estados Unidos, Rusia y Francia. “Son números que no se daban en años anteriores”, dice el director, descendiente de abuelos austríacos y armenios que llegaron al Paraguay tras la Primera Guerra Mundial.

Para hacer frente a la marea de solicitudes, la DNM planea lanzar en junio un portal en línea que permitirá a los extranjeros solicitar la residencia temporaria desde su país de origen y, al menos en teoría, obtener la aprobación en 15 días. La reforma, según Kronawetter, apuntará también a desplazar a las agencias que ofrecen atajos “engañosos” hacia la residencia por miles de dólares: “Muchos no están de acuerdo, pero lo vamos a hacer.”

Más allá de los beneficios fiscales y la simplificación de trámites, Kronawetter destaca que Paraguay tiene un as en la manga: su gente. “Acá el extranjero se siente bien… no hay discriminación, xenofobia ni racismo. Te vas al campo y te van a recibir mejor que en la ciudad, y la gente que menos tiene va a compartir más contigo las cosas”.

Sin embargo, esta bienvenida cálida no es universal. Los ciudadanos de China, India y casi toda Asia y África deben tramitar una visa —con carta de invitación de un residente o empresa local— antes de poder ingresar al país y solicitar la residencia.

Hay, además, una paradoja que nadie puede ignorar. Mientras jubilados europeos, nómadas digitales norteamericanos e inversores sudamericanos se vuelcan hacia Paraguay, muchos ciudadanos paraguayos están armando las valijas. Según datos de la ONU, casi un millón de paraguayos —cerca del 15 % de la población— vive en el exterior.

Y en el país, una reacción anti-extranjeros va cobrando fuerza en las redes, donde críticos acusan a los recién llegados de inflar los precios, tratar con superioridad a los locales y protagonizar un “turismo sexual organizado”.

Para entender por qué tantos extranjeros eligen Paraguay —y por qué tantos paraguayos se van— The Paraguay Post recorrió la Región Oriental del país de punta a punta. Visitamos una ordenada cooperativa japonesa, un pueblo agroindustrial de brasileños y una polémica colonia fundada por austríacos antivacunas de extrema derecha. También hablamos con paraguayos que llevan décadas viviendo en el exterior, y con otros que ya están preparando el equipaje.

Una pregunta afloró una y otra vez: ¿Es Paraguay realmente un paraíso? ¿O eso depende de quién eres y de dónde vienes?

¿Un país de oportunidades?

Para muchos migrantes, Paraguay es un lugar de posibilidades: un territorio donde los soñadores pueden concretar grandes proyectos y los golpeados por la vida pueden reinventarse.

Yexis Guzmán, herrеra de oficio criada en la costa caribeña de Venezuela, llegó a Paraguay hace cinco años. Harta de la discriminación que sufrió como refugiada en Perú, cruzó el Lago Titicaca en una lancha de contrabandistas, cocinó para camioneros para juntar el dinero de un test de Covid en la frontera boliviana y atravesó el Chaco a pie y a dedo bajo el sol implacable.

“El viaje para mí fue fatal”, dice Guzmán, de 40 años, de palabra directa y sin titubeos, una de los al menos siete millones de personas que huyeron del derrumbe económico venezolano en los últimos años.

Al principio, Paraguay tampoco fue fácil. Consiguió trabajo como encargada de cocina en un hotel de Asunción, pero la hacían trabajar de seis de la mañana a once de la noche, durmiendo en una piecita detrás de la recepción. El dueño le retuvo el celular, los documentos —que hasta hoy no le devolvió— y le amenazó con una demanda cuando renunció al tercer mes.

“Fue lo peor por el trato, el abuso y la explotación”, recuerda Guzmán.

Empezó vendiendo hallacas —tamales venezolanos— en la ciudad de San Lorenzo, para mandar dinero a sus hijos en Venezuela. En unos años juntó lo suficiente para que su hijo mayor, Kevin, entonces de 16 años, hiciera el largo viaje en ómnibus hasta Paraguay.

En el patio de su casita en Capiatá, bajo la sombra fresca de dos enormes árboles de mango, fundaron juntos Gastronomía Porteña, un restaurante de comidas típicas de los puertos de Venezuela que reúne a migrantes venezolanos, colombianos, argentinos, cubanos y ecuatorianos. “Agradecida con mi abuela que me enseñó a cocinar y con mis tías que me enseñaron muchos platillos”, dice Guzmán. Recuerda cómo un cliente venezolano rompió a llorar al probar su torta de jojoto —un postre de maíz típico— por primera vez en más de veinticinco años.

Guzmán también es fundadora de una organización, Qué Chévere, que asesora a venezolanos en sus documentaciones y organiza ferias gastronómicas y de artesanía en las plazas de Asunción.

A pesar del comienzo accidentado, Paraguay les dio algo de estabilidad y libertad. Mientras un familiar en Venezuela fue encarcelado y torturado por publicar un meme sobre Maduro, Kevin —boxeador aficionado que atiende mesas en el restaurante— crea contenido humorístico en Instagram y TikTok.

Según Latinobarómetro, una encuesta de opinión a nivel regional, Paraguay es uno de los países más acogedores de América Latina para los inmigrantes. El 73 % de la población cree que la migración impulsa el desarrollo económico, frente a un promedio regional del 57 %.

Sin embargo, Guzmán critica la decisión del presidente Peña de cerrar las fronteras a los venezolanos sin visa tras el secuestro de Maduro por parte de fuerzas especiales estadounidenses en enero, una medida que, dice, ha separado familias. “Ojalá que este presidente de aquí y esta presidenta Rodríguez puedan abrir la embajada en Paraguay. Porque hay muchísimas mujeres aquí que tienen sus hijos en Venezuela y querían traerlos este año y no pueden ahora por esta situación”, lamenta. Y aunque lleva una vida construida en Paraguay, confiesa que el deseo de volver nunca se apaga: “Me hace falta mi casa”.

Otros migrantes han encontrado nichos de negocio inexplorados más allá de la cocina.

“Necesitaba salir”, dice Verónica Vega, que llegó a Paraguay hace 15 años, con dos hijos pequeños y cincuenta dólares en el bolsillo, tras la ruptura de una relación. “Fue casi un salto suicida”.

Empezó vendiendo en la calle atrapasueños confeccionados con ñanduti. Hoy gestiona un negocio de cristales, corales y colgantes de amatista con 100.000 seguidores entre Facebook y TikTok.

Tras años de inviernos largos y trabajo escaso en su Uruguay natal, ahora camina descalza por la calle. Compró una vivienda, tuvo otro hijo y montó un showroom para su colección de minerales.

“En Uruguay, la torta ya está cortada”, explica Vega, de 44 años. “En Paraguay, todo está por hacer. Es un país con muchas oportunidades, de gente amable y corazón abierto.”

Las piedras que Vega recoge en los cerros del departamento de Cordillera —y que a veces regala a sus clientes— son, a su manera, otra mercancía codiciada.

“Paraguay es el corazón de Sudamérica. Es un país energéticamente muy especial”, agrega. “Yo no solo vendo piedras, yo creo en su poder para sanar, ya que me ayudaron mucho a mí”.

Muchos de sus compatriotas han encontrado oportunidades de otro tipo. Según recientes declaraciones del ministro de Industria y Comercio Marco Riquelme, los uruguayos son hoy el grupo extranjero que más tierra posee en Paraguay: unas 3 millones de hectáreas dedicadas principalmente a la soja, la ganadería y la industria forestal.

Otros inmigrantes recientes ven en los bajos costos de Paraguay —y en su escena cultural emergente— la oportunidad de cumplir sus ambiciones y dejar huella.

Euan Richard, físico y guitarrista escocés de 38 años oriundo de Edimburgo, visitó Asunción como turista en 2021 tras haber vivido en Tokio y Ámsterdam. Al conocer a músicos locales de gran talento, muchos de ellos autodidactas formados en YouTube, decidió concretar un sueño largamente postergado: abrir su propio bar de jazz.

“Dije, screw it“, recuerda Richard. “¿Por qué no hacerlo acá y darles a los chicos un lugar donde tocar?”

En los dos años siguientes, calcula que JazzCube —un elegante espacio en el exclusivo barrio capitalino de Villa Morra— albergó 500 conciertos en vivo con músicos paraguayos e internacionales.

Hubo momentos arriba del escenario, dice Richard, en que “todo encajaba: músicos compartiendo ideas, improvisando, manteniendo una verdadera conversación artística. Eso no estaba pasando en muchos otros lugares”.

En los Países Bajos habría sido demasiado caro y habría requerido permisos complicados. “Acá, simplemente vacié mi cuenta de ahorros y me lancé”.

Richard y sus socios vendieron el negocio a regañadientes en enero de 2024, sin haber logrado que fuera rentable. Actualmente dicta clases en la UNA, la principal universidad pública del país, por una retribución honoraria de 10.000 guaraníes —un dólar y medio— la hora. También es coautor del primer paper académico paraguayo sobre muones, un tipo de partícula subatómica.

Y Richard sigue tocando por la ciudad y grabando música con amigos de la época del JazzCube. “Mirando hacia atrás”, reflexiona, “estoy muy orgulloso de lo que hicimos”.

La tierra prometida

A unas seis horas de Asunción en auto, el polo agroindustrial de Santa Rita se asienta sobre la fértil tierra colorada del este paraguayo. Pero el océano de soja que rodea la ciudad, las churrasquerías que suenan a sertanejo y los carteles en portugués que publicitan tractores, agroquímicos y semillas transgénicas hacen que parezca Brasil.

Ignacio Schorr, de 78 años, fue uno de los miles de colonos brasileños —muchos de ascendencia alemana— que se asentaron en el este paraguayo hace cincuenta años por invitación del régimen de Alfredo Stroessner. Recuerda haber talado árboles colosales de siglos de antigüedad y haber vivido en un galpón junto al ganado.

Hoy, Schorr tiene una casa rodeada de cerca eléctrica, dos camionetas estacionadas en su entrada, siete hijos adultos y mil kilómetros cuadrados de soja a su nombre. Unos 263.000 brasileños vivían en Paraguay en 2023, una cifra que creció casi un 10 % solo el año pasado. Pero Schorr, de piel curtida por el sol y poco español, mira a los recién llegados con desdén.

“Eles ja estão tudo tranquilo,” comenta. “ja está tudo pronto” (ellos ya están tranquilos, está todo listo).

A pocas cuadras, la abogada de origen brasileño, Kelly Thomaze, está ampliando su equipo de secretarias uniformadas de rosa —y experimentando con chatbots de inteligencia artificial— para atender una lista de espera de más de cien empresarios brasileños que quieren radicarse en Paraguay.

“Veo una desesperación”, dice Thomaze, cuyos reels de Instagram elogiando los bajos impuestos, los pocos feriados y el magro sistema de protección social paraguayo suelen volverse virales. “Vienen detrás de la sobrevivencia misma”.

Muchos de los clientes de su consultora, que huyen de las recientes subas impositivas a los sectores más ricos en Brasil, están instalando fábricas textiles de maquila en la cercana Ciudad del Este. Allí obtienen exenciones impositivas, energía hidroeléctrica barata —y trabajadores dóciles, de los cuales prácticamente ninguno está sindicalizado.

“Las cargas laborales son mucho más bajas” en Paraguay, explica Thomaze. “Prácticamente podemos decir que no tenemos demandas legales.”

Otros temen que Brasil esté deslizándose hacia una dictadura comunista y pro-LGBT bajo el longevo presidente de izquierda Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, exlíder sindical. El año pasado, el expresidente derechista Jair Bolsonaro fue condenado a 27 años de prisión por conspirar para anular las elecciones de 2022 que perdió frente a Lula. Los jueces federales han bloqueado decenas de cuentas en redes sociales por apoyar el intento de golpe bolsonarista.

“No podés expresarte”, argumenta Thomaze, quien se mudó a Paraguay con su familia a los cinco años. “Es casi peligroso.”

Su país adoptivo, en cambio, pasó de ser una “curiosidad” a una tierra prometida: “Acá en Paraguay somos 100 % de derecha. Esa cuestión de géneros, acá en Paraguay ni siquiera se abre discusión sobre eso. Se defiende la familia. En Brasil, hay una confusión”.

Y Paraguay es más seguro, agrega. “Mi auto afuera no está llaveado”.

En busca de una segunda opinión, el Post se acerca a varios lugareños, pero la mayoría se cierra en banda cuando les preguntamos por sus vecinos y jefes brasileños.

Nos encontramos con Arturo Flecha puliendo la vereda frente a la casa de Schorr hasta dejarlo reluciente, listo para ser repintado. Tiene un pie roto, así que trabaja sentado sobre el pavimento ardiente bajo el sol. Dice que los brasileños pagan hasta 130.000 guaraníes —unos 20 dólares— por día, frente a los 100.000 que se consiguen en Asunción, con comida y alojamiento incluidos.

“Creo que eso era territorio brasileño, ¿no?”, pregunta Flecha, un joven de 20 años con buen humor. “Pero ahora sí. Me da igual; la gente son muy buena. Dan trabajo”.

“Casi de todo sé hacer”, agrega. “Hay que comer”.

Llamamos a Tomás Zayas, histórico dirigente campesino del departamento de Alto Paraná, quien dice que todos sus compañeros de Santa Rita fueron desalojados para dar paso al agronegocio.

“El problema no es que vengan los brasileños”, subraya. “El problema es el modelo”.

Zayas —cuya vivienda fue atacada por desconocidos armados en 2013— acusa a los sojeros extranjeros de expulsar a los agricultores paraguayos pobres, maltratar a los trabajadores locales, acaparar riqueza y contaminar el medioambiente. Dice que un análisis de laboratorio encontró agroquímicos en su sangre.

“Se va creando una nación dentro de nuestra nación”, advierte Zayas. “Yo creo que esto es una bomba de tiempo y que en algún momento se va a explotar”.

Desde 1537, apenas unos pocos cientos de españoles remaron por el Río de la Plata para someter y mezclarse con los pueblos guaraníes del Paraguay. La provincia se mantuvo pobre y remota durante siglos.

Sin embargo, ese aislamiento relativo solo avivó las fantasías de los extranjeros sobre Paraguay como una utopía subtropical, cuenta al Paraguay Post el historiador Claudio Fuentes Armadans.

“Con la independencia esa fascinación por Paraguay se va a profundizar”, agrega Armadans, durante el gobierno del dictador posindependentista Dr. Francia (1816-1840), quien hizo prácticamente imposible que los extranjeros entraran — o salieran.

La Guerra de la Triple Alianza (1864-1870) — en la que enfermedades, hambruna e invasores de Brasil, Argentina y Uruguay diezmaron la mayor parte de la población masculina — consolidó el lugar común de un Paraguay como “paraíso sexual” donde las mujeres superaban en número a los hombres.

Sin embargo, mientras los puertos y fábricas sudamericanos absorbían millones de italianos, irlandeses, polacos y levantinos desde la década de 1850 en adelante, Paraguay — despoblado, crónicamente inestable y con un clima agobiante — no logró atraer inmigración masiva.

En cambio, fue escenario de varios proyectos de colonización fracasados.

En 1872, casi 900 “agricultores de Lincolnshire” fueron traídos desde Gran Bretaña al Paraguay oriental. Todo era parte de una elaborada estafa financiera: en realidad, la mayoría eran mendigos de Londres y tuvieron que ser rescatados de hambrunas y enfermedades.

Una colonia de vegetarianos antisemitas llamada Nueva Germania, que pretendía demostrar la superioridad de la raza alemana, terminó en la quiebra y el suicidio de su fundador en 1889.

Unos años después, un grupo de australianos pobres y abstemios fundó Nueva Londres como una utopía blanca, “fuerte, recta y viril”, donde “cada hombre será un compañero”. Pero su colonia comunista no tardó en desgarrarse por culpa de las mujeres del lugar, el ron y las peleas de liderazgo.

A partir de 1926, colonos menonitas provenientes de Canadá y Rusia transformaron el Chaco paraguayo en una potencia ganadera, marginaron a sus pueblos originarios y arrasaron con desmontes visibles desde el espacio.

Hasta hoy, sostiene Armadans, muchos extranjeros ven al Paraguay como un lugar donde cuestiones como los impuestos, las leyes, la monogamia y las vacunas son optativas: “Hay cierta migración que eso lo ve con buenos ojos”.

Pero muchas comunidades inmigrantes en Paraguay se han esforzado por integrarse — y han hecho contribuciones importantes culturales, a la salud pública y hasta al bienestar espiritual de la población.

Los padres de Catalino Yozo Hirano se ganaban la vida a duras penas en un pueblo en las montañas de la isla japonesa de Shikoku, en la posguerra, cuando se enteraron de que el régimen de Stroessner estaba repartiendo tierras. Se embarcaron rumbo al Paraguay, un viaje de casi cuatro meses en barco, y se convirtieron en algunos de los primeros pobladores de la Colonia Yguazú, fundada en 1961.

Los colonos cultivaron tomates y sandías, y plantaron cerezos a lo largo de amplias avenidas pensadas para 2.000 familias. El príncipe Akihito, futuro emperador, visitó la colonia en 1978.

Pero llegaron menos de 400 familias. Los mercados quedaban demasiado lejos, los colonos brasileños los superaban en la agricultura mecanizada, y la rápida industrialización del Japón de los años 70 hizo que un Paraguay lejano resultara cada vez menos atractivo.

Sesenta años después, Colonia Yguazú es una comunidad próspera y tranquila que junta sus modestos recursos para sostener una escuela — abierta a todos — que promueve la lengua y la cultura japonesas, además de un hospital con médicos y enfermeras de la madre patria donde los pobladores locales reciben atención con descuento.

“El ochenta y cinco por ciento de los pacientes son paraguayos”, dice Hirano, de 65 años, secretario de la Asociación Japonesa de Yguazú. “Mantenemos el sanatorio aunque estamos en déficit de 100.000 dólares al año”.

No es puro altruismo, admite. Hoy, menos del diez por ciento de los 12.000 habitantes de la colonia son de origen japonés.

“Somos una minoría”, explica Hirano, casado con una paraguaya de ascendencia local y con hijos. “Nuestro objetivo es la convivencia con los paraguayos. Nací aquí, soy paraguayo, pero me ven como extranjero”.

De joven, Hirano volvió a la tierra de sus padres durante seis años. Encontró trabajo en una línea de ensamblaje de autos, pero el ritmo de vida le resultó demasiado agitado, “una disputa contra el tiempo”. En Paraguay, piensa, uno puede “disfrutar de las horas”.

La cercana Ciudad del Este alberga a varios miles de personas de China y Taiwán: en su mayoría migrantes y sus descendientes que llegaron a este enclave fronterizo libre de impuestos en los años 80 en busca de fortuna.

Algunos volcaron sus ganancias en la construcción de un ornamentado templo de estilo pagoda que se eleva cuatro pisos en medio de los shoppings del centro.

“Nuestro budismo es muy inclusivo”, dice su secretaria, Sonia Karnani, mientras recorre el lugar con el Post. Más que una fe estricta, “la gente lo toma como una doctrina de vida, de ser consciente de uno mismo”.

La fundación Fo Guang Shan financia un hospital gratuito de maternidad, custodiado por estatuas de la Virgen María y de Buda. El templo también organiza eventos interculturales, clases de percusión, exposiciones y talleres de mindfulness.

El lugar transmite una serenidad que contrasta de manera improbable con los bulliciosos pasajes de Ciudad del Este, capital del comercio y el contrabando en el Paraguay: carpas nadando en un estanque, linternas de papel mecidas por la brisa.

Pero la mayoría de los asistentes a sus retiros de meditación silenciosa son paraguayos, dice Karnani, quien nació en el Paraguay y tiene, según ella misma, “alma guaraní”.

“Creo que está ayudando a la gente”, agrega Karnani, una joven de 38 años de rostro fresco que también enseña mandarín. “Por eso vuelven”.

Un éxodo silencioso

Las oportunidades de ascender no están al alcance de todos en Paraguay. Y donde algunos encuentran una especie de zen en la vida tranquila, otros ven un callejón sin salida.

Al terminar el secundario en el interior del país, Evaristo Romero Troche cambió el techo de paja de la casa familiar por la jungla urbana de Brasil, con la esperanza de juntar suficiente plata para volver a Paraguay y estudiar ingeniería agronómica. No volvería hasta 17 años después.

Hoy, a sus 42 años, Romero vive con su esposa, su hija y su mamá en Costa Rosada, en las afueras de Caaguazú. Tomando tereré a la sombra y con una remera del Club Flamengo, recuerda su tiempo en São Paulo — una megalópolis de 20 millones de habitantes — en una mezcla de español, portugués y guaraní.

Romero entró a una vasta industria textil semiinformal donde los trabajadores migrantes viven y trabajan en los mismos espacios atestados, divididos por los patrones — muchas veces peruanos, bolivianos y paraguayos — en piecitas colectivas separadas con terciadas o telas.

Muchos talleres operaban en negro, pagando en efectivo. La paga variaba: por día, por mes o por producción. Romero eligió esta última, trabajando a full para ganar — junto a tres compañeros — hasta 1.000 reales (200 dólares) al día.

Pero las condiciones a veces se sentían como una explotación. Las jornadas iban de las 7 de la mañana a las 9 de la noche. La comida y el alojamiento estaban incluidos, pero los descansos garantizados y las licencias pagas, no. Romero vio niños paraguayos de apenas 10 años que habían dejado los estudios y viajado con sus familias para trabajar en las oficinas de costura.

Una investigación de Reporter Brasil de 2024 documentó cómo las autoridades brasileñas rescataron a 192 paraguayos de condiciones análogas a la esclavitud en fábricas de cigarrillos, estancias y talleres textiles entre 2010 y 2023. El informe registró casos de madres que amamantaban a sus hijos en las máquinas de coser, sin ninguna posibilidad de acceder a una licencia por maternidad.

Conseguir trabajos así de precarios es muy sencillo. El Paraguay Post buscó “costurero Paraguay” en Facebook y encontró cientos de publicaciones. Le escribimos a un número de WhatsApp y hablamos con la dueña de una oficina que nos prometió trabajo — pero sin residencia, sin alimentación ni contrato formal.

La vida en São Paulo no fue todo un sufrimiento. Los migrantes paraguayos se reunían los fines de semana para hacer asado y jugar al fútbol. En 2014, cuando Paraguay no clasificó al Mundial, Romero y sus compañeros de oficina vistieron la albirroja para participar en un torneo de residentes extranjeros que terminó con Bolivia alzando la copa.

En diciembre de 2025, datos oficiales registraron más de 56.000 paraguayos residentes en Brasil. Romero está orgulloso de su tiempo en São Paulo, donde, con el tiempo, abrió su propio taller y mandó a buscar a su familia. Cada semana le giraba plata a su mamá para que construyera una casa de ladrillos.

Esas remesas son un salvavidas para la economía paraguaya. En 2025, los migrantes enviaron un récord de 1.350 millones de dólares: la tercera fuente de divisas del país, detrás de la carne vacuna (2.170 millones) y la soja (2.650 millones). Incluso supera con creces los ingresos de las dos represas hidroeléctricas binacionales (Itaipú y Yacyretá) que en 2025 fueron de 455 millones de dólares.

Aun así, la nostalgia de Romero fue creciendo con los años. Hubiera preferido quedarse si hubiera tenido trabajo estable.

“Che ndaipotái la che ahasa´akue ha´e ohasá“, dice en guaraní, refiriéndose a su hija, que hoy estudia enfermería en una universidad privada de Caaguazú. No quiere que ella pase por lo que él pasó.

Mientras tanto, el silencioso éxodo de familias paraguayas continúa.

Son las semanas que siguen a la Navidad, y el barrio está quieto: muy lejos de su infancia, cuando cada tarde había partidos de piki vóley en la cancha. La casita de madera de enfrente está trancada con candado: los vecinos también migraron.

“Todo el mundo se fue a trabajar a Chile, Argentina y España”, dice Romero.

La salida masiva de mujeres jóvenes para trabajar como niñeras, limpiadoras y cuidadoras en el exterior ha contribuido a que la tasa de natalidad paraguaya casi se haya reducido a la mitad desde 1990.

En parte como reflejo de la emigración masiva y la caída de la fecundidad, el censo de 2022 arrojó que apenas 6,1 millones de personas viven en el Paraguay: muy por debajo de las estimaciones anteriores de 7,5 millones.

Pero a medida que la economía paraguaya crece — el PIB del país se expandió casi un 7 por ciento en 2025 — y los gobiernos extranjeros convierten a los migrantes en chivos expiatorios, algunos están empezando a volver.

En 2005, Vilma Lucila Núñez dejó su Asunción natal y a sus dos hijos pequeños para trabajar como mucama, cama adentro en Daireaux, un pueblo del interior bonaerense a unos 400 kilómetros de la capital. “En busca de trabajo me fui a Argentina”, recuerda. “Era la opción que había en ese momento”.

Se levantaba a las 5 de la mañana todos los días para preparar el desayuno a los patrones, y no paraba hasta las 11 de la noche. “Cocinaba, limpiaba, era niñera, todo”, recuerda Núñez, hoy de 49 años, que enuncia cada frase con una sonrisa. Ganaba entre 700 y 1.000 pesos argentinos al mes (300 dólares), y cada vez que podía enviaba algo a sus hijos.

Unos años después se casó con un argentino, obtuvo la residencia permanente y juntaron sus familias, los dos hijos de ella más los cuatro de su pareja. Con su marido pusieron una empresa de jardinería. Para mantener vivo el recuerdo del hogar, cada mañana prepara su tereré y cocina platos paraguayos tradicionales — soyo, vori vori, chipa, sopa paraguaya y chipa guazú — para su familia multinacional.

Los paraguayos son la principal población migrante de Argentina: más de 522.000 residentes según el censo de 2022 de ese país, y 722,000 según el Instituto Nacional de Estadística de Paraguay.

Pero el presidente conservador Javier Milei expulsó a unos 5.000 extranjeros solo entre diciembre y enero, prometiendo acabar con el “caos y el abuso” que supuestamente traen los migrantes y “hacer grande a la Argentina otra vez”.

Otras reformas recientes de Milei implican que quienes no tienen residencia permanente ya no pueden acceder a la salud pública, fuera de caso de emergencia, sin pagar. Los extranjeros que tienen hijos en Argentina o se casan con argentinos ya no obtienen automáticamente el derecho a quedarse: ahora deben demostrar solvencia económica y antecedentes penales limpios.

Esto deja afuera a los trabajadores informales que quieran regularizar su situación, dice Gabriela Liguori, directora ejecutiva de CAREF, una ONG local que apoya a migrantes y refugiados. “Los cambios que está viviendo la Argentina son expulsivos, especialmente para quienes tienen menos recursos”, agrega.

La ofensiva en Argentina se hace eco de la expulsión por parte de Donald Trump de 230.000 residentes nacidos en el extranjero desde Estados Unidos en 2025, a los que se suman 250.000 detenidos en la frontera y deportados.

Kronawetter, director de migraciones del Paraguay, dice que la mayoría de los 20 paraguayos deportados en el primer año del regreso de Trump al poder eran llegados recientes y no residentes de larga data, y que fueron deportados en vuelos comerciales — un contraste con los deportados esposados enviados a El Salvador, Brasil y otros países.

Señala datos del Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE) que muestran que 33 paraguayos fueron deportados en 2024, el último año de la administración Biden. En los cinco años anteriores, el promedio era de nueve. “Trump deportó mucho menos”, agrega Kronawetter.

Cree que este trato supuestamente más indulgente del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional podría reflejar la relación cada vez más estrecha entre las administraciones de Peña y Trump.

En abril, Paraguay recibió el primer grupo de migrantes indocumentados de terceros países expulsados por Estados Unidos. Tras un acuerdo firmado en febrero que no fue publicado, está previsto que lleguen otros 25 al mes al Paraguay, donde un organismo de la ONU los ayudará a regresar a sus países de origen.

Pero más que el clima hostil en Argentina, lo que tiene harta a Núñez es la economía disparatada del país, su inflación de montaña rusa y el costo de vida aplastante.

En marzo viajó al Paraguay a visitar familiares y planificar su regreso definitivo en diciembre. El plan es emprender de nuevo y cultivar árboles frutales en el campo con su familia.

“No hay futuro” en Argentina, se queja Núñez. “Es como que estuviéramos estancados allá y no podamos progresar”.

Es otra historia en España, la economía grande de mayor crecimiento en la UE, y hogar de una comunidad en rápida expansión de al menos 162.000 migrantes paraguayos.

En abril, el primer ministro socialista Pedro Sánchez abrió de un plumazo un camino hacia la residencia legal para medio millón de trabajadores indocumentados.

Sánchez describió su decreto de regularización como “un acto de justicia y una necesidad”, y elogió a los extranjeros por sostener la economía, mantener los servicios públicos y contribuir a construir una España “rica, abierta y diversa.”

Alguien que podría aprovechar estas políticas es Marino Cabrera.

Cabrera, de 53 años, lleva 25 años atendiendo un puesto de frutas al borde de la vereda bajo un árbol de mango en Las Mercedes. Ha visto cómo este histórico barrio asunceno fue cediendo terreno a las cafeterías, los deliverys venezolanos y los AirBnbs.

En un buen día puede ganar 300.000 guaraníes. Pero una vez que carga su camioneta con mercadería del Mercado de Abasto y paga el combustible, queda poco. A pesar de haber pasado diez años en el ejército — entró como cadete a los 15 — tiene pocos ahorros y ningún seguro médico.

“En este país está prohibido enfermarse”, se ríe Cabrera. “Difícil las cosas en este país para la gente común. Sale mucho la gente.”

El año pasado, él también se fue: pasó siete meses en Madrid trabajando en turnos de 18 horas en la refacción de una torre de edificios, ganando hasta 180 euros al día. “Las ingenieras son dominicanas”, recuerda. “Después, somos todos paraguayos”.

Se sintió a gusto en España, pero extrañaba a su familia. “Si fuera por mí, no vendría más luego”, reflexiona Cabrera, mientras pasa una bolsa de piñas y bananas por la ventanilla de un auto. Espera volver pronto para otro trabajo en construcción.

Hay mucha gente en Paraguay con ganas de trabajar, dice Cabrera, “pero no consigue”. Su hija se recibió de psicóloga hace tres años y todavía está desempleada. Mientras tanto, él observa, “los extranjeros que vienen acá no quieren ir más. Viven de maravilla”.

Unas semanas después, el Post pasa a fotografiar a Cabrera, pero su puesto de frutas y verduras ya no está. Pasa un mes, y la esquina sigue vacía.

El paraíso verde

El Paraíso Verde fue planificado para hasta 20.000 residentes. Hoy viven allí alrededor de 200. Video: Matteo Fabi para The Paraguay Post.

A pesar del creciente interés por el país como destino de ensueño, algunos se han quejado de que el Paraguay no es todo lo que les prometieron.

En el departamento sureño de Caazapá, por un camino de barro a treinta minutos del pueblo más cercano, un proyecto inmobiliario con forma de caracol va emergiendo lentamente de un pantanal.

El Paraíso Verde (EPV) fue fundado en 2016 por los ciudadanos austríacos Erwin y Sylvia Annau como una comunidad privada de “espiritualidad” para personas con visiones disidentes del mundo.

En su sitio web, Annau se describe como un buscador serial de la libertad que ha explorado “intensivamente” 16 religiones y filosofías — entre ellas la Cienciología, a la que hoy llama una “secta”.

La libertad, sin embargo, tiene sus límites en El Paraíso Verde. Las personas LGBT no son bienvenidas. Tampoco los vacunados.

El interés en la colonia heterodoxa se disparó durante la pandemia, cuando los materiales en línea de la pareja alentaban a otros colonos europeos a huir de la “matrix” de los confinamientos, las vacunas contra el covid-19, las chemtrails (estelas químicas), el 5G y la inmigración proveniente de países de mayoría musulmana.

“Europa se fue a mierda”, dice Peter Brandt, un exvendedor de electrodomésticos alemán de 56 años con la cabeza bronceada por el sol, que muestra las instalaciones a The Paraguay Post.

“Somos la comunidad de no vacunados más grande del mundo”, agrega. “Se puede vivir acá si uno acepta las reglas, como nada de químicos.”

Un folleto en el alojamiento para visitantes lista entre los principios de la comunidad el respeto, la solidaridad y la libertad, además de “la prevención y aclaración de rumores.” Los residentes se ofrecen mutuamente Reiki y sanación Theta, tratamiento electromagnético, servicios de impresión 3D y un club de tiro.

Afuera, niños rubios con flotadores chapotean en un lago artificial. En un contenedor reconvertido, un alegre bávaro de cola de caballo llamado Stephan prepara panecillos, café y tortas de ciruela para visitantes, residentes y trabajadores locales.

La pregunta de por qué decidió mudarse a Paraguay lo toma desprevenido, como si nunca se hubiera cuestionado el motivo.

“No sé”, responde. “Hay que preguntarle a Erwin. Creo que Paraguay es muy fácil para venir acá”.

Exsoldados paraguayos armados con pistolas y escopetas hacen guardia en las entradas y en un portón que separa a la mayoría de los colonos de la residencia de los Annau y de la mayor parte de las instalaciones.

Brandt nos lleva a recorrer el sector residencial principal en su motocarro. Por ahora, viven acá entre 180 y 200 personas; la mayoría de los lotes están vacíos o a medio terminar.

Otros exhiben una mezcla ecléctica de estilos arquitectónicos: una cabaña de madera de dos pisos en venta por un millón de dólares, una construcción que parece una yurta mongola, una casa semienterrada con aire de madriguera de hobbit y varias villas de estilo colonial.

Una de las más lindas es la de Heinz Klötzner, un vivaz septuagenario que se mudó acá durante la pandemia junto a su esposa fallecida. Desde entonces creó un jardín lleno de mariposas con árboles de mamón, pomelo y naranja y una pileta natural donde nada todas las mañanas.

“Hace cinco años, acá no había nada”, dice Klötzner, mostrándole al Post una foto de un campo enmarañado. “No quiero volver a Europa. La vida allá es demasiado agitada.”

Al igual que varios otros colonos, Klötzner también creció en la Alemania Oriental comunista.

Esa experiencia significa que “podemos ver venir la próxima dictadura”, explica Brandt, que se sostiene con unos pocos cientos de dólares al mes gracias a una plataforma de trading de criptomonedas con inteligencia artificial.

Para algunos, este Edén paraguayo resultó ser, según se cuenta, un infierno legal y financiero. Exinversores y exresidentes han acusado a la empresa operadora de la colonia, Reljuv S.A., de estafarlos por decenas de millones de dólares.

Algunos compradores dicen que dejaron todo en Europa, invirtieron sus ahorros en propiedades en El Paraíso Verde — solo para llegar y encontrar que la construcción no había empezado y que los títulos de sus terrenos eran confusos o estaban en disputa.

A finales de 2025, el Ministerio Público paraguayo imputó a Erwin y Sylvia Annau —así como al expresidente de Reljuv, el empresario argentino y operador político local Juan Buker— por estafa, a partir de una investigación abierta por fraude inmobiliario a extranjeros en El Paraíso Verde.

En 2021, los tres fueron fotografiados junto al expresidente Horacio Cartes y el entonces precandidato a la presidencia Santiago Peña en una visita a El Paraíso Verde. Un año después, en octubre de 2022, los empresarios volvieron a aparecer abrazados a Cartes y Peña en un evento de campaña en Caazapá del que Buker fue anfitrión. De acuerdo con las denuncias contra EPV, el dinero de los inversionistas habría sido usado en la campaña electoral del actual presidente Peña.

Los Annau y Buker han negado cualquier irregularidad y se han culpado mutuamente por los problemas financieros, según medios locales. Hasta ahora, nadie ha sido condenado por la supuesta estafa millonaria de El Paraíso Verde.

Thomas Schulz —un exdirector de orquesta hosco y corpulento de Baden-Württemberg— se ha convertido en un improbable portavoz extraoficial de las supuestas víctimas.

En 2021 se mudó a Paraguay con su esposa y su hijo, que tiene TDAH, y, durante la pandemia, tuvo muchas dificultades con el uso obligatorio de máscara y el distanciamiento social en la escuela.

“Estaba en contra de todas esas órdenes estúpidas”, le dice Schulz al Paraguay Post en un restaurante del cercano pueblo de Caazapá. “No estoy en contra de todas las vacunas, solo de las vacunas genéticamente modificadas“.

La inmigración también fue un factor que lo empujó a irse. “No soy racista”, dice. “Tengo muchos amigos blancos, negros. Pero no se puede eliminar la raza blanca.”

Su familia se instaló en las frondosas sierras del Yvyturuzú. Schulz se convirtió en ganadero a pequeña escala, cambiando el frac y la corbata de moño por una camisa de franela gastada, unas crocs y tierra bajo las uñas. Su hijo, que ahora se educa en casa, habla guaraní con los amigos del barrio.

Se topó con los videos de El Paraíso Verde y se mantuvo lejos: “Vi cinco minutos y tuve suficiente.” Pero en los años siguientes fue conociendo a “30 o 40 personas” que lo habían perdido todo y tenían miedo de hablar.

El cowboy suabo se convirtió en su defensor de facto y varios de ellos —al irse del país— le transfirieron sus propiedades en El Paraíso Verde con la esperanza de que pudiera recuperar algo de lo invertido.

“No quiero enriquecerme con esto”, explica. “Si vendo algo, voy a usar el dinero para seguir peleando”.

Siente lástima por los residentes que quedan, dice que les han inculcado el miedo hacia los paraguayos comunes; llama a la colonia una “jaula” y a los Annau una “dictadura.”

“No quiero tener lo mismo que en Alemania”, explica, “un país dentro de un país. Si me mudo a un país, quiero ser parte de él. ¿Qué clase de vida es esa, si uno vive solo con miedo?”

A pesar de su disputa con la cúpula del lugar —agrega con un dejo de picardía—, El Paraíso Verde sigue siendo uno de sus mejores clientes, pagando precios prémium por su carne orgánica libre de vacunas y su abono.

En El Paraíso Verde, Brandt se queja de que los inversores “deprimidos” que perdieron plata están generando una negatividad innecesaria. “Eso quedó en el pasado”, dice.

En una entrevista publicada en YouTube el año pasado, los Annau describen una transición hacia un modelo de gobernanza democrático y declaran superada la “crisis de corrupción”, a la que culpan de socios locales que se aprovecharon de que ellos no hablaban español.

Erwin cierra prometiendo “hacer grande a El Paraíso Verde otra vez”.

“Vengan a ver con sus propios ojos”, les dice a los espectadores este asesor fiscal y sanador alternativo de cabello plateado. “Saquen sus propias conclusiones”.

Schulz, terminando una chuleta de cerdo con salsa extra en el copetín cercano, no está convencido de que la colonia —ahora dividida en dos entidades llamadas Pira Tava y Paraíso Homes— haya cambiado de verdad.

“Aunque una rata nazca en un establo, nunca va a ser un caballo de carrera”, concluye, antes de acomodar su cuerpo en su motocarro y perderse traqueteando por el camino.

¿Un hogar para siempre?

Algunos de los que llegan al Paraguay en busca del paraíso parecen haberlo encontrado. Para sus descendientes, en cambio, el pasto a veces se ve más verde del otro lado del cerco.

En Nueva Londres —hoy un pueblo tranquilo a unos 130 kilómetros al este de Asunción— apellidos como Kennedy, Smith y Murray son todo lo que queda del experimento socialista angloaustraliano.

Sirviendo una chipa avati que recuerda a los scones británicos y un vori-vori de carne en su jardín exuberante, Blanca McCreen, de 62 años, dice que desearía haber aprendido inglés.

“Mi abuelo hablaba perfectamente”, recuerda. Pero “ya perdimos todo eso”.

Para ella, Nueva Londres es un lugar muy tranquilo. “No hay delincuentes. Lo que más hace falta es trabajo. Los que pueden, salen”.

Su hijo Hector podría ser pronto uno de ellos. Trabaja como médico en la cercana ciudad de Coronel Oviedo, pero su carrera tiene un techo en Paraguay.

Los ascensos suelen ir a parar a los miembros del Partido Colorado, explica, que ha gobernado el Paraguay durante la mayor parte de los últimos 80 años.

“Veo gente que trabaja conmigo que no se movió un dedo, y eso molesta”, se queja Héctor, un joven de 29 años de voz tranquila.

Cuando le preguntan adónde iría en busca de mejores horizontes, es tajante: “Inglaterra, sin duda.” Él, que siente curiosidad por sus raíces, quiere estudiar en el Reino Unido o en Australia.

El clima lluvioso de Gran Bretaña, agrega con nostalgia —mientras el sol de la tarde pega fuerte— también le atrae: “Para mí, un día lluvioso es lo más”.

En Piribebuy, Simpson y Genaw reconocen que su país adoptivo no es perfecto.

Ella menciona la costumbre paraguaya de prender fuegos artificiales en cualquier ocasión y cómo algunos vecinos tiran basura en un arroyo cercano.

Pero cuando le preguntan si el Paraguay es su hogar para siempre, Simpson asiente con entusiasmo. “Sí, sí”, repite, pasando al español. “Para siempre”.

Leé en Español

When Jess Simpson and Aric Genaw were looking to relocate from the Pacific Northwest, the middle of South America wasn’t their first choice.

The couple were poised to move to Costa Rica, but it was too expensive and bureaucratic. They researched Portugal: too chilly in the winter.

“I made a list of all the countries,” says Simpson, 49, a former U.S. Navy officer. “I got rid of the ones that were cold, that were dangerous, where they didn’t speak Spanish.”

One place stood out for its “super cheap and easy” residency process and its steamy climate, akin to her native Louisiana.

“This place just seems so chill,” she remembers thinking. “Right, we’re moving to Paraguay.”

In late 2024, the couple touched down in Piribebuy — a small town in the hills 40 miles east of Asunción, the capital — with their Golden Doodle and two Australian Shepherd dogs.

Helped by a local friend, they negotiated a discount on a gently sloping plot shaded by mango and avocado trees, and started building a home.

Genaw, a 50-year-old mechanic, admits to being an introvert. But Simpson, who does business coaching and bookkeeping online, quickly got stuck into local life: running trails in the hills, giving evening classes in English, making mbejú (manioc pancakes) with her neighbours.

“I’ve gained so much weight,” she laughs, mentioning a popular cheesy cornbread. “Chipa guazú: I could eat that all day long.”

Simpson also blogs fondly on Substack about life in smalltown Paraguay: the sub-tropical thunderstorms that rumble on for hours, the day-long fiestas, the wakes that last all week.

“The US is busy and loud and expensive, and all about appearances. I didn’t know my neighbours,” she reflects. “Here, I know every single person in every single house.”

Donald Trump’s tumultuous second term — which has seen law enforcement shoot dead nine people to date amid a mass round-up of undocumented migrants — has only confirmed their decision.

“We didn’t realise how much we were, like, in a police state in the US,” explains Simpson, a former municipal official in Gold Hill (pop. 1335), Jackson County, Oregon.

“And that’s why we came to Paraguay, for the freedom, for the peace and quiet, to be left alone and live … Every day, I wake up and think: what a paradise.”

A record residency rush

The couple form part of the largest wave of immigration in modern Paraguayan history. In 2025 alone, a record 47,687 people applied for residency: up 63% on the year before.

On social media, a growing cohort of expat influencers — often amplified by pro-government accounts — are praising Paraguay’s mouthwatering barbecue culture, comparatively safe streets, and traditional family values.

And on a recent morning, the National Directorate of Migration (DNM) in downtown Asunción was a flurry of foreign languages and Paraguayan fixers with sheaves of documents.

Of the 40,600 foreigners granted leave to remain last year, 24,526 were from Brazil, many of them students. Argentines, with 4,366 requests granted, were a distant second.

The influx is only accelerating: successful applications grew by 85% in January-March compared to the same period in 2025, putting Paraguay on course to receive nearly 90,000 immigrants in 2026.

Upstairs, the desk of Jorge Kronawetter — the institution’s director — is almost hidden under stacks of residency applications.

“We’re working at our limits,” says Kronawetter, who personally reviews and signs around 150 requests per day.

President Santiago Peña has made it a priority to attract wealthy foreigners. In April, Paraguay’s government announced a new Investor Pass offering fast-tracked permanent residency for those investing $150,000 in Paraguay’s tourism sector, or $200,000 in real estate or the stock market.

And amid growing conflict around the world, many are looking to Paraguay’s fast-expanding economy, low cost of living, and 10% flat tax rate — which drops to 0% for money earned abroad — as a safe haven.

“Capital always looks for where it can get the most benefits,” explains Kronawetter, with a smile.

Other top countries of origin last year included Germany (1,652), Bolivia (1,357), Spain (1,023) and Venezuela (847). Hundreds each also applied from the Netherlands, the United States, Russia, and France.

“They’re numbers we’ve never seen before,” says the director: himself descended from Austrian and Armenian grandparents who came to Paraguay in the wake of the First World War.

To cope with the tide of immigrants, the migration office plans to roll out an online portal in June that will allow foreigners to apply for temporary residency from their home country — and, at least in theory, get approval within 15 days.

The overhaul, Kronawetter says, will undercut agencies that offer “deceitful” shortcuts for thousands of dollars: “Many people don’t want it, but we’re going to do it.”

Fiscal perks and streamlined paperwork aside, Kronawetter adds, Paraguay has an ace up its sleeve: its people.

“Foreigners feel at home here … there’s no discrimination, xenophobia, or racism. You go to the countryside, and people will treat you even better than the city. The people who have the least will share with you the most.”

But not only is this warm welcome restricted to a few dozen nationalities. Citizens of China, India, and nearly all of Asia and Africa have to get a visa — requiring an invitation letter from a local resident or company — before they can enter Paraguay and apply for residency.

There’s also a paradox. As European retirees, North American digital nomads, and South American investors pile into Paraguay, many citizens are heading for the exit. According to UN data, nearly a million Paraguayans, or almost 15% of the population, live abroad.

And back home, an anti-expat backlash is gathering steam online, as critics accuse recent arrivals of driving up prices, lording it over locals, and engaging in “organised sex tourism.”

To understand why so many foreigners are coming to Paraguay — and why so many locals have left — The Paraguay Post travelled across the country to meet migrants and their descendants.

We dropped by an orderly Japanese cooperative, a Brazilian agro boomtown, and a controversial colony of German and Austrian anti-vaxxers. We also spoke with Paraguayans who have spent decades abroad, and those preparing to pack their bags.

One question repeatedly surfaced: is Paraguay really a paradise? Or does that depend on who you are, and where you come from?

A country of opportunities

Many migrants see Paraguay as a place of possibilities: a place for dreamers to realise grand designs, and where the downtrodden and desperate can turn their lives around.

Yexis Guzmán, a former steelworker from the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, came to Paraguay five years ago. Fed up with discrimination in Peru, she took a smuggler’s boat across Lake Titicaca, cooked for truckers to raise money for a Covid test at the Bolivian border, and walked and hitchhiked across the scorching Chaco outback.

“The journey was horrific,” says Guzmán, a straight-talking 40-year-old, one of at least seven million people to have fled Venezuela’s economic meltdown in recent years.

To begin with, Paraguay was hardly better. She found a job as a cook in an Asunción hotel, but was made to work from six in the morning to 11 at night, sleeping in a tiny space behind reception. Her boss confiscated her cellphone, withheld her documents — she is yet to get them back — and threatened to sue her when she walked out three months later.

“It was the worst: the harsh treatment, the abuse, the exploitation,” Guzmán recalls.

She started selling hallacas — a kind of Venezuelan tamale — in the suburb of San Lorenzo, sending money home for her children. Within a few years, she earned enough for her eldest, Kevin, then 16, to make the long bus journey to Paraguay.

In the garden of their simple home in Capiatá, they together founded Gastronomía Porteña, which serves up coastal Venezuelan comfort food to a growing clientele from fellow Andean and Caribbean nations under the shade of two enormous mango trees.

“I’m so grateful to my grandma for showing me how to cook, and my aunties for teaching me lots of little dishes,” says Guzmán. She recalls how one Venezuelan customer cried with emotion after tasting her spin on jojoto, a corn-based dessert, for the first time in decades.

Her organisation, Qué Chévere, meanwhile helps Venezuelans get local documents, and organises craft and culinary fairs across Paraguay’s capital.

Despite the bumpy start, Paraguay has given them relative stability and freedom. Where a family member back home was jailed and tortured for sharing a meme that criticised ex-dictator Nicolás Maduro, Kevin — a keen amateur boxer who waits the tables — creates humoristic videos on social media.

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, well below the regional average, while 73% think it boosts economic development.

But Guzmán criticises a decision by Peña to close Paraguay’s borders to Venezuelans without a visa following Maduro’s abduction by U.S. special forces in January, saying it has separated families. And she yearns to return to Venezuela, she admits: “I miss my home.”

Other migrants have found unexplored business niches beyond the kitchen.

“I needed to get out,” says Verónica Vega, who came to Paraguay 15 years ago after the breakdown of a relationship with two small children and scarcely fifty dollars in her pocket. “It was almost a suicidal leap.”

She started out selling dreamcatchers made with ñanduti, Paraguayan lacework, on the street. Today, she runs a business marketing crystals, corals, and amethyst pendants to 100,000 followers across Facebook and TikTok.

After years of suffering through cold winters with little work in her native Uruguay, she now goes about barefoot — and has bought a house, acquired a showroom for her mineral collection, and had another child.

“In Uruguay, the cake is already cut,” explains Vega, 44. “In Paraguay, everything is still to play for. It’s a land of opportunities, of kind and open-hearted people.”

“Paraguay is the heart of South America. Energetically, it’s very special,” she adds. “I don’t just sell stones: I believe in their power to heal, because they helped me a lot.”

Many of Vega’s compatriots deal in prized commodities of a different kind. Uruguayans now own the most land of any group of foreigners in Paraguay: some 3 million hectares, mainly dedicated to soybean, beef, and forestry products.

Other recent immigrants see in Paraguay’s cheap costs — and emerging cultural scene — a chance to achieve their ambitions and make a mark.

Euan Richard, a 38-year-old physicist and guitarist from Edinburgh, visited Asunción as a tourist in 2021 after stints living in Tokyo and Amsterdam.

After meeting talented local musicians, many of them self-taught via YouTube, he decided to fulfill a long-held dream: opening his own jazz bar.

“I thought screw it,” Richard recalls, “why not do it here, and give the guys a place to play?”

Over the following two years, he estimates that JazzCube — a stylish space in the capital’s upscale Villa Morra district — hosted 500 live concerts with Paraguayan and international performers.

There were moments on stage, Richard says, when “it all came together: musicians sharing ideas, improvising, having a proper artistic conservation. That wasn’t happening in many other places.”

In the Netherlands it would have been too expensive and required complicated permits. “Here, I just emptied my savings account and went for it.”

Richard and his partners reluctantly sold the business, which wasn’t profitable, in January 2024.

Today, he sometimes gives classes at the UNA, Paraguay’s top public university, for an honorary fee of 10,000 guaraníes ($1.50) per hour. He has also co-authored Paraguay’s first academic paper on detecting muons, a kind of particle.

And Richard still gigs around town and records music with friends from his JazzCube days. “Looking back,” he reflects, “I’m really proud of what we did.”

The promised land

Some six hours’ drive from Asunción, the agribusiness hub of Santa Rita sits amid the fertile red earth and rolling plains of eastern Paraguay.

But the ocean of soybean surrounding the town, the churrasquerías playing sertanejo music, and the billboards in Portuguese advertising tractors, pesticides, and GM seeds make it seem like Brazil.

Ignacio Schorr, 78, was one of thousands of Brazilian colonists who settled eastern Paraguay five decades ago at the invitation of the Alfredo Stroessner regime (1954-89). He recalls tearing down colossal, centuries-old trees and living in a barn with livestock.

Today, Schorr has a house with an electric fence, two SUVs parked in his drive, seven adult children, and a thousand square kilometres of soybean to his name. Some 263,000 Brazilians were living in Paraguay in 2023: a number that jumped by nearly 10 percent last year alone. But Schorr, who has sun-weathered skin and little Spanish, looks down on the newcomers.

“They have it easy,” he says. “We got everything ready for them.”

A few blocks away, Brazilian-born lawyer Kelly Thomaze is expanding her workforce of pink-uniformed secretaries — and experimenting with AI chatbots — to deal with her waitlist of over a hundred Brazilian entrepreneurs looking to relocate to Paraguay.

“They’re desperate,” says Thomaze, whose Instagram reels praising Paraguay’s low taxes, few public holidays, and bare-bones social welfare often go viral. “It’s a matter of survival.”

Many of her consultancy firm’s clients are fleeing recent tax hikes on the rich in Brazil, looking to shift their fiscal residency Paraguay but not live here full-time. (Temporary residents can leave the country for up to 12 months without disrupting their pathway to permanent residency).

Some are setting up maquila textile factories in nearby Ciudad del Este. Here, they get tax breaks, cheap hydroelectric energy from the Itaipú Dam — and obedient workers, virtually none of whom are unionised.

“The labour requirements are much lower” in Paraguay, Thomaze explains. “We basically don’t have lawsuits.”

Others fear Brazil is sliding into a communist, pro-LGBT dictatorship under long-serving leftist president Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former union leader.

Last year, right-wing former president Jair Bolsonaro was handed a 27-year sentence for conspiring to overturn the 2022 election that he lost to Lula. Judges have blocked dozens of social media accounts for cheering on Bolsonaro’s attempted coup.

“You can’t express yourself,” argues Thomaze, who moved to Paraguay with her family aged five. “It’s almost dangerous.”

Her adoptive country, by contrast, has gone from “curiosity” to promised land: “Here in Paraguay, we’re 100 percent right-wing. The whole gender issue isn’t even up for debate. The family is protected, there’s no confusion like in Brazil.”

It’s also safer, she adds. “My car outside is unlocked.”

In search of other opinions, the Post approaches several locals, but most clam up when we ask about their Brazilian neighbours and bosses.

We come across Arturo Flecha sanding the curb in front of Schorr’s house until it gleams, ready to be repainted. His foot is broken, so he sits on the broiling pavement in the sun. He says the Brazilians pay up to 130,000 guaraníes ($20) a day — compared to 100,000 guaraníes back in Asunción — with bed and board included.

“This was Brazilian territory, right?” asks Flecha, a cheerful 20-year-old. “Well, now it is. I don’t care, they’re good people. They give people work.”

“I know how to do almost anything,” he adds. “A guy’s got to eat.”

We call up Tomás Zayas, a longstanding campesino leader in the surrounding department of Alto Paraná. He says all his comrades in Santa Rita have been evicted to make way for agribusiness.

“We don’t have a problem with Brazilians coming here,” he emphasises. “The problem is the model they’re bringing.”

Zayas — whose home was attacked by unknown gunmen in 2013 — accuses the foreign soybean barons of forcing out poor Paraguayan farmers, hoarding wealth, and poisoning the environment. He says tests have found pesticides in his blood.

“They’re creating a country within our country,” Zayas warns. “This is a time bomb that at some point is going to explode.”

Starting in 1537, barely a few hundred Spanish conquistadors rowed up the Río de la Plata to subjugate and intermingle with Paraguay’s native Guaraní peoples. The province remained poor and remote for centuries.

Yet this relative isolation only stoked outsiders’ fantasies about Paraguay as a sub-tropical utopia, historian Claudio Fuentes Armadans tells The Paraguay Post.

“That fascination with Paraguay deepened,” Armadans adds, under post-independence dictator Dr. Francia (1816-40), who made it all but impossible for foreigners to enter — or to leave.

The War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70) — which saw disease, starvation, and invaders from Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay wipe out most of the male population — cemented the trope of Paraguay as a “sexual paradise” where women outnumbered men.

Yet as South American ports and factories absorbed millions of Italians, Irish, Poles, and Levantines from the 1850s onwards, Paraguay — depopulated, unstable, and with a punishingly hot climate — largely failed to attract mass immigration.

Instead, it hosted several doomed settlement schemes.

In 1872, nearly 900 “Lincolnshire farmers” were shipped from Britain to eastern Paraguay. It was part of an elaborate financial scam: in reality, most were beggars from London, and had to be rescued from starvation.

A colony of anti-Semitic vegetarians called Nueva Germania, intended to demonstrate the superiority of the Aryan race, ended with the bankruptcy and suicide of its founder in 1889.

A few years later, a group of poor Australian teetotallers founded Nueva Londres as a White utopia, “strong and straight and manly,” where “every man will be a mate.” But their communist colony was soon split apart by local women, rum, and leadership squabbles.

From 1926 onwards, Mennonite colonists from Canada and Russia transformed Paraguay’s Chaco into a cattle ranching powerhouse, marginalised its native peoples, and bulldozed clear-cuts in the forest visible from space.

To this day, Armadans argues, many foreigners see Paraguay as a place where things like taxes, laws, and vaccines are optional: “Some migrants see that as a good thing.”

But many immigrant communities in Paraguay have taken pains to integrate — and made important contributions to the public’s health and even spiritual wellbeing.

Catalino Yozo Hirano’s parents were eking out a living in a poor hilltop village in post-war Japan when they heard the Stroessner regime was handing out land.

They set sail for Paraguay, becoming some of the first residents of Colonia Yguazú, a Japanese colony founded in 1961.

The settlers cultivated tomatoes and watermelons, and planted sakura blossoms along wide avenues ready for 2,000 households. Prince Akihito, the future emperor, visited in 1978.

But fewer than 400 families followed the Hiranos. Markets were too far away, Brazilian colonists outmatched them at mechanised agriculture, and Japan’s rapid industrialisation in the 1970s made distant Paraguay a less appealing prospect.

Sixty years on, Colonia Yguazú is a prosperous, low-key community that pools its modest resources to pay for a school, open to all, that promotes Japanese language and culture — as well as a hospital with Japanese doctors and nurses where locals get cut-price care.

“Eighty-five percent of the patients are Paraguayan,” says Hirano, 65, the secretary of the Yguazú Japanese Association. “We keep the hospital going even though we run a deficit of $100,000 every year.”

This isn’t pure altruism, he admits. Today, fewer than 10 percent of the colony’s 12,000 residents are of Japanese origin.

“We’re a minority,” Hirano explains. “Our objective is to get along with the Paraguayans, because though I’m Paraguayan by birth, people see me as a foreigner.”

As a young man, Hirano adds, he returned to his parent’s homeland for six years. He found work on a car assembly line, but found the pace of life too frantic, “a race against the clock.” In Paraguay, he thinks, “you can enjoy the passage of time.”

Nearby Ciudad del Este is home to several thousand people of Chinese and Taiwanese descent: largely migrants who came to this duty-free border hub in the 1980s to strike it rich, and their descendants.

Some have poured their earnings into building an ornate, pagoda-style temple, which rises to four storeys amid the shopping malls downtown.

“Our Buddhism is very inclusive,” says its secretary, Sonia Karnani, showing the Post around. Rather than a strict faith, “people take it as a way to live your life.”

The Fo Guang Shan faith funds a free maternity and children’s hospital, fronted by statues of the Virgin Mary and Buddha. The temple also hosts intercultural events, traditional drumming classes, and exhibitions.

The serene spot — carp swimming in a pond, paper lanterns fluttering in the breeze — makes an unlikely contrast with the hectic alleyways of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay’s shopping and smuggling capital.

But most attendees at their silent mediation retreats are Paraguayan, says Karnani.

“I think it’s helping people,” adds Karnani, a fresh-faced 38-year-old who also teaches Mandarin. “That’s why they come back.”

A silent exodus

Opportunities to ascend in Paraguay aren’t available to everyone. And where some find a sense of zen in the quiet life, others see a dead end.

After finishing high school in Caaguazú in rural Paraguay, Evaristo Romero Troche traded his straw-roofed family home for the urban jungle in Brazil. He hoped to earn enough to study agronomy back home. He wouldn’t return for 17 years.

Now 42, Romero lives with his wife, daughter and mother in Costa Rosada, on the outskirts of his hometown. Sipping tereré in the shade, and wearing a Club Flamengo shirt, he recalls his time in São Paulo — a megalopolis of 20 million people — in an accented mix of Spanish, Portuguese, and the native language Guaraní.

In Brazil, Romero entered a sprawling, semi-underground textile industry where migrant workers live and work in the same cramped spaces, divided by employers — often Peruvians, Bolivians and Paraguayans — into makeshift sleeping quarters with strips of plywood or fabric.

Many shops operated off-books, paying workers in cash. Pay varied — by day, by month or by output. Romero chose the latter, working harder to earn — with three co-workers — up to 1,000 reais ($200) per day.

Yet the conditions often felt exploitative. His workdays ran from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Food and lodging were included, but breaks and paid time off weren’t. Romero saw Paraguayan children as young as 10 who had dropped out of school and traveled with their families to work in the textile shops.

A 2024 investigation by Reporter Brasil described how Brazilian authorities rescued 192 Paraguayans from slavery-like conditions in cigarette factories, ranches, and garment workshops between 2010 and 2023. The report documented cases of mothers denied maternity leave and breastfeeding at their sewing machines.

Finding such precarious jobs is easy. The Paraguay Post searched “textile worker Paraguay” on Facebook and found hundreds of publications. We wrote a WhatsApp number and spoke with the owner of a shop who promised us work. But they didn’t offer accommodation, food, or a formal contract.

Life in São Paulo wasn’t all hardship. Paraguayan migrants gathered on weekends for barbecues and football games. In 2014, when Paraguay failed to qualify for the World Cup, Romero and his co-workers represented la albirroja in a tournament of foreign residents that ultimately saw Bolivia hoist the trophy.

In 2025, more than 56,000 Paraguayans were living in Brazil, according to official data. Romero is proud of his time in São Paulo, where he eventually opened his own shop and sent for relatives to join him. Each week, he wired money to his mother so she could build a new house out of bricks.

Such remittances are a lifeline for Paraguay’s economy as a whole. In 2025, migrants sent a record $1.35bn home: the country’s third-largest source of foreign exchange after beef ($2.17bn) and soybean ($2.65bn).

Still, Romero’s homesickness only grew with the years. He would have rather stayed home if steady work had been on offer.

“I don’t want her to go through what I did,” he says, referring to his daughter, now studying nursing in Caaguazú.

All around them, the silent exodus of Paraguayan families continues.

It’s a few weeks after Christmas, and the neighbourhood is quiet: a far cry from Romero’s youth, when rowdy matches of piki vóley took place every afternoon. The wooden house across the street is padlocked: his neighbours have also migrated.

“Everyone’s gone to work in Chile, Argentina and Spain,” Romero explains.

The outflow of young women to work as nannies, cleaners and carers abroad has contributed to Paraguay’s birth rate nearly halving since 1990.

Partly reflecting mass emigration, the 2022 census found that just 6.1 million people live in Paraguay: well below previous estimates of 7.5m.

But as Paraguay’s economy grows — the country’s GDP expanded by nearly 7 percent in 2025 — and foreign governments scapegoat migrants, some are now returning.

In 2005, Vilma Lucila Núñez left her native Asunción and her two young children behind to work as a mucama, cama adentro (a live-in maid) in Daireaux, a small town 250 miles southwest of Buenos Aires.

She got up at 5 a.m. every day to make breakfast for her employer’s family, and didn’t stop until 11pm, sending part of her monthly salary — between 700 and 1000 pesos (around $300) — home to her kids.

“I cooked, I cleaned, I was a babysitter, everything,” recalls Núñez, now 49.

A few years later, she married an Argentine, gaining permanent residency as a result. They had two more children and started a small gardening business.

To keep memories of home fresh, she still prepares her tereré (chilled yerba mate) every morning and cooks traditional Paraguayan dishes like soyo, vori vori, sopa paraguaya and chipa guazú for her dual-national family.

Paraguayans are Argentina’s main source of migrants, with just over 500,000 living in the neighbouring country according to its 2022 census. According to Paraguay’s national statistics office, this figure is now 722,000.

But Argentina’s conservative president Javier Milei expelled some 5,000 foreigners between December and January alone, vowing to end the “chaos and abuse” supposedly brought by migrants and “make Argentina great again.”

Recent reforms by Milei mean those without permanent residency can no longer access non-emergency healthcare for free. Foreigners who have children in Argentina or marry locals now no longer automatically get the right to remain, but have to demonstrate a clean criminal record and the ability to support themselves.

This essentially bars informal migrant workers from regularising their status, says Gabriela Liguori, the director of CAREF, a local NGO supporting migrants and refugees. “The changes Argentina is living through are all about expelling poor people,” she adds.

The crackdown in Argentina mirrors Donald Trump’s expulsion of 230,000 foreign-born residents from inside the United States in 2025. A further 250,000 were arrested at the border and deported.

Kronawetter, Paraguay’s migration director, says most of the 20 Paraguayans deported in Trump’s first year back in office were recent arrivals, and that they were deported on commercial flights: a contrast to the shackled deportees sent to El Salvador, Brazil and beyond.

He points to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data showing 33 Paraguayans were deported in 2024, the final year of the Biden administration. In the previous five years, the average figure was nine. “Trump has deported way fewer,” Kronawetter adds.

He thinks this supposedly lenient treatment by the Department of Homeland Security could reflect the ever-closer relationship between the Peña and Trump administrations.

In April, Paraguay received the first group of undocumented migrants from third countries expelled by the United States. Following an agreement in February that has not been published, a further 25 will be sent every month to Paraguay, where the UN will help them return to their home countries.

More than the hostile mood music in Argentina, Núñez, the former maid, is fed up with its screwball economics, rollercoaster rate of inflation, and punishing cost of living.

In March, she travelled back to Paraguay to visit relatives and plan her definitive return in December. The plan is to start another business and cultivate fruit trees in the countryside with her family.

“There’s no future” in Argentina, Núñez complains. “It’s like we’re stuck and can’t make any progress.”

It’s a different picture in Spain, the EU’s fastest-growing major economy, and home to a fast-growing community of at least 162,000 Paraguayan migrants.

In April, the socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez at a stroke provided a pathway to legal residency for half a million undocumented workers.

Sánchez described his regularisation decree as “an act of justice and a necessity”, praising foreigners for propping up the economy, sustaining public services, and helping to build a “rich, open and diverse Spain.”

Someone who may take advantage of such policies is Marino Cabrera.

Cabrera, 53, has spent 25 years manning a kerbside fruit stall under a mango tree in Las Mercedes. He’s seen the historic Asunción barrio gradually give way to coffee shops, Venezuelan delivery drivers, and AirBnbs.

On a good day, he can earn 300,000 guaraníes ($50). But once he loads his truck with produce from the Mercado de Abasto and pays for gas, he barely breaks even.

Despite spending ten years in the army, starting as a 15-year-old cadet, he has few savings and no health insurance.

“In this country, it’s illegal to get sick,” Cabrera chuckles. “Things are difficult for regular folks. Lots of people are leaving.”

Last year, he joined them, spending seven months in Madrid. He worked 18-hour shifts refurbishing a tower block, earning up to €180 ($210) per day. “The engineers were Dominican women,” he recalls. “The rest of us were Paraguayan.”

He felt at home in Spain, but missed his family. “If it was just me, I wouldn’t have come back,” reflects Cabrera, pausing to pass a bag of pineapples and bananas into a car window. He hopes to return for another building job soon.

Paraguayans are desperate for work, Cabrera says, “but they can’t find any.” His daughter earned a psychology degree three years ago, but is still unemployed. Meanwhile, he remarks, “the foreigners that come here never want to leave. They live like kings.”

A few weeks later, the Post drops by to take Cabrera’s photo, but his stall has been dismantled. A month passes, and the corner remains empty.

The green paradise

El Paraíso Verde was reportedly planned for as many as 20,000 residents. It is currently home to around 200. Video: Matteo Fabi for The Paraguay Post.

Despite the growing buzz around Paraguay as a dream destination, some have found it isn’t all they were promised.

In the rural southern department of Caazapá, down a muddy track thirty minutes from the nearest town, a snail-shaped real-estate project is slowly rising out of a swamp.

El Paraíso Verde was founded as a “spiritual community” of dissenting worldviews in 2016 by Austrian nationals Erwin and Sylvia Annau.

On his website, Annau describes himself as a serial freedom-seeker who has “intensively” explored 16 religions and philosophies — including Scientology, which he now calls a “cult”.

Liberty, however, has its limits at El Paraíso Verde. LGBT people are not welcome. Nor are the vaccinated.

Interest in the contrarian colony spiked during the pandemic, as the couple’s online materials encouraged other European settlers to flee the “matrix” of lockdowns, Covid-19 jabs, chemtrails, 5G, and immigration from Muslim-majority countries.

“Europe is fucked,” says Peter Brandt, a 56-year-old former appliance salesman from Germany with a suntanned scalp who shows The Paraguay Post around.

They are the world’s biggest community of deliberately unvaccinated people, he claims: “It’s allowed to live here if you accept the rules, like no chemicals.”

A brochure in the guest accommodation lists respect, solidarity and freedom among the community’s principles, as well as “the prevention and clarification of rumors.” Residents offer each other Reiki and Theta healing, electromagnetic treatment with a Tesla coil, 3D printing services, and a shooting club.

Outside, blonde children in waterwings splash around in a silty lake. A merry, ponytailed Bavarian called Stephan prepares delicious bread rolls, coffee and plum cakes in a repurposed shipping container.

Asked why he decided to move to Paraguay, he looks stumped.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “Must ask Erwin. I think Paraguay is very simple to come here.”

Paraguayan former soldiers with pistols and shotguns stand guard at the entrances, and at a gate separating the majority of the settlers from the Annaus’ residence and most of the amenities.

Brandt takes us through the gate for a tour of the main residential sector in his motorbike trailer. Most of the plots are vacant or half-finished: right now, only 180 to 200 people live here.

Others feature a hodge-podge of architectural techniques. There’s a two-storey log cabin on sale for $1m, a construction resembling a Mongolian yurt, a half-buried, hobbit-like house, and several Spanish-style villas.

One of the nicest is home to Heinz Klötzner, a spry 76-year-old who moved here during the pandemic with his late wife. He has since created a butterfly-filled garden with papaya, grapefruit and orange trees and a natural pool where he swims every morning.

“Five years ago, there was nothing here,” Klötzner says, showing the Post a picture of a tangled field. “I don’t want to go back to Europe. Life there is so hectic.”

In common with several other settlers, Klötzner also grew up in communist East Germany.

That experience means “we can see the next dictatorship coming,” explains Brandt, who supports himself with a few hundred dollars a month from an AI-powered cryptocurrency trading platform.

For some, this Paraguayan Eden reportedly turned out to be a legal and financial hell. Former investors and residents have accused the colony’s operating company, Reljuv S.A., of swindling them out of tens of millions of dollars.

Some buyers say they packed up their lives in Europe, invested their savings in property in El Paraíso Verde — only to arrive and find that construction hadn’t begun and their land titles were unclear or contested.

In late 2025, the public prosecutor’s office in the nearby city of Villarrica charged Erwin and Sylvia Annau — as well as Reljuv’s former president, Argentine businessman and local powerbroker Juan Buker — with fraud.

In the years prior to Paraguay’s 2023 election, the three were photographed alongside Horacio Cartes and Santiago Peña, then a presidential candidate, during a visit to El Paraíso Verde. They also appeared arm-in-arm with the powerful ex-president and his protégé at a campaign event in Caazapá hosted by Buker. A lawyer representing alleged victims has claimed that investors’ money was spent by Peña’s campaign.

The Annaus and Buker have blamed each other for the financial irregularities, according to local media. None have been found guilty of any wrongdoing in connection with El Paraíso Verde.

Thomas Schulz — a gruff, bear-like former orchestra director from Baden-Württemberg — has become an unlikely unofficial spokesman for the alleged victims.

In 2021, he relocated to Paraguay with his wife and son, who has ADHD and struggled during the pandemic with mask mandates and social distancing at school.

“I was against all these stupid orders,” Schulz tells The Paraguay Post at a local restaurant. “I’m not against all vaccinations, only genetically modified vaccinations.”

Immigration was also a push factor. “I’m not a racist,” he says. “I have lots of friends who are white, black. But you can’t eliminate the white race.”

His family settled in the lush Yybyturuzú hills. Schulz became a small-scale rancher, trading his tuxedo for a frayed flannel shirt, crocs, and dirt under his fingernails. His son, now homeschooled, speaks Guaraní with local friends.

He encountered El Paraíso Verde’s videos and steered clear: “I watched five minutes, then had enough.” But over the following years he met “30 to 40 people” who had lost everything and were scared to speak up.

The Swabian cowboy became their de facto advocate, with several leaving the country and transferring him their properties in El Paraíso Verde in the hope he could claw back some of their investment.

“I don’t want to be more rich with this,” he explains. “If I sell something, I’ll use the money to continue the fight.”

He feels sorry for the remaining residents, saying they have been made to live in fear of regular Paraguayans, calling the gated community a “cage” and the Annaus a “dictatorship.”

“I don’t want to have the same [as] in Germany,” he explains, “a country inside a country. If I migrate to a country, I want to be part of it … What kind of life it is, if you are only afraid?”

Despite his battle with its management — he adds with a hint of mischief — El Paraíso Verde remains one of his top customers, paying premium prices for his organic, vaccine-free beef and manure.

Back at the settlement, Brandt complains that “depressed” investors who lost money are spreading unnecessary negativity. “That’s in the past,” he says.

In an interview posted to YouTube last year, the Annaus say they are transitioning to a democratic model of governance. They declare the “corruption crisis” to be over, blaming it on local associates who took advantage of them not speaking Spanish.

Erwin closes by promising to “make El Paraíso Verde great again.”

“Come by and see for yourself,” the silver-haired tax consultant and alternative healer tells viewers. “Make up your own mind.”

Schulz, polishing off a plate of pork chops with extra sauce in the nearby diner, is unconvinced the leadership of the colony — which is now divided into two entities called Pira Tava and Paraiso Homes — has turned over a new leaf.

“Even if a rat is born in a stable, it will never be a racing horse,” he concludes, before settling his heavy frame onto his motocarro pickup and rattling off down the road.

A forever home?

Some of those who come to Paraguay in search of paradise seem to have found it. For their descendants, the grass often looks greener elsewhere.

In Nueva Londres — today a sleepy town 80 miles east of Asunción — surnames like Kennedy, Smith, and Murray are all that remain of the Anglo-Australian socialist experiment.

Serving up scone-like chipa avati and a beef vori-vori stew in her verdant garden, Blanca McCreen, 62, says she wishes she learned English.

“My grandfather spoke it perfectly,” she recalls. “But we’ve lost all those things.”

“Nueva Londres,” she adds, “is very peaceful. There’s no crime. What’s lacking most of all is work. Those that can, leave.”

Her son, Hector, may soon be one of them. He works as a doctor in the nearby town of Coronel Oviedo, but his career can only progress so far in Paraguay.

Promotions usually go to members of the Colorado Party, he explains, which has governed Paraguay for most of the past 80 years.

“There are people working alongside me who didn’t lift a finger to get there,” complains Hector, a softly-spoken 29-year-old.

Asked where he might seek fresher pastures, he is emphatic: “England, without a doubt.” He wants to study in the UK, and is curious about his roots.

The drizzly British climate, he adds wistfully — as the mid-afternoon sun beats down — also appeals: “For me, a rainy day is the best.”

Back in Piribebuy, Simpson and Genaw acknowledge their adoptive country isn’t perfect.

She mentions the Paraguayan penchant for fireworks on every occasion, and how some of their neighbours throw trash in the nearby stream.

But asked if Paraguay feels like her forever home, Simpson nods fervently. “Yes, yes,” she repeats, switching into Spanish. “Para siempre.”

TOP STORY

The U.S. pressures Paraguay to stick with Taiwan

Whoever said long-distance relationships never last clearly hasn’t heard of Paraguay and Taiwan.

The East Asian island nation and its landlocked South American ally lie some 20,000 kilometres distant on opposite sides of the planet.

This trans-Pacific tryst dates back to 1957, when their Cold War dictators formed an alliance to stamp out Communism in their respective hemispheres. (Alfredo Stroessner was largely successful, Chiang Kai-shek not so much).

The unlikely couple have since settled into a comfortable marriage of convenience. Taiwan donates electric buses, a presidential plane, and second-hand helicopters that saw service in the Vietnam War. It paid for Paraguay’s spaceship-like Congress building, completed in 2003, and still funds repairs.

The Asian tiger, which manufactures over 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips, also gives scholarships for dozens of Paraguayans to study STEM in Taipei every year. It is now building a campus near Luque for a technical university worth upwards of $18m. It’s also trying to kickstart a local fish-farming industry.

For its part, Paraguay sticks up for Taiwan at the UN and continues to recognise it as a sovereign state: one of just 12 countries to still do so worldwide. It’s a stance that irritates China, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province and makes no secret of its desire to (re)assert control.

Until recently, despite lacking formal diplomatic relations with Beijing, Paraguay seemed able to play both sides.

It ships large quantities of its soybean harvest indirectly to China through Argentina and Uruguay, much of it transported by Chinese agribusiness firm COFCO. Paraguay bought $5.6bn in Chinese goods in 2025: a third of its imports. Lawmakers have enjoyed all-expenses-paid trips to Taipei and Beijing.

Meanwhile, Paraguayan politicians have hinted that their loyalty to Taiwan has a price tag – former president Mario Abdo Benítez demanded $1bn in annual investment in 2022 – and an expiry date.

Paraguay is open to a regional free trade deal with China – then-economy minister Carlos Fernández Valdovinos told me last year – “as long as they don’t put conditions on who we can have a beer with.”

“Right now,” he added, “we want to drink a beer with Taiwan.”

Yet as I recently reported for The New York Times, this geopolitical love triangle is fast becoming a square, with the United States acting as an increasingly aggressive wingman for Taiwan.

Donald Trump’s White House is determined to fight China’s growing influence in Latin America, which it sees as its back yard.

It has pressured Chile to drop a proposed submarine fibre-optic cable to Hong Kong, pushed Panama into handing control of Chinese-operated harbours to U.S. firms, and warned Peru about ceding sovereignty to a Chinese megaport.

And in Paraguay, the so-called Donroe doctrine manifests as hawk-like vigilance over anything perceived as likely to tip the scales in favour of Beijing.

U.S. officials have accused Chinese hackers of being behind recent cyberattacks against Paraguayan government institutions, and praised Paraguay for excluding Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from bidding for a contract to roll out 5G.

According to local press reports and one Paraguayan official, the U.S. has withdrawn visas from at least 11 Paraguayan lawmakers – including two from the ruling Colorado Party – after they expressed support for China or travelled to Beijing at the invitation of the Chinese government last year.

When I asked the U.S. government about this, they deployed what you might call strategic ambiguity.

A spokesperson said the State Department can deny visas if the individual’s “proposed activities would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

THE POST TAKE:

The mounting U.S. pressure seems to be having a chilling effect on pro-China opinion. Several interviewees for my Times story were wary of voicing any sentiment suggesting the Paraguay-Taiwan friendship may not be eternal.

In 2022, Pedro Galli, the then-president of the ARP, an influential agribusiness lobby group, railed at how an alliance signed by “two bloodstained dictators” nearly 70 years ago is preventing Paraguay’s ranchers from selling their beef to China.

He called the alliance with Taiwan “stupid” and said it reduced Paraguayans to the status of “beggars”. He later threatened to “run naked through the street in protest.”

Galli didn’t reply to my requests for comment. And his successor is less outspoken: he cancelled our interview, then offered to answer written questions instead.

Jessica Chenu, a Paraguayan lawyer who is the commercial director of the Paraguay-China Chamber of Commerce – located in an old house a few blocks from Plaza Uruguaya – said Paraguayan firms are dying to do business with Beijing. But she was unable to connect me with any willing to speak on the record.

Chenu – who previously worked at the Chinese Military Museum in Beijing – was also desperate to reiterate that the Chamber is independent of the Chinese government and takes no position on diplomatic recognition.

She referred my questions on the topic to the Chinese consulate in São Paulo, saying she was visiting the following week and could chase them up.

The line from la embajada – as the U.S. Embassy in Asunción is widely known – is that Paraguay’s position on Taiwan versus China is for Paraguay to decide, and that the U.S. exercises no pressure behind the scenes.

Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, has argued the same. “Even if the United States were against it, I would still support Taiwan,” he told a local chat show in August.

But when U.S. officials publicly praise Paraguay for keeping China at arm’s length, and reportedly strip visas from Paraguayan politicians who stray too close to Beijing’s embrace, there can be little doubt as to where Washington’s preferences lie.

A raft of donations to Paraguay’s armed forces, and a seat at the top table at the Board of Peace for Peña, meanwhile illustrate the perks of staying in the good graces of Trump and Marco Rubio. This combination of carrot and stick are likely to keep Paraguay firmly on Team Taiwan for years to come.

Taiwan can also point to a deepening partnership on technology and trade: it’s now Paraguay’s top market for pork, and a major buyer of its beef. More cooperation agreements are due to be signed when Peña visits Taiwan this weekend, accompanied by top ministers and more than 50 business figures.

Others accuse the United States of hypocrisy: strong-arming Paraguay to shun China, when Washington has maintained diplomatic relations with Beijing since 1979 and did $660bn worth of business with the People’s Republic in 2024 alone.

“But us, their lapdogs, we’re not allowed,” opposition senator Esperanza Martínez told me, arguing that Paraguay is leaving billions in trade and investment on the table by turning its back on the PRC.

She said she had marvelled at China’s modern cities and high-tech industries on a recent visit, and recalled how – as health minister in the Lugo administration (2008-12) – the Taiwanese embassy had sent her flowers every year on her birthday.

“They’re using us,” she added. “And we’re selling ourselves very cheaply.”

— Laurence Blair

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TOP STORY

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, had eight kids. Carolina, 43, has two. 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 rate is still dropping 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 trend 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 increasing 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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