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Hace 49 años, en un cementerio de las afueras de Asunción, una madre estaba enterrando a su hijo junto a una pareja joven cuando un camión se detuvo cerca de ellos.

Cuatro policías y un sepulturero bajaron un cajón rústico de tablas clavadas. Lo enterraron sin ceremonia en un pedazo de tierra sin nombre, debajo de un tajy (lapacho).

Era marzo de 1977. Paraguay llevaba casi un cuarto de siglo bajo la dictadura más larga de Sudamérica.

El régimen del general Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), armado y financiado por Estados Unidos, hacía desaparecer a sus críticos. Preguntar era algo peligroso.

Pero a uno de los presentes le ganó la curiosidad. Se acercó al sepulturero y le preguntó en guaraní quién estaba en el cajón.

“Dicen que le mataron al doctor Agustín Goiburú”, le respondió. “Y acá por lo menos debajo de esta sombra va a descansar tranquilo”.

Agustín era el enemigo público número uno del régimen.

Médico cirujano y dirigente del Movimiento Popular Colorado (Mopoco), una disidencia del propio partido de Stroessner, curaba a víctimas de tortura, denunciaba los abusos y les ayudaba a escapar.

También planeó matar al dictador colocando explosivos cerca de su comitiva. Tras ser secuestrado en 1969, se fugó de su celda por un túnel y volvió al exilio en Argentina.

Entonces el régimen stronista, miembro fundador del Operativo Cóndor, un plan regional para exterminar a la izquierda, lo mandó secuestrar otra vez en febrero de 1977. Lo torturó y lo desapareció.

Rogelio Goiburú, que entonces tenía 20 años, nunca más volvió a ver a su papá.

Hoy Rogelio, también médico, dirige el organismo estatal encargado de buscar a los cientos de personas desaparecidas por la dictadura. Entre ellas, Agustín.

La búsqueda de toda su vida tiene ahora una nueva esperanza.

Hace poco salió a la luz un testimonio de hace décadas. Lo reveló el hijo de uno de los testigos, que se acordó de la historia al ver a Rogelio en la tele. Según ese relato, los restos de Agustín están en el Cementerio del Este de Asunción.

La historia, tal como la cuenta Rogelio, es la que abre esta nota.

Rogelio también habló con trabajadores del cementerio municipal, quienes le contaron que colegas ya jubilados les habían hablado de un entierro clandestino cerca del muro perimetral, en ese entonces un alambrado.

“Y por eso no podemos no excavar en este lugar”, dijo Rogelio, hoy de 70 años, a The Paraguay Post la semana pasada. Unos voluntarios paleaban la tierra bajo el tajy retorcido que hoy da sombra a un amontonamiento de panteones familiares.

Es una versión macabra de buscar una aguja en un pajar: ubicar un cuerpo escondido entre miles.

“Encontramos fragmentos óseos”, dice Adriana Sartorio, parte de un equipo de científicos forenses de la Universidad Estatal de Arizona (ASU) que apoya la investigación. “No podemos decir absolutamente nada sobre el origen de los fragmentos, pero se encontraron fragmentos”.

La idea es extraer ADN, compararlo con muestras de Rogelio y su familia e identificar a Agustín. Se trata, dice Sartorio, “de tratar de reconstruir y darle una muerte digna a la gente que en verdad necesita por la injusticia que el gobierno de este entonces nos daba”.

Sartorio tiene 44 años y es paraguaya. Su papá conoció a muchos de los desaparecidos de la dictadura. “Es algo que es personal también”.

Después de décadas de callejones sin salida, Rogelio tiene una confianza serena.

“Papá era un poco cabezón, tenía la cabeza un poco grande y yo me voy a dar cuenta por el tamaño del cráneo”.

También pide a otros testigos, incluidos los policías que enterraron a Agustín, que se animen a hablar y “pierdan el miedo”.

Le preguntamos por qué tendrían miedo todavía. Rogelio sonríe y señala al pequeño grupo de sobrevivientes y acompañantes que lo apoyan en la búsqueda.

“Esa pregunta la podría responder cualquiera de los que estamos por acá… Stroessner se fue al exilio, cayó del poder, pero el stronismo sigue vigente”.

Allegados de Stroessner siguen ocupando cargos. El mismo Partido Colorado del dictador sigue en el poder. Pocos de sus funcionarios han sido condenados.

“Jamás a nadie se le ocurrió, siendo altas autoridades del Partido Colorado, hacer un acto de repudio, de disculpas, de todos los daños que causó, no solamente a… a las víctimas sobrevivientes que hasta ahora están, sino también a la ciudadanía, al pueblo paraguayo”, sigue Rogelio.

El actual presidente, Santiago Peña, dijo tras ser electo que Stroessner trajo “estabilidad” y progreso, aunque reconoció un “déficit” del régimen en derechos humanos.

Le preguntamos a Rogelio si su oficina, la Dirección de Memoria Histórica y Reparación, recibe fondos del Gobierno.

“¿Cómo se dice cero en inglés?”, responde. “Nothing”.

Mientras los policías paraguayos andan en camionetas Hilux, Rogelio va a la excavación en un Mercedes-Benz sedán de 1986 que ya acusa sus años.

A veces usa la camioneta de su mamá, “que es más vieja todavía”. El vehículo que le dio el Gobierno está descompuesto, cuenta, y no le reembolsan lo que gasta en arreglos.

Los especialistas de Arizona pagaron sus propios pasajes, prestaron sus instrumentos y donaron su tiempo. Un fondo de la ONU ayudó a pagar a los sepultureros y a cubrir gastos.

Tras cuatro días de palear y cernir tierra, el optimismo empecinado se apaga un poco.

El grupo exhuma varios esqueletos que ya figuran en los registros del cementerio. También encuentra fragmentos de al menos otros dos cuerpos.

“Los huesos están muy degradados y desconozco en este momento cuáles son las capacidades del laboratorio científico para rescatar material genético”, explica Rogelio.

Los restos se analizarán la semana que viene en la Morgue Judicial y después irán a Arizona para más pruebas. “Y así en conjunto poder determinar qué es, cuál va a ser la conducta”.

Antes de irse, el grupo vuelve a cubrir las tumbas y deja ramos de flores sobre la tierra colorada y húmeda.

LA MIRADA DEL POST:

Las nuevas excavaciones de Rogelio llegan en un momento delicado.

De visita en Paraguay esta semana, el alto diplomático estadounidense Christopher Landau firmó un acuerdo de seguridad fronteriza y otro para ayudar a Paraguay a interceptar avionetas sospechosas de transportar drogas.

“Para mí serán días muy emotivos, estar de vuelta en Paraguay”, dijo Landau, vicesecretario de Estado de EE. UU.

Es hijo de George Landau, embajador de Washington ante el régimen stronista entre 1972 y 1977. Recordó con cariño su infancia en Asunción, ciudad que dejó a los 13 años.

Documentos desclasificados del Gobierno estadounidense indican que Landau padre estaba al tanto del Operativo Cóndor por lo menos desde agosto de 1976. Estados Unidos siguió dándole armas y dinero a Stroessner durante años.

Consultada por el Post, la embajada de EE. UU. en Asunción confirmó que el vicesecretario no hizo ninguna referencia a la dictadura stronista en esta visita.

Landau sigue su viaje a la Argentina de Javier Milei. Su gira llega mientras la Casa Blanca de Donald Trump presiona a sus aliados regionales para que se sumen a su ofensiva contra supuestos “narcoterroristas”.

Según organizaciones de derechos humanos, EE. UU. ha matado a más de 230 personas en un año de bombardeos por tierra y mar, respaldándose en evidencias endebles.

Paraguay descartó por ahora que tropas estadounidenses combatan a bandas criminales en su territorio, pero sí autorizó entrenamientos y ejercicios conjuntos. Mientras tanto, casos de gatillo fácil entre sus propias fuerzas de seguridad han ido en aumento.

En agosto, agentes antidrogas mataron a un docente y a un líder indígena en la comunidad Tekoha Y’apo, supuestamente en defensa propia. La comunidad dice que los dos hombres fueron emboscados y ejecutados en el marco de un conflicto por tierras.

En diciembre de 2023, policías y militares irrumpieron en la penitenciaría de Tacumbú, en Asunción, para retomar el control. Murieron un policía y 11 reclusos. El presidente Peña calificó la operación de “histórica y sin precedentes”.

En 2020, el entonces presidente Mario Abdo Benítez posó triunfante después de que una fuerza de tarea atacara en Concepción a un campamento supuestamente del EPP, un grupo armado de izquierda.

Poco después se supo que dos niñas de 11 años, hijas de miembros del EPP, habían muerto en el operativo. Las autoridades las enterraron ese mismo día en un cementerio local, sin autopsia.

“Hoy vivimos en este espacio, donde por lo menos ya no nos pueden secuestrar así impunemente, torturar y asesinar y ocultar nuestros cuerpos. Sin embargo, desde luego que sabemos que allá en los confines de nuestra patria se siguen haciendo esas cosas”, sostiene Rogelio.

Los jóvenes saben poco de la dictadura, agrega. Por eso plantea que las escuelas deberían tener la obligación de enseñar las conclusiones de la Comisión de Verdad y Justicia, que investigó el saldo siniestro del régimen: 3.470 exiliados, 18.772 torturados, 59 ejecutados extrajudicialmente y 336 desaparecidos.

Casi dos tercios de los paraguayos nacieron después de 1989, cuando los generales de Stroessner despacharon al envejecido dictador a una playa de Brasil.

Según el último informe de Latinobarómetro, una encuesta de opinión regional, los paraguayos muestran una profunda ambivalencia respecto a la democracia imperfecta que vino después.

El 71% dijo que no le importaría que llegara al poder un gobierno no democrático si resolviera los problemas del país. Es el porcentaje más alto de toda América Latina.

El 55% de los encuestados paraguayos dijo que la democracia puede funcionar sin partidos políticos. El 33%, sin elecciones.

En el cementerio, el Post le pregunta a Rogelio cuál es su mensaje para la ciudadanía. Su respuesta es tajante: “Que esto no tiene que volver a suceder en Paraguay”.

TOP STORY

Kidnapped by Stroessner, could Agustín Goiburú finally be found?

Leé en español

Forty-nine years ago, a mother was burying her child in a cemetery on the eastern outskirts of Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, accompanied by a young couple, when a truck pulled up nearby.

Four police officers and a gravedigger took out a roughly hewn coffin of nailed-together wooden boards. They interred it, without ceremony, in an unmarked patch of earth beneath a lapacho tree.

It was March 1977, and Paraguay was nearly a quarter-century into South America’s longest dictatorship.

The 1954-89 regime of General Alfredo Stroessner, armed and bankrolled by the United States, made critics vanish. Asking questions was dangerous.

But curiosity got the better of one of the bystanders. He approached and asked the gravedigger, in the native Guaraní language, who was in the box.

“They say they killed Dr. Agustín Goiburú,” came the reply. “And at least he will rest easy here in the shade.”

Agustín was the regime’s public enemy number one.

A surgeon and a leader of the dissident MOPOCO movement, he patched up torture victims, denounced their treatment, and helped them escape.

Agustín also plotted to assassinate Stroessner by planting explosives near the dictator’s motorcade. After being kidnapped in 1969, he tunnelled out of his cell and returned to exile in Argentina.

So the Stroessner regime – a founding member of a region-wide scheme to exterminate leftists called Operation Condor – had him abducted once more in February 1977, tortured, and disappeared.

Rogelio Goiburú, then 20 years old, never saw his father again.

Today, Rogelio, also a doctor, leads a state body tasked with searching for the hundreds of people forcibly disappeared by the Stroessner regime: including Agustín.

His lifelong quest has now been given precious new hope.

Decades-old testimony recently came to light – passed on by the son of one of the eyewitnesses, whose memory was jogged after seeing Rogelio on TV – that Agustín’s remains lie in the Cementerio del Este in Asunción.

The story, as Rogelio relays it, is outlined above.

He also spoke to workers at the municipal graveyard, who said retired colleagues had told them about the clandestine burial near the perimeter wall.

“That’s why we have to dig here,” Rogelio, now 70, told The Paraguay Post last week, as helpers shovelled the soil beneath the gnarled lapacho tree, now shading a jumble of family crypts.

The result is a macabre version of searching for a needle in a haystack: trying to locate one particular body hidden among thousands.

“We’ve found fragments of bone,” says Adriana Sartorio, part of a team of forensic scientists from Arizona State University who are supporting the investigation. “We can’t say absolutely anything about their origin.”

The hope, she says, is to extract DNA, compare it with samples from Rogelio and his family, identify Agustín, and restore some of the dignity denied him in death.

Her own father knew many of those disappeared by the dictatorship, adds Sartorio, 44, originally from Paraguay: “It’s also personal.”

And after decades of dead-ends, Rogelio is quietly confident.

“Dad was a little big-headed,” he adds. “If we find him, I’ll recognise him from the size of the skull.”

He is also appealing for other witnesses, including the police officers who buried Agustín, to come forward and “lose their fear”.

Asked why they would still be afraid, Rogelio smiles, gesturing to the small group of survivors and supporters accompanying his search.

“Anyone here could answer that question,” he says. “Stroessner was exiled, he fell from power, but stronismo remains in force.”

Associates of Stroessner still hold office. The dictator’s Colorado Party remains in power. Few of his functionaries have been convicted.

“It’s never occurred to anyone,” Rogelio continues, “to make an act of repudiation, of asking for forgiveness for all the damage [the dictatorship] caused: not only to the surviving victims but the Paraguayan people.”

Paraguay’s current president, Santiago Peña, has said Stroessner brought “stability” and progress, while criticising the regime’s “deficit” in terms of human rights.

The Post asks Rogelio if his office, the Dirección de Memoria Histórica y Reparación, receives any government funding.

“How do you say zero in English?” he responds. “Nothing.”

Where Paraguay’s cops drive Hiluxes, Rogelio commutes to the dig in a timeworn 1986 Mercedes Benz sedan.

Sometimes he borrows his mother’s truck, “which is even older.” A government-provided vehicle has broken down, he adds, and he doesn’t get reimbursed for repairs.

The specialists from Arizona have paid for their own flights, loaned their instruments, and donated their time. A UN grant has helped pay the gravediggers and cover costs.

After four days of shovelling and sifting, the dogged optimism fades a little.

The group exhumes several skeletons already registered in the cemetery’s records, as well as fragments of at least two other bodies.

“The bones are very degraded,” Rogelio explains. “I don’t know right now whether the lab will be able to extract any genetic material.”

The remains will be analysed in a judicial morgue next week, he adds, before being sent for testing at ASU. “Together, we can determine the way forward.”

Before leaving, the search party fills in the graves once more, leaving bouquets of flowers on the humid red earth.

THE POST TAKE:

Rogelio’s latest excavations take place at a sensitive moment.

Visiting Paraguay this week, senior US diplomat Christopher Landau has signed agreements on border security and helping Paraguay intercept planes thought to be transporting drugs.

“For me these will be very emotional days, being back in Paraguay,” said Landau, the US Deputy Secretary of State.

The son of George Landau, Washington’s ambassador to the Stroessner regime between 1972 and 1977, he has reminisced fondly about his childhood in Asunción, which he departed aged 13.

Declassified US government files indicate Landau senior was aware of Operation Condor from at least August 1976. The US government continued to give Stroessner weapons and money for years afterwards.

Consulted by the Post, the US embassy in Asunción confirmed Deputy Secretary Landau had made no reference to the Stroessner dictatorship on this visit.

Landau’s charm offensive – he travels to Javier Milei’s Argentina this afternoon – comes as Donald Trump’s White House pushes regional allies to join its assault on alleged “narco-terrorists.”

A year-long US bombing campaign on land and sea has killed more than 230 people on flimsy evidence, say human-rights watchdogs.

While Paraguay has so far ruled out US troops fighting gangs on the ground, it has authorised joint training and exercises. Meanwhile, its own security forces are increasingly trigger-happy.

In August, anti-drug agents shot dead a teacher and Indigenous leader in the community of Tekoha Y’apo, supposedly in self-defence. The community says the two men were ambushed and executed as part of a land dispute.

In December 2023, police and soldiers stormed the lawless Tacumbú jail in Asunción to reimpose order, leaving one officer and 11 prisoners dead. President Peña hailed the operation as “historic and unprecedented.”

In 2020, then-president Mario Abdo Benítez posed triumphantly for photos after a task force stormed a camp supposedly belonging to the EPP, a leftist armed group, in Concepción.

It soon transpired that two 11-year-old girls, children of EPP members, had been killed during the operation. The authorities buried them on the same day in a local cemetery without performing an autopsy.

“Today, at least, they can’t kidnap us with impunity, torture and murder us, and hide our bodies,” Rogelio argues.

“But we know that, in remote parts of our country, these things keep on happening.”

Young people know little about the dictatorship, he adds, arguing schools should be made to teach the findings of a Truth and Justice Commission that investigated the regime’s grim toll: 3,470 exiled, 18,722 tortured, 59 murdered and 336 disappeared.

Nearly two thirds of Paraguayans were born after 1989, when Stroessner’s generals packed off the aging autocrat to a Brazilian beach.

According to the latest report by Latinobarómetro, a region-wide opinion poll, Paraguayans are deeply ambivalent about the imperfect democracy that resulted.

71% said they wouldn’t mind if a non-democratic government came to power as long as it solved the country’s problems: the highest percentage of any Latin American nation.

55% of Paraguayan respondents said democracy could function without political parties, 33% without elections.

Asked by the Post at the cemetery what his message is for the Paraguayan public, Rogelio is emphatic: “We can’t let this happen again.”

Also in this issue:
Peña the Powerful · Cartes checkmated · Flooding displaces thousands · Extreme weather warning · Revealed: water-hungry data centres · Paraguayan master ceramicist comes to the UK · Local mayor bans Halloween, again

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TOP STORY

Could Latin America’s largest data centre be built in Paraguay?

Paraguay’s next great export, according to the businessmen behind Iguazú AI City, will be computing power.

Their proposed mega data centre amid the rolling farmland of Yguazú, Alto Paraná, would use the country’s cheap renewable electricity from the Itaipú dam to process artificial intelligence workloads for customers abroad.

Alejandro Zuccolillo, a real-estate and transport magnate and co-founder of project developer ARAICO, wants Paraguay to become “one of the world’s leaders in computing exports.”

The company, which he cofounded with Nicolás Arrellaga, says it will invest up to $12bn in Paraguay. That would make Iguazú AI City the biggest private project in Paraguayan history by far.

Its announced stages so far total $11.3bn: $300m initially, followed by two $5.5 bn expansions. The opening phase would draw 6 MWs of power, with infrastructure due in December and computing exports in March 2027.

Later stages would take the proposed supply from ANDE, Paraguay’s state electricity firm, to roughly 280 MW.

The 1.3 GW ARAICO says it will ultimately need — equivalent to two of Itaipú’s 20 turbines — would require private energy producers, few of which currently exist in Paraguay, to pick up the slack.

Washington had already spotted the resource. In May 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio highlighted Paraguay’s surplus hydropower as an opportunity for AI investment. A year later, Peter Thiel, the Palantir co-founder and Founders Fund partner, visited President Santiago Peña. Zuccolillo now names Founders Fund as ARAICO’s anchor investor.

ARAICO’s strongest argument is its proposed electricity tariff. It says it will pay ANDE $45 per megawatt-hour, rising annually by at least 2.5%, or in line with US inflation if higher.

That’s a much better deal then Paraguay gets from selling its spare power at cents on the dollar to Brazil. It would generate millions in revenue for ANDE that could help patch up Paraguay’s creaking and powercut-prone grid: attracting other investors and benefiting regular people.

Zuccolillo argues that proximity to Itaipú’s infrastructure keeps delivery costs down. Using the energy at home, he says, would allow Paraguay to “industrialize and create a new technological value chain.”

That’s the “for” case. Stacked against the project are a welter of questions about water use, noise pollution — and concerns that Paraguay could sign away its hugely valuable power to a project that is still largely pie in the sky.

Tech analyst Joaquín Morínigo notes there are no publicly verifiable customer contracts and financing for the larger, later phases; the initial 6 MW represents less than 0.5% of the promoted 1.3 GW. On October 1, Zuccollilo himself said the project’s contract with ANDE was still under review.

Morínigo also questions claims that the AI City will boost Paraguay’s digital sovereignty, given that the country relies on high-speed Internet connections that are routed through Brazil.

Expensive hardware depreciates quickly, he adds, while an AI investment bubble could see ARAICO’s massive facility left idling with little paying demand.

How much water the project will use is also unclear. Consenso uncovered plans for the company to dig 20 wells and consume an estimated 350,000 litres daily in order to cool its computers.

ARAICO engineer Verónica Peralta said those figures were outdated and that the first phase would use less than 1,000 litres a day: less than the soybean crops the data centre would replace.

The Paraguay Post was also the first to report last year on how a data center in Villarrica — in that case, used for bitcoin mining — was keeping residents up all night and driving them crazy with incessant noise. Locals are now suing the local representative of company in question, Bitfarms.

Yguazú AI City — which will be huge by comparison — could have similar impacts on residents of the town of Yguazú, which lies barely a kilometre away.

THE POST TAKE

The Araico project forms part of the pivot we described in May, when telecoms chief Gustavo Villate proposed to “unplug crypto and plug in AI.” With bitcoin mining contracts due to expire at the start of 2027, Peña’s government is courting investors with deeper pockets and greater political leverage.

The promised upgrade also serves a geopolitical purpose: presenting Paraguay’s alignment with Washington and Taiwan as a route into the tech industry, versus the commodity dependence offered by China.

In fact, ARAICO’s fully private campus contrasts with a different model in the same location: Peña’s proposed venture with Taiwan, Yguazú Digital. MITIC says this will be a 50/50 partnership, with Paraguay contributing energy and land and Taiwan supplying equipment.

Its proposed 10 MW computing pilot is estimated at $300–500m; the eventual ambition is 1 GW of computing capacity, requiring around 1.5 GW of electricity. Peña invited Taiwanese electronics producer Foxconn to join on October 1.

The private pipeline of existing projects offers further comparisons. Los Angeles-based X8 Cloud announced a 50 MW starting phase and a 500 MW ambition for 2027. Pardat Holding presented a proposed $1bn, 100 MW facility in Yguazú in March. Penguin says it is adapting existing bitcoin mining infrastructure for AI, advertising 100 MW live and a 500 MW pipeline.

All of these projects are at different stages; none of their promises are guaranteed.

US firm HIVE offers a more concrete test. It reported a live GPU cluster in Asunción in March, serving Columbia University researchers. The engagement is noncommercial, and HIVE’s much larger Paraguayan power footprint remains primarily Bitcoin infrastructure, but it demonstrates that foreign researchers can run small AI workloads in Paraguay.

Still, there are many reasons to doubt the sweeping promises of the US big tech lobby, as Jazmín Acuña of El Surti details. Imported equipment accounts for a big chunk of the investment, and the transfer of knowledge to the few local workers employed will probably be limited.

But rejecting AI data centres would not magically produce a traditional, jobs-heavy factory ready to buy the same power at the same prices.

ATOME illustrates why a traditional industrial project may not be a better bargain. The British fertilizer developer sought $30/MWh fixed for 15 years, while ANDE said it needed $44.30 just to break even. Peña’s government issued decrees offering cheap rates anyway, then withdrew them after pressure from ANDE’s union. ATOME has since issued notice of an investment dispute, threatening to sue Paraguay if no settlement is reached.

ARAICO’s higher, adjustable offer is therefore worth examining on its own merits. But Paraguay must subtract supply and infrastructure costs and foregone compensation from Brazil, then assess taxes, wages, and the impact on the local economy and environment.

The main risk is committing the country’s future energy capacity — which is scheduled to run out around 2030 — before the project’s customers and financing materialize. Each expansion should require a published assessment of available power, credible demand and guarantees against leaving ANDE with stranded infrastructure or costs passed to regular users.

Our story in May asked whether the AI pivot would create a real technology ecosystem or just another insiders’ industry like bitcoin mining. So far, despite all the fanfare, Iguazú AI City is yet to answer that question.

The AI industry needs cheap, reliable power. Paraguay has that, for now. That gives the country a chance to negotiate beneficial terms that transform its spare energy into lasting development.

Success would mean a stronger grid that works better for residents and attracts other industrial projects — and a local economy capable of doing more than supplying cheap power to the next global tech trend.

Also in this issue:
Whistleblowers sound alarm on Ueno · Peña calls for calm · World Bank upgrades growth prospects · Fitch plays hard to get · China targets top Paraguayan official · Prieto lays out 2028 plans · Flooding displaces hundreds

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MUNICIPAL ELECTION SPECIAL

A victory to build on — and a city to rebuild

Soledad “Sole” Núñez was elected mayor of Paraguay’s capital on Sunday: an unexpected, if narrow, victory that confounded the pollsters and left Paraguay’s ruling Colorado Party squabbling and blaming each other for the defeat.

Núñez celebrated her victory from the balcony of Bar Nacional, overlooking supporters gathered opposite the Pantheon of Heroes in downtown Asunción.

City Hall “will no longer be in the hands of a gang of criminals,” she told the crowd, promising to safeguard public money and punish those that misspend it.

“Today, the people won—the dream of living in a city that works,” she declared in an earlier speech, promising to govern for those who had voted against her as well as her supporters.

A few blocks away, a planned victory celebration in the Colorado Party HQ was being hastily dismantled.

Colorado candidate Camilo Pérez — who had earlier given what seemed like a premature victory speech — snapped angrily at reporters and rushed to get in his car and drive away.

President Santiago Peña meanwhile emphasised the closeness of the contest rather than acknowledging a decisive opposition victory in the capital.

With 99.92% of polling stations processed, Núñez had 133,325 votes to Camilo Pérez’s 128,301—a margin of 5,024, or 47.78% against 45.98%.

Pérez initially declined to concede, but on Monday recognized her victory, blaming “betrayal” by some Colorado council candidates for his loss.

Drilling into the data behind the ballots — both in Asunción and across the country — holds clues as to how the political scene will unfold in the run-up to pivotal presidential elections in 2028.

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MUNICIPAL ELECTION SPECIAL

Mother of cities, mother of battles

Residents of Asunción go to the polls on October 4 to decide who will run Paraguay’s beloved but dysfunctional capital for the next five years: a period when the city will be in the global spotlight like never before.

Sunday’s municipal elections, also taking place in 263 districts across the country, will pit the centrist former housing minister Soledad Núñez, 43, against longtime Paraguayan Olympic Committee boss Camilo Pérez, 57.

Both claim to represent change. Each has promised to reduce traffic, improve public transport, tidy up the streets, and fight waste at City Hall.

Polls suggest Núñez — who heads the Juntos por Asunción alliance of 16 small opposition parties, as well as being backed by the larger Liberal Party — is the underdog.

But the photogenic civil engineer has led an energetic campaign, reportedly touring all 69 of the capital’s neighbourhoods to listen to and canvas locals.

She has dismissed the surveys predicting a landslide victory for the ruling Colorado Party as a “sham”, and accused Pérez of being in the pocket of former president Horacio Cartes (2013-18).

“If we turn out on Sunday, the people win,” Núñez said at a closing campaign rally on Tuesday, where she appeared alongside opposition figures including Miguel Prieto, Johanna Ortega, and Ricardo Estigarribia.

“If we don’t, dirty money wins,” she added, calling on people to “trust that Asunción can be fixed if we come out to vote for something different.”

Núñez’s most eyecatching pledge is abolishing wheel clamps and the capital’s traffic cops, who are widely loathed for soliciting bribes. She says she will replace them with an “urban mobility agency” and a smart CCTV system using AI sensors.

Núñez has also vowed to kick out planilleros, penpushing time-wasters, from the 9,000-strong municipal payroll — and cut off “parallel cash flows” that she claims divert some 40% of the city’s budget to private individuals’ pockets.

“Nobody put me here and I owe nothing to anyone apart from you,” she said in a video message to social media followers on Thursday. “Enough with the abandonment of our city.”

Her campaign has also fielded a battery of other policies, from a 24/7 mental-health phoneline to free bus fares for students. She has also promised to restore a tram network to encourage visitors to rediscover the neglected historic centre of Asunción at the weekends.

Her pitch as a technocrat with advanced degrees from Oxford and Madrid is exemplified by her campaign jingle, Sole Solución (Sole Will Solve It).

But to put any of that into practice, she’ll have to defeat Pérez.

Formerly Paraguay’s top junior water skier and a South American Rally Champion, Pérez has no experience of elected office.

But he was handpicked by Cartes to succeed Óscar “Nenecho” Rodríguez and interim mayor Luis Bello, also Colorados, at City Hall.

Mayor Rodríguez resigned in 2025 after a probe found he diverted 500m guaraníes ($85m) in bonds to pay for things like salaries. The cash was meant to go towards storm drains: the lack of which sees even wealthy avenues swamped by floodwater and sewage during heavy rains.

The avuncular Pérez has also strived to present himself as a breath of fresh air, with the managerial experience needed to get the house in order.

He says he will put Asunción’s best foot forward as it hosts an opening match of the 2030 FIFA World Cup as well as the 2031 Pan American Games — and prepares to mark its 500th anniversary in 2037.

“Asunción is going to be the capital of South America,” Pérez told Última Hora in June.

But he admitted that the financial debacle under Rodríguez had left City Hall in “intensive care”, and that there was “a lot of work to do” to reach his objective of a clean, safe, and pothole-free capital.

The backing of Cartes, one of Paraguay’s richest men, means the former youth tennis star has a formidable warchest and party machine behind him.

According to official filings, Pérez spent nearly 2.4bn guaraníes ($400,000) of his own money on municipal primaries earlier this year in which he handily beat dissident Colorado candidate Arnaldo Samaniego.

That’s more than seven times the amount Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, spent on his own primary campaign in December 2022.

Cartes’s support, say critics, comes with strings attached — and will limit Pérez’s ability to meaningfully clean up City Hall, widely considered to be a Colorado vehicle of jobs-for-votes.

The Colorado candidate has denied being a soft touch on deadbeat desk jockeys, saying he will cut 3,000 jobs through a programme of voluntary redundancies financed by the Inter-American Development Bank.

”Being a planillero is a crime,” he recently told TV news, “and it won’t happen under our administration.”

THE POST TAKE

Perhaps conscious of these liabilities, Pérez has declined Núñez’s challenge to hold a public debate, depriving asuncenos of the chance to hear them defend their proposals.

But Núñez also has weaknesses. She has no party machine of her own. Her tenure as housing minister (2014-18) under Cartes is a double-edged sword.

She points to a track record of delivering 10,000 units of social housing per year, up from 1,600 in the previous period, and running the department without any credible allegations of corruption. Her time in government also shows she can work with the Colorados where necessary.

But serving under Cartes — who had already been linked by press reports and leaked US diplomatic cables to drug-trafficking, and was later sanctioned by the US for corruption, allegations he denies — weakens her claim to represent a break with the Colorado “regime”.

In 2023, Núnez was on the opposition ticket to become vice-president to Liberal Party presidential candidate Efraín Alegre. Their lacklustre campaign contributed to the opposition vote fragmenting, and the cementing of Colorado control over the presidency and Congress.

In the weeks before the polls, The Paraguay Post repeatedly communicated with Núñez and her press team, as well as a spokesperson for Pérez, but neither campaign agreed to provide a time or place for an interview.

Two minor candidates — Rodrigo “little Bukele” Franco, who vows to purge City Hall of “parasites”, and Arlene Aquino, a notary who prioritises tackling potholes and trash — are unlikely to pick up many votes.

Whoever wins will likely have to cut deals with a divided junta municipal, or city council. Núñez is fielding a slate of candidates from a range of centrist movements.

Prominent figures on Lista 3 include urban environmentalist Rosa Vacchetta, the anti-corruption advocate and sitting councillor Pablo Callizo, and public transport campaigner Mauricio Maluff.

But these will face competition for the opposition vote from a leftist bloc, the Alianza Socialista Unida, which contains figures like María Denis: a community organiser who ran soup kitchens in the deprived Tacumbú neighbourhood during the pandemic.

The current council has 15 Colorado members and nine from the opposition. 70 percent of the incumbents, including two who have served for 25 years, are seeking re-election.

And the mayor’s formal power only extends to the limits of Asunción proper, whose population is under 500,000 and falling.

This means she or he will have to work closely with local mayors — including those in Luque, Lambaré, San Lorenzo, and Mariano Roque Alonso — to tackle traffic and transport across the metropolitan area of 2.3m people.

Outside the capital, the Colorados hope to recapture local government in Ciudad del Este from Prieto’s Yo Creo Movement, and retake city hall in Encarnación from an opposition alliance.

Nestled in a bend of the Paraguay River, Asunción has been romanticised in song as the “capital of lovers, orange trees and flowers.” Locals grumble about how the capital is run, but are remarkably attached to it.

Recent surveys by the CIIS, a think-tank, shows 38% of asuncenos love their city, while 43% like it despite its defects. Half said it had got worse in the past five years, compared to a third who said it had improved.

Over a quarter said corruption at City Hall was the capital’s main problem, followed by 10% for public transport, 9% each for crime and public health, and 8% the state of roads. A striking 42% said they never or almost never visited squares or parks, mainly because they were afraid of crime.

Of 1700 participants, 45% were affiliated with the Colorados and less than 10% with opposition parties. But only 29% said they actually supported the Colorados, while nearly half said they were fans of no political party at all.

Such data suggest that private polling by Núñez’s campaign indicating a groundswell of anti-Colorado sentiment could play into her favour.

And while the Asunción municipal race has typically proved a poor predictor of presidential polls, some are treating Sunday as a dry run for whether the opposition can come together to beat the Colorado machine in 2028.

A defeat for Núñez could be read as a failure of her managerial, apolitical style and strengthen the case for a more populist figure like Prieto — or even Payo Cubas — to be on the opposition ticket in 18 months’ time.

Sunday’s result is unlikely to make international headlines, or to change things overnight in Asunción. But it could subtly change the course of Paraguayan politics for years to come.

TOP STORY

Paraguay’s shocking system of child exploitation

Late last month, The Paraguay Post published a story on criadazgo, the colonial-era custom that sees thousands of poor children sent from their homes to work as unpaid, live-in servants to wealthier families.

Carefully reported by Romina Aquino González, and with sensitive photography by María Isabel López, the piece immerses the reader in the topic through the stories of criadas — who often experience abuse and exploitation, scarring them for life.

Women like Sandra, who suffered the pain of being sent away from her sisters at the age of 11 to cook and clean for a family that treated her like a slave. Or Julia, who was mistreated, went hungry, and to this day bitterly regrets not being allowed to finish school.

Romina questioned the Colorado Party senator and former US ambassador who thinks criadazgo is “as Paraguayan as football or tereré” — and met with the experts, young people and lawmakers who are campaigning to end it for good.

We also included suggestions for our local readers to take action: from joining a nationwide union of children and teenagers who defend the right to dignified work, to lobbying legislators and learning more about the topic.

Funded entirely by subscriptions from our community of supporters, and available to read for free in English and Spanish, it’s one of the stories we’re proudest to have published to date at the Post.

But the really remarkable thing was what happened next.

After we posted a photo essay with survivors’ stories to Instagram, a trickle of people began to share their own. Then a handful more. Then a flood.

One commenter said she had been a criada from the age of six, suffering “physical and psychological” abuse that almost led her to suicide — and that only five years of therapy, emigrating abroad, and “constant resilience” had saved her.

“I was one of them,” wrote another, “and hugely suffered from the abusive slavery of the family that raised me. They didn’t let me study … it brings me joy to know that at least we’re talking about it more, and that congress is trying to find a solution.”

At the time of publishing, our photo essay on criadazgo had received over 110,000 views and 10,000 interactions, including nearly 250 comments and being shared more than 2,000 times.

Defenders of criadazgo often say it benefits poor kids by giving them bed, board, and an education. But as far as we can tell from this sample, few who go through it have anything positive to say.

In fact, weeks later, the heartbreaking, shocking, and moving stories continue to come in: of parents, grandparents, neighbours and childhood friends who experienced dire neglect and even torture, but still strove to turn their lives around.

One woman recalled being a “a girl without a childhood”, her memories “all of work”. Her own mother had been a criada from the age of eight.

She had made sure her 10-year-old son was able to study and play, with no more responsibilities than taking his plate to the sink, making his bed, and tidying away his toys.

“Thanks to God,” she added, “I broke the chain.”

According to Instagram’s data, nearly 30% of viewers — and many of the commenters — were based in Argentina, indicating this is an issue that crosses borders.

And nearly 75% of the audience were women, suggesting that men are more likely to perceive criadazgo — which mainly affects girls and young women — as an issue that doesn’t concern them.

Much of the value of what we do at the Post is below the paywall.

In this issue of the Weekly Post, for example, we delve into the sudden civil war engulfing Paraguay’s ruling party, fears over a banking crisis spreading from a certain lime-green financial institution, a potential $1bn lawsuit against the government, plus the end of a long-running border wrangle with Bolivia, and more.

We’re proud that G7 embassies, multilateral banks, investors, expats and locals keep coming back to read our incisive coverage of Paraguayan politics, economics, (foreign) policy, the climate, organised crime, security and more.

But if you’re interested in the things that matter beyond boardrooms, we warmly encourage you to support us as well.

That will enable us to keep bringing you human stories from people whose voices are rarely heard — and sparking the conversations that hopefully lead to change.

In Paraguay, you can report a case of child abuse by calling the free hotline Fono Ayuda 147 or visting the local CODENI (child protection office) in your district.

Also in this issue:
Cartes’s grip is slipping · Peña’s growing powerbase · Bankers issue warning, Ueno & BCP hit back · When Santi met Delcy · Brazil unveils rival data-center plans · ATOME threatens to sue Paraguay · Inside the Green Paradise

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TOP STORY

Paraguay’s world-class birds

In 2016, Diana Gennari and Arturo Alvaro began hosting tourists at Estación Puerto Olivares, their ranch two hours’ drive from Paraguay’s capital, Asunción.

They put visitors up on the historic working farm, showed off a nineteenth-century chapel and their miniature stream train, and offered kayaking and camping trips.

But when a birdwatching enthusiast turned up at the remote spot a few years ago, Gennari recalls, “that’s when things really took off.”

Word got out: Puerto Olivares, tucked between a bend of the Paraguay and Manduvirá rivers, and boasting a private reserve of dense native forest, is a seriously good place to spot birds.

On a recent weekend, a dozen Belgian birdwatchers with telephoto lenses were ferried on a raft up and down the Manduvirá in search of herons, kingfishers, toucans, and monkeys.

After dinner, they piled onto Alvaro’s truck to look for the urutaú, a deftly camouflaged pootoo whose mournful cry and headlamp-like eyes are deeply ingrained in Paraguayan folklore.

They’re guided by Guillaume Martin, a French geologist who moved to Paraguay several years ago, fell in love with local nature, and now offers wildlife and birding tours across the country in partnership with Puerto Olivares.

The Belgians are “really enjoying themselves,” grins Martin, whose business, Lobo Pe, is named after a local giant otter. He clearly is as well: “I’m never going back.”

South America is a birder’s paradise: the continent is home to roughly 3,500 bird species, nearly a third of the world’s total.

Luxury eco-lodges in the Galapagos, the Amazon, and the cloud forests of the Andes have long hogged the attention — and tourist dollars — of birders desperate to tick off a rare find.

It’s a growing business, with one 2025 study of eBird records finding that activity by foreign birdwatchers in Colombia grew fortyfold between 2010 and 2022.

But there are signs that the birding world is waking up to Paraguay: home to more than 700 avian species, many of them unique to this corner of South America.

A handful of operators like Martin now offer birding itineraries in the remnants of Atlantic Forest of the east, the sprawling Pantanal wetlands of the north, and the biodiverse Chaco in the west.

Even the Transformers actress Megan Fox and musician Machine Gun Kelly — in town for the Asunciónico festival in 2022 — were photographed, binoculars in hand, pushing into a bush in the Bay of Asunción, which is beloved of migratory wading species.

As the Post writes this newsletter from Asunción, a clutch of parakeets are chittering in a tree outside the window, where a yellow-breasted pitogüe (great kiskadee) has also built its nest.

And this week, Paraguay’s birding bounty will get its moment in the spotlight when Asunción — for the first time — hosts the South American Bird Fair.

Hosted from September 17 to 20 at the Puerto de Asunción Cultural Centre, the fifteenth edition of the regional birding festival will see workshops, talks, and guided visits to ornithological sites of interest.

Visitors can sign up for guided birdwatching tours of the Botanical Gardens, Lago Ypacaraí, the Aguapey Natural Reserve, and Puerto Olivares.

Further afield, there are trips to the salt lagoons of the Central Chaco, as well as the Mbaracayú Reserve.

One of Paraguay’s largest surviving fragments of Atlantic Forest, the reserve is one of the best places to spot (and hear) the Pájaro Campana — whose bell-like chirrup can reach 125 decibels, one of the loudest bird calls recorded.

Experts from across Latin America will also deliver talks on climate change, the role of birds in Indigenous cultures — and explore wildlife tourism as a driver of local development, drawing on the example of top destinations like Costa Rica.

“Paraguay is emerging as one of South America’s most exciting destinations for birdwatching and ecotourism,” say organisers.

This year’s bird fair, they add, “will be the perfect opportunity to discover its extraordinary biodiversity and rich culture.”

THE POST TAKE

With luck, this last topic may catch the attention of Paraguay’s lawmakers and its president, just a few blocks away in Congress and the Palacio de López respectively.

Earlier this year, the government announced plans to triple the number of tourists received by Paraguay to ten million per year by 2037 — and “transform Paraguay into a world-class tourism destination.”

But the proposals were light on detail, with the tourism minister — who quit four months later — suggesting Paraguay should build its own version of Disneyland.

Paraguay’s nascent birding boom suggests a different way forward: betting on eco-tourism as a driver of employment and conservation, with visitors and locals alike enjoying the country’s wild places and protecting them for future generations.

There are obstacles to this vision: not least the lack of high-end, low-impact safari infrastructure in Paraguay that could attract the deep-pocketed wildlife jetset.

Martin, the French birding guide, puts up his guests in a hodge-podge of plastic tents rather than the canvas yurts preferred by glampers. The so-called Chaco Lodge at Laguna Salada, their next destination after Puerto Olivares, is just a campsite with a viewing platform.

The Mbaracayú Lodge is welcoming but rustic, and the surrounding reserve is threatened by deforestation linked to agribusiness and drug trafficking, as The Paraguay Post recently reported.

Even in Asunción, the wetlands and streams patrolled by snowy egrets and herons are also clogged by trash and sewage — the result of poor drainage and limited rubbish collection in the capital’s poorer barrios.

More worryingly, congress is currently debating plans to start drilling for gas in one of Paraguay’s last great natural reserves.

The Parque Nacional Médanos del Chaco is home to 144 recorded bird species — including the quebracho crested tinamou, the Chaco owl, and the spot-winged falconet, which are only found in the Dry Chaco biome — as well as Indigenous communities who have opposed the fossil-fuel plans.

This week’s celebration of all things winged could encourage more Paraguayans to take ownership of the extraordinary wildlife outside their front door.

As Alberto Yanosky, co-founder of local conservation and birding organisation Guyra Paraguay has put it: “You can’t defend what you don’t know.”

Also in this issue:
Peña warns against impeachment · Doctors win a pay U-turn · PISA exposes Paraguay’s education slump · Tax agency hunts for revenue · Taiwan data-center plans · Paraguayans fighting in Ukraine · Stroessner becomes a videogame villain

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TOP STORY

The Weird and Wonderful World of Paraguay’s Mickey Mouse

Visit pretty much any Paraguayan supermarket or convenience store and you’ll see a familiar — and surprising — sight.

Packages of herbs, condiments, and baking ingredients decorated with a cheerful, button-nosed mouse: labelled with the name Mickey, and all but identical to Mickey Mouse.

When you first spot the red-and-yellow packaging, you might assume its part of a licensing agreement with the Walt Disney Corporation.

The impression of a corporate tie-up is only strengthened when you see the Mickey mascot out and about around Asunción.

Mickey — pronounced locally as MEE-kay — gives out free samples at supermarkets, presses the flesh at food industry events, and is even known to appear as the guest of honour at weddings.

But the true story is much stranger: and speaks volumes about Paraguay’s distinctive history, gastronomy, and popular culture.

The legend of Mickey — as I wrote for a story that featured on the front page of The New York Times — began in 1935.

The Blasco family, recent immigrants from Italy, opened an ice cream parlour in downtown Asunción. Perhaps inspired by the early black-and-white movies of Mickey Mouse, they called their shop Mickey.

Their cheerful branding was a hit with Paraguayans still suffering from the aftershocks of the cataclysmic Triple Alliance War (1864-70) as well as the Chaco War (1932-5), which saw 100,000 Paraguayans and Bolivians perish in the parched, thorny outback.

By 1969, the family business was selling packages of baking soda decorated with the famous rodent.

In 1978, they moved into a larger premises — the company’s current location on Avenida Félix Bogado — topped by a 62-metre Christmas tree. Some say the tree being switched on is the official start of the festive season.

Today, Mickey is a household name whose spices, seasoning and herbs — from boldo to begonias to yerba mate — fill cupboards, stews, soufflés and yerba mate gourds across the nation, including the Chaco.

Mickey scratches the sweet spot in the Paraguayan psyche, the TV chef Euge Aquino, who promotes the company’s products to her Instagram following, told me.

It conjures up sentimental images of Christmas, of Disneyland, of your abuela’s cooking — and even nationalistic pride.

On August 16, Paraguay celebrates Children’s Day. The date commemorates the massacre of Paraguayan child soldiers by Brazilian troops at the Battle of Acosta Ñu during the Triple Alliance War.

The Mickey mascot marks the occasion by handing out sweets and popcorn to a horde of children outside the factory gates.

“People came from the countryside to see him,” Aquino told me, recalling how she lined up with friends to meet Mickey in the 1980s. “It was a religion.”

The firm’s commercial director, Viviana Blasco, asked me not to disclose the real identity of the mascot in order to preserve the “magic” of Mickey.

But The Paraguay Post can reveal that a father-and-son duo who have worn the Mickey suit for decades — usually in shifts, to cope with the sweltering summer heat — are preparing to pass the torch.

The elder is a long-serving factory worker, the younger a mechanic. But the apprentice is a professional mascot.

“I auditioned to be the Duracell Bunny,” said the new recruit, warming up inside an office. “But it’s a nightmare to put on that outfit, with all the padding and the big battery on the back. This one’s much easier.”

“We don’t do it for the money,” he added, before donning the felt-and-fibreglass rodent head, getting into his silent character, and strolling out to his adoring public.

Mickey’s rise to the status of national treasure was nearly derailed in 1991 when Disney’s lawyers finally came knocking.

Blasco vividly remembers being given the news: “We have a problem.”

The global entertainment behemoth filed an IP violation complaint with Paraguay’s Business Ministry, then a trademark tribunal, before the case worked its way up to the country’s highest court.

Wading through stacks of the litigation, I found that one Supreme Court minister agreed people could easily confuse the Paraguayan Mickey with Disney’s Mickey.

But the Blasco family business had a formidable advocate in its corner.

Elba Rosa Brítez, a 72-year-old senior partner at local legal firm PSTBN, received me in a study lined with rusty sabres and cannonballs from the Triple Alliance War.

”I was a born litigant,” she said, recalling how her practice normally defends multinationals like AB InBev and American Cyanamid against upstart challengers and copyright thieves.

“This was the exception,” Brítez added. “I wanted to help my fellow countrywoman, a Paraguayan business. And I found a legal loophole to defend them.”

The Blasco family had registered the Mickey trademark in Paraguay decades previously — and repeatedly renewed it — without any protest from Disney.

Perhaps the Corporation simply hadn’t heard of Mickey until then, Brítez suggested.

In any case, in 1998, the Court ruled that Mickey had — through years of uninterrupted use — acquired the right to be Mickey.

“You don’t know how I jumped for joy when they issued the ruling,” Brítez told me, dismissing the popular legend that the Blascoes had hoodwinked Disney’s lawyers by registering the image of Mickey in profile rather than face-on.

I asked her if Disney could mount another challenge in the future — especially if Mickey tried to sell its products beyond Paraguay.

“Maybe,” she conceded. “Nothing lasts forever, right? But it will be hard for them to win through the courts.”

The Blasco family, she added, “has acquired rights, and that’s respected. Mickey will still be around for a while yet.”

THE POST TAKE

You can read different morals into the tale of Mickey.

One is that Paraguay has long been something of a wild west when it comes to copyright protection and intellectual property.

The authorities occasionally bust factories producing fake designer sportswear of the kind that lines the passageways of the Mercado 4.

In July, DINAPI, Paraguay’s intellectual property agency, confiscated 200,000 bottles of counterfeited perfume — probably imported — in a private port at Villeta. Overall, the country seized nearly 985 tonnes of illegal merchandise in the first seven months of the year.

Until recently, a fake “Harvard University” handed out bogus legal and medical degrees from a tower block in Ciudad del Este.

Paraguay — like Peru, Brazil, and Argentina — remains on the USTR’s Watch List, which cites “serious IP enforcement challenges” and describes Ciudad del Este as a “notorious market for counterfeiting and piracy.”

The elephant in the room — one rarely disturbed by inspectors — is Paraguay’s production of roughly 45 billion cigarettes annually when domestic demand is barely 1.5 billion. The rest are smuggled abroad.

But the enduring popularity of Mickey also speaks to Paraguay’s sense of itself as a scrappy underdog, up against the world: a societal personality trait which also came to the fore during the World Cup.

Outsiders may cry foul at Paraguay’s gutsy, physical defence on the football pitch or its less-than-spotless business practices.

But defying powerful rivals and inventing ingenious workarounds is something of a national pastime.

The trend is exemplified by the phrase — usually deployed when someone has turned their glove box into an iced water dispenser for tereré, or transformed a motorbike engine into a petrol-powered plough — “Paraguayans haven’t conquered the world because they can’t be bothered.”

In the course of my reporting on Mickey, I found many people had taken the company’s dark horse victory against Disney to heart as a symbol of national pride.

“It’s nice,” one working-class mother told me, queuing up with her kids to meet Mickey outside the factory in August. “At least we won at something.”

Also in this issue:
Cartes turns on Ueno Bank · Opposition politicians jailed · IMF highlights deficit, consumer debt · The hunt for Chinese and Cuban agents · Jailed governor hospitalised · Doctor strikes resume · Marset ally busted

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TOP STORY

Paraguay’s health system in crisis

Paraguay’s government is struggling to calm the waters after a five-day strike by doctors and mounting resignations over pay and resources.

Medics say stagnant salaries and shortages of medicines are stretching personnel to breaking point — and putting patients’ lives in danger.

After negotiations with health ministry officials broke down last week, hundreds of staff walked out of public hospitals and marched through Asunción and other cities.

Police blocked marching medics from occupying the centre of Encarnación, which was hosting tens of thousands of fans for the World Rally Championship (WRC) over the weekend.

In Ciudad del Este, riot police clashed with white-coated demonstrators and fired rubber bullets in the air.

”All we’re asking is to be paid the same as in 2012,” Rosanna González, the secretary general of doctors’ union Sinamed, told reporters.

Sinamed says minimum salaries for physicians have remained frozen at roughly five million guaraníes ($830) per month for the past fifteen years.

It says real wages have been slashed by more than 75% during that period due to the rising cost of living, and wants the government to hike salaries by the same amount.

Doctors also want the Health Ministry to hire more staff, saying that 9,000 of Paraguay’s 11,000 medical professionals are on precarious short-term contracts.

But anger mounted as Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, refused to acknowledge doctors’ demands — instead dancing with his wife at the WRC’s closing party, and taking grinning selfies behind the wheel with driver Oliver Solberg.

On Friday, 141 doctors at the Acosta Ñu Children’s Hospital — equivalent to 86% of its staff, and including all of its 18 surgeons — were reportedly preparing to tender their resignation.

At the Trauma Hospital in Asunción, union leader Sara Burgos said 37 of her fellow anesthesiologists had quit, and that 19 of the hospital’s 23 neurosurgeons were ready to follow.

“We don’t have basic supplies,” she told reporters, mentioning the drugs atropine and etilefrine — essential to complex surgeries — as well as the tracheal tubes used to deliver oxygen and anesthesia. “The patients had to buy them. In an emergency, we had to buy them.”

Sinamed bosses said hundreds more resignations were on the way — and the Peña administration would be to blame for any patient deaths that resulted.

“We’re just asking the president to have a little empathy,” said Norma Ruiz, the head of paediatric intensive therapy at the Itauguá National Hospital.

Ruiz told press she is often forced to buy syringes out of her own pocket to treat children in critical condition — and that much of her salary is spent on drugs to treat a medical condition of her own.

”We’re putting our bodies on the line,” she added, through tears. “I don’t want to go and work in a private hospital, I’ve worked here for 13 years and this is like my home.”

Senior figures in the ruling Colorado Party meanwhile insisted the government couldn’t afford to meet Sinamed’s demand for a raise of three million guaraníes per contract.

Senate president Bachi Núnez — who practiced as a surgeon over twenty years ago — criticised the resignations, suggesting medicine was a “calling” that went with long low pay and responsibility to patients.

On Monday, cabinet chief Javier Giménez said health was a priority for Peña and offered to reopen talks with doctors — but ruled out any immediate pay rise, saying it was incompatible with balancing the budget.

In a short press conference with health minister María Teresa Barán and economy minister Óscar Lovera, Giménez said any increase in salaries would have to be folded into a restructuring of the profession to create a carrera sanitaria, or health-career track.

“If we’re going to give a raise,” said Giménez, “Let it be according to speciality, merit, and length of experience.”

THE POST TAKE

Anyone who has set foot in a public hospital in Paraguay knows how much doctors do with so little.

Seriously ill patients languish on makeshift ICU beds in hallways. Toilets are disaster zones, often lacking running water.

Queues form for hours before dawn for vaccines and diagnostics. No luck? Come back tomorrow and get in line again.

Even middle-class families are forced to hold raffles or barbecues — or sell possessions, or simply get into debt — to pay for life-saving medicines.

The constant drip of medical misery anecdotes reflect the data. Paraguay spends just 4% of GDP on health: well below the 6% that the Pan American Health Organization sets as the minimum for universal coverage.

In February 2024, President Peña and First Lady Leticia Ocampos recorded a sombre video where they said they had been shocked by conditions at the National Hospital — and promised to turn things around.

“We are committed to changing this reality,” Peña added. “If we can’t change this, we won’t be able to change anything in Paraguay.”

Some relief for Paraguay’s creaking public health system may finally be on the way.

Released on Tuesday, the government budget for 2027 suggests Paraguay will spend $2.8bn on public health next year: up a striking 77% from this year.

Accounting for nearly 11% of government spending, this will be the highest single budget item, well above education ($1.65bn) and infrastructure ($1.4bn).

The amount destined for medicines and supplies in particular is due to rise by $220m to $760m in 2027 — which just so happens to be the year when presidential primaries are held ahead of national polls in 2028.

In social media posts on Wednesday morning, Peña said he would put nearly 2,400 doctors on permanent contracts, spend half a billion dollars on improved infrastructure, and build seven new major health centres.

“We will keep working without pause for solutions so each Paraguayan, wherever they are, receives a complete, dignified and more human health service,” he wrote.

But experience with previous budgets suggests there’s a big difference between promising to spend money on something and actually spending it.

And after the Peña administration admitted last month that — having fessed up to some questionable accounting techniques — the deficit will rise to 3.9% of GDP next year, some are asking where the money will come from.

Predictably, some have called for slashing government waste and clawing back cash from corruption.

Or, trimming entitlements for penpushers: like the $101m the government forecasts spending this year on private health insurance for civil servants, mostly in the Supreme Court and Ministry of Justice.

The reality is that even if Paraguay were to reach Scandinavian levels of probity, it wouldn’t recoup enough money to reanimate the country’s moribund public services.

That kind of cash can only come from borrowing — an unpopular option, given public debt has nearly doubled to 41.2% of GDP since 2019 — or touching an even greater taboo: taxes.

Opposition senator Rafael Filizzola argues that levying a 2,000-guaraní ($0.30) duty on every pack of cigarettes sold in Paraguay would recoup $700m every year: more than covering the $500m the treasury spends on treating smoking-related illnesses.

Given that the fortunes of Peña’s patron, former president and tobacco baron Horacio Cartes (2013-18), rest on producing cheap smokes — most of which are later smuggled outside the country — this particular proposal seems unlikely to fly.

Yet even some members of the ruling Colorado Party are breaking ranks and questioning Paraguay’s allergy to taxation.

“There’s no two ways about it,” senator Silvio “Beto” Ovelar told a meeting with doctors last week. “We have to raise taxes: if not today, tomorrow.”

“Even if all us senators and civil servants went without a single guaraní, we still couldn’t … reach 6% [of GDP] on health,” he added.

The senior Colorado politician said Paraguay’s famous “triple 10” formula — the percentage levied on corporate, personal income, and value-added taxes since 2012 — had been “very beneficial” but has now run its course.

He argued for increasing the personal income tax to 14%, VAT to 12%, or corporate taxes to 15% — while acknowledging that such proposals would likely be shot down by the Peña administration, which has repeatedly resisted calls to raise taxes.

“Those of us who earn more should pay more,” Ovelar added. “That’s my own, very personal opinion.”

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Read in English

A Sandra Paredes, modista y madre de cuatro hijos, de 56 años, le emociona hacer disfraces, jugar con los detalles, divertirse en el proceso. Cuando se le pregunta por qué, responde que quizás es porque, cuando era niña, no tuvo muchas oportunidades de jugar.

Sandra nació en Argentina con un padre paraguayo y una madre argentina. Cuando su mamá murió a los 37 años, ella y sus hermanos junto a su papá y madrastra vinieron a vivir a Asunción. La primera vez que Sandra vivió como “criada”, con una familia extraña, fue cuando tenía 11 años. Fue solo un par de meses y recuerda que su rol era cuidar a dos niñas, más pequeñas que ella.

Pero la segunda vez, fue distinta. Se fue a los 13 años, a una casa en Luque, y se quedó hasta casi cumplir los 18 años. También en principio, su tarea era cuidar a los niños, pero terminaba haciendo de todo: limpiaba, cocinaba, lavaba.

“Según mis papás, ellos hablaron con esa gente que yo quería seguir mi colegio, que quería seguir estudiando. Pero no fue así. No me hicieron estudiar jamás. Me tenían que vestir, supuestamente hacer estudiar y no cumplieron con eso. Me compraban ropa, pero ropa usada. Y yo de aquí para allá con ellos, con las criaturas, sí o sí encima de las criaturas”, cuenta Sandra a The Paraguay Post.

Sandra, como miles de niñas y adolescentes en Paraguay, vivió en situación de criadazgo. Se trata de una práctica en la que una niña, niño o adolescente es entregado a otra familia, de mejor posición económica, para que realice tareas del hogar y de cuidado, con la promesa de darle techo, comida y estudios. Voces conservadoras —incluyendo altos cargos del Partido Colorado oficialista— sostienen que forma parte de la identidad nacional, y que es tan paraguaya como el tereré, la popular infusión fría de yerba mate.

Pero en la realidad, ese “acuerdo” entre familia de origen y receptora no siempre se cumple. Una creciente lucha para eliminar el criadazgo argumenta que la situación muchas veces deriva en trabajo infantil forzoso y explotación, e incluso genera casos de violencia física y sexual. Además, conlleva el trauma de separar a las niñeces de sus padres, sus hermanos y hermanas, y su hogar, en una cadena de desarraigo y dolor que puede llegar a perpetuarse por generaciones —y afectar a varios miembros de la misma familia—.

Cuando Sandra recuerda su pasado, pareciera como si volviera a vivir aquella época. Su mirada se aleja, sus ojos se cristalizan y dice: “Primero se fue la mayor con una gente. Dios mío, fue un dolor inmenso. Era como si se murió, ¿entendés? Sentíamos ese dolor. Después, cuando me fui yo, mis otras hermanitas se sintieron así también. Y así fuimos cada una. Realmente no le deseo a nadie”, lamenta.

El criadazgo tiene sus orígenes en la colonia. Uno de sus antecedentes históricos, de acuerdo a expertas como Adelina Pusineri, es el sistema de encomiendas, en el que indígenas eran entregados a hogares españoles para formar parte de la servidumbre. Conocida como “Naboría”, “la mayoría de las veces eran niñas o niños de corta edad que servían en las casas de los señores españoles o criollos”.

Luego de la Guerra contra la Triple Alianza (1864-70), se intensificó, teniendo en cuenta la cantidad de niñeces que quedaron sin familia. Durante los conflictos, dictaduras, y desarraigos del siglo veinte, se normalizó aún más. La última encuesta que el Estado realizó al respecto, en el 2011, mostró que aproximadamente 47.000 niñas, niños y adolescentes vivían en situación de criadazgo.

Organizaciones como Global Infancia y Grupo Luna Nueva sostienen que el criadazgo constituye una forma de trata de personas: implica el traslado de niñas y niños vulnerables bajo falsas promesas, para su explotación laboral o sexual, sin remuneración ni libertad de movimiento.

En palabras de Camila Corvalán, socióloga, especialista en Estudios de Género e investigadora de la ONG Enfoque Niñez, el criadazgo es un fenómeno extremadamente complejo. Aunque en casi todos los casos hay separación de la familia, puede o no haber incomunicación con la misma, puede o no haber abandono escolar, falta de recreación, explotación laboral y acceso a la salud.

“Reviste una complejidad de vulneraciones”, explica Corvalán. “No podemos decir que tiene exactamente las características del trabajo en condiciones de explotación o totalmente las características de la trata de personas, porque no es igual”.

De acuerdo con la investigadora, muchas familias optan por este camino porque el apoyo estatal es casi ausente y la consideran la mejor opción para ese futuro de esa niña o niño. En el caso de Sandra, muy a su pesar, confiesa que, prefería estar en otras casas, antes que en la suya, donde sufría maltratos por parte de su madrastra: “Y pasamos muy mal con ella y prefería estar en una casa ajena al final, porque por lo menos comíamos bien, nos vestíamos, estábamos bien”.

Pero lo que más siente Sandra de la situación que vivió como “criada” es que no pudo terminar el colegio: hasta ahora, una de sus mayores frustraciones. Y Corvalán agrega que, en muchos casos, la situación “se vuelve inviable o la violencia que ocurre en las condiciones de explotación son realmente mucho peores para la adolescente”.

Según el reporte de junio de 2026 de Fono Ayuda 147, la línea telefónica gratuita de denuncias del Ministerio de la Niñez y Adolescencia, solo en el mes de junio se registraron 1.264 hechos de vulneración de derechos a niñas, niños y adolescentes, entre los que se destacan violación del deber del cuidado, maltrato, abuso y explotación sexual. Sin embargo, desde 2020, no hay un número que corresponda al criadazgo.

En una entrevista del mismo año, el actual ministro Walter Gutiérrez —entonces viceministro— advirtió que la crisis socioeconómica y sanitaria podría haber agravado el fenómeno.

En un informe del gobierno nacional, basado en los registros de Fono Ayuda, del 2014-2016 se registra que, de 59 casos de criadazgo, 47 correspondían a niñas y adolescentes.

“Sin duda, todo eso también está atravesado por una cuestión de género”, puntualiza Corvalán. “Hay toda una construcción sobre cuáles son las oportunidades que puede tener una mujer, a las cuales puede aspirar una mujer. Si no es a ser una ‘serviha’ (palabra en guaraní que significa literalmente ‘la que me sirve’).”

“Es un poco para mí la palabra que le da esa columna vertebral al criadazgo”, agrega la experta. “El tema del servicio”.

¿Decisión o coacción?

Existen varias normativas y convenios internacionales que el Estado paraguayo está incumpliendo al no generar políticas públicas para hacerle frente al criadazgo.

El artículo 54 de la Constitución Nacional establece las bases para la protección de los niños, niñas y adolescentes “contra el abandono, la desnutrición, la violencia, el abuso, el tráfico y la explotación” y su “desarrollo armónico e integral.”

La ley 57/90 —que corresponde a la Convención sobre los Derechos del Niño de las Naciones Unidas, adoptada en 1989— obliga al Estado a garantizar la protección, el desarrollo y la participación de todos los niños, sin distinción.

Desde Enfoque Niñez, las investigaciones en las cuales participó Corvalán indican que incluso niñas y adolescentes que ya contaban con medidas de guarda judicial por situaciones de violencia en sus familias terminaban en hogares ajenos, trabajando como criadas.

También, que el fenómeno ha mutado desde la época en que Sandra experimentó el criadazgo. Si antes las niñas o adolescentes perdían el contacto con sus familias, ahora la cosa cambió, ya que la mayoría cuenta con dispositivo móvil y se encuentra en conexión constante. Sin embargo, según Corvalán, eso también ha provocado otro tipo de controles y violencias.

“Hoy el criadazgo es una adolescente que quiere comprarse un celular, que tiene una agencia, que decide, y cuesta muchísimo escuchar esto, pero que decide (ser criada) como una opción frente a toda la precariedad que existe, frente a un sistema que no le puede retener en la escuela, que no le da otras opciones de formación para el empleo, que es una cultura que le dice que su cuerpo es lo único que tiene para ofrecer como fuerza de trabajo”, manifiesta.

Según la Encuesta Permanente de Hogares Continua 2025 (EPHC), en Paraguay, del total de niños, niñas y adolescentes de 10 a 17 años (827.843), alrededor de 5,3% están ocupados, es decir, aproximadamente 44.261 se encuentran realizando trabajo infantil.

Frente a un Estado ausente y una familia que no puede proveer las condiciones necesarias para ese niño, niña y adolescente, ¿qué caminos le quedan? Desde la Coordinadora Nacional de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes Trabajadores (CONNATS), adolescentes como Fabiola Fernández, 17 años, delegada nacional, y su hermano Junior Fernández, 15 años, delegado latinoamericano, vienen ensayando respuestas.

Para Junior, lo más importante es la concientización de sus compañeros y compañeras, que ellos y ellas puedan identificar, analizar su propia realidad y ver la manera de contrarrestar esa situación. Como también, promover el apoyo del Estado a las familias, para que no tengan que recurrir a esa práctica.

“Nosotros desde la CONNATS, defendemos el trabajo digno de niños, niñas y adolescentes. Algo que pasa mucho es que la gente no sabe diferenciar eso. El trabajo se supone que te tiene que ayudar a desarrollarte, a aprender, a mejorar, a ayudar a tu familia”, se expresa segura y enfática Fabiola, a través de una videollamada desde Ciudad del Este, en la frontera paraguaya con Brasil, que no impide que su energía arrolladora traspase la pantalla.

Fabiola comparte que la posición de la CONNATS es firme: el criadazgo no es trabajo infantil, es un delito, un trabajo forzoso, que te saca horas de estudio y de recreación.

La que acompaña a los chicos en la videollamada es Doris Ramírez, trabajadora social y coordinadora de la ONG Callescuela. Valora como positivo el trabajo que vienen haciendo desde la organización apostando a la participación protagónica de los niños, niñas y adolescentes, como Fabiola y Junior, quienes lideran y llevan adelante charlas, talleres participativos, y conversaciones con padres, pares y la comunidad.

“Necesitamos sensibilización para desmontar la idea de que el criadazgo es algo beneficioso para la familia o para los NNA. Junior y Fabiola la tienen clara porque fueron construyendo esa conciencia. Creemos que esa es una de las estrategias”.

Según Ramírez, es necesario hacer una diferenciación: una cosa es el criadazgo y otra es la solidaridad.

“A veces escuchamos que ponen como criadazgo situaciones de familias de sectores populares que también reciben parientes que vienen a estudiar del interior a Asunción, porque en nuestras comunidades no tenemos oferta educativa pública y algunas veces ni siquiera privada, entonces se da la migración y el desarraigo, pero en el marco de una solidaridad entre familias”, puntualiza.

Un intento legislativo fallido

En 2024, se presentó en el Congreso Paraguayo el proyecto de ley “Que garantiza el derecho de niños, niñas y adolescentes ante la protección del criadazgo”.

Fue impulsado por las diputadas Johanna Ortega (País Solidario-Asunción) presidenta del Frente Parlamentario por los Derechos de la Infancia y la Adolescencia, y Dalia Estigarribia (PLRA-Central), quien está al frente de la Comisión de Niñez y Adolescencia.

La propuesta planteaba una mirada integral de la problemática: prevención, acompañamiento, reinserción, ayudas a las familias, capacitación a la comunidad educativa, líderes comunitarios y autoridades, entre otros. Además, contemplaba el impulso y la promoción de actividades económicas alternativas y de proyectos productivos para las familias vulnerables a esta práctica.

De la elaboración participaron organizaciones de la sociedad civil como Global Infancia y Plan Internacional, instituciones públicas como el Ministerio de la Niñez y el Ministerio del Trabajo, asimismo, organizaciones de niños, niñas y adolescentes.

Pero el 20 de mayo de 2025, el Senado paraguayo rechazó el proyecto. Uno de los principales opositores de la ley fue el senador oficialista Gustavo Leite, quien comparó la práctica con el consumo del tereré. “Esta es una ley antinatura, anti paraguay, anti cultura paraguaya,” había expresado el parlamentario y posteriormente embajador paraguayo en los Estados Unidos.

En intercambio con The Paraguay Post, Leite asegura que ya hay suficientes leyes que protegen a los niños, niñas y adolescentes de vulneraciones de sus derechos. Considera que el criadazgo es una figura cultural negativa en Europa, no así en Paraguay.

“No se puede aplicar en Paraguay conceptos de otras culturas por imposición. Es el mismo caso de la igualdad de género, el titular es el mismo. No estoy a favor del abuso infantil, por el contrario, tampoco estoy a favor de aplicar conceptos globalistas en Paraguay. El abuso infantil es un delito deleznable y debe ser penado y ya está legislado en Paraguay”, afirma el legislador, quien fue impulsor en el 2023 de un proyecto de ley fallido “para prohibir la ideología de género” y de la ley conocida como “Anti ONG”, promulgada en el 2024.

La diputada Ortega menciona que las argumentaciones que dieron para rechazar la ley son simplemente excusas. Sostiene que quienes buscan justificar estas prácticas “son los mismos que históricamente han sido cómplices de sostener un sistema de explotación y desigualdad. Hay una élite que aún piensa que las niñas pobres deben tener un único destino: ser sus criadas o sirvientas”.

Para la legisladora el gobierno utiliza lemas como ‘provida y profamilia’ pero solo por conveniencia electoral, porque cuando se trata de votar a favor de la protección de la vida y las familias, lo hacen en contra. “Si es un proyecto de miembros de la oposición, cualquier excusa es válida para ellos para no aprobar”.

Transformar el dolor en motor

Hay quienes, a pesar de haber vivido en situación de criadazgo, también tuvieron otras oportunidades. Como el caso de la activista y antropóloga, Tina Alvarenga, de 60 años. Es militante de la alegría, de los derechos de los niños, niñas y adolescentes y de las mujeres indígenas.

Fue una de las primeras personas que vivió esa situación y teorizó al respecto. Junto a otras pensadoras y especialistas desarrollaron abordajes para hacerle frente. Entre ellos, el material Criadas, hasta cuándo…, en el que invitaron a escritoras y escritores a ficcionar historias reales de criadazgo, publicado por primera vez en los 2000.

“A veces me dicen, ‘pero si no hubieras sido criadita no ibas a llegar a ser quien sos’. Yo creo que no me ha determinado. Evidentemente, yo iba a ser algo más allá de una ama de casa, madre de familia y esposa feliz”, afirma sin dudar. Tina, a diferencia de otras niñas y adolescentes que vivieron en situación de criadazgo, sí pudo acceder a educación y recibir acompañamiento para seguir formándose.

Entre 2000 y 2003, Tina Alvarenga y otras activistas de Global Infancia se iban al Congreso, a los ministerios, a las iglesias y a las escuelas para sensibilizar sobre el criadazgo y generar un cambio de paradigma.

“Las maestras fueron fundamentales para hacer esta transformación, porque en principio ellas también tenían ‘criaditas’. Después, cuando se dieron cuenta, cambió la cuestión. La educación fue el ámbito que modificó muchas cosas”, rememora con orgullo.

Que el criadazgo siga siendo una práctica justificada, para Tina Alvarenga describe una mirada clasista y utilitaria, en la que el otro te dice “no somos iguales”. Añade: “Se trata de no mirarle al niño o niña como sujeto pleno de derecho, sino como un objeto. Tal vez, si fueran más varones los criados, sería muy diferente”.

“Es como una hija más” es una de las frases que se repiten en casi todas las historias de vida de mujeres que vivieron en situación de criadazgo. Y aunque en el discurso suena lindo, muy pocas se sintieron realmente parte de la familia durante su estadía.

“La pregunta es: ‘¿Qué pasa si se equivoca igual que el resto de tus hijos?’ Y va a volver a su casa. Entonces ahí está la línea, ahí está la diferencia. En realidad no es una hija más, porque tu hijo no se levanta a las cinco de la mañana y se va a dormir a las 11 de la noche y no falta a la escuela porque hay que cuidar al bebé”, expresa Corvalán.

Además de una ley específica que aborde la prevención, las especialistas coinciden en que hacen falta más políticas públicas y recursos para el fortalecimiento familiar.

The Paraguay Post intentó comunicarse con representantes del Ministerio de la Niñez y Adolescencia y compartió sus preguntas para conocer sobre los esfuerzos que vienen realizando, pero no obtuvo respuestas.

Sanar una herencia colonial y familiar

Rosita Del Valle, cineasta, 33 años, no entendía a su mamá. Había una tristeza que guardaba a la que ella no podía acceder.

En 2024, decidió hacer su trabajo de tesis basado en el testimonio de su madre. Lula, un corto documental sobre su vivencia siendo “criada”. Su mamá, Julia Mendieta, de 63 años, sufrió maltratos, pasó hambre y tampoco le permitieron terminar el colegio.

“Yo, por ejemplo, sufro. Yo quería ser alguien en esta vida, pero no llegué. No estudié lo que a mí me gustaba. Tal vez me gustaba ser una profesora, enfermera o doctora. Y no pude llegar a ser eso … . Yo pedí mucho para que me dieran tiempo para estudiar y me dijeron: ‘no, andá a otro lado si querés eso’”, cuenta Julia en el documental.

Rosita, al igual que otras hijas de personas que vivieron en situación de criadazgo, considera que esa práctica es violenta y tuvo consecuencias muy negativas en su mamá. Su trabajo es una forma de visibilizar el tema y generar conciencia al respecto. En unos años, espera poder desarrollar una película ficcionada que pueda mostrar la historia en profundidad.

Cuando Rosita se recibió, su tutor le dijo algo que a ella le atravesó muy fuerte. “La hija de una persona que dice que no pudo ser lo que quería hoy está terminando un trabajo de tesis y está rompiendo esa cadena,” recuerda. “Para mí, se sintió de esa manera, como romper cadenas”.

Terminar con el criadazgo también requiere de un esfuerzo que contemple la proyección de esa niña o adolescente hacia otros horizontes. ¿Qué pasa después de los 18 años? ¿Qué proyectos de vida se construyen por fuera del cuidado y de las tareas del hogar?, Corvalán invita a pensar: en las esperanzas, en las oportunidades, en esas otras alternativas de vida posibles.

Jóvenes como Fabiola también están escribiendo otras historias para las niñas y adolescentes de su generación. Su discurso conmueve: “Quiero que Paraguay pueda llegar a ser un espacio libre de violencias para niños, niñas y adolescentes. Y que los espacios de representación realmente nos tengan en cuenta. Es muy difícil hablar de algo que nos preocupa o generar políticas públicas para nosotras y nosotros si al final no nos van a incluir”.

Reportería adicional por Norma Flores Allende.

Edición de texto: Laurence Blair y Norma Flores Allende.

Leé en español

Sandra Paredes, a dressmaker and mother of four, loves making costumes. She plays with the details, gets lost in the process. Perhaps, she says, it’s because she was rarely allowed to play when she was a girl.

Sandra was 11, and her mother had recently passed away, the first time she left home. She spent two months working as a nanny with a family she didn’t know, caring for two girls even younger than her.

The second time was longer, and much harder. When she was 13, she moved into another family’s home in Luque, on the outskirts of Paraguay’s capital, Asunción. She worked there, without pay, until she turned 18.

At first, the job was the same — looking after the children — but she ended up doing everything: cooking, cleaning, washing clothes.

“My parents said they told them that I wanted to stay in school,” recalls Sandra, now 56. “But they never let me study. They were supposed to dress me, but they only bought me second-hand clothes. And I went above and beyond for them, especially for the kids.”

Sandra, like thousands of Paraguayan children to this day, was a criada.

Under this traditional practice, known as criadazgo, kids from poor backgrounds are sent to better-off families to work as live-in, unpaid help. Usually, they’re promised food, schooling, and a roof over their head in exchange.

Conservative voices, including senior government figures, say the custom is positive — and as fundamental to Paraguayan identity as tereré, the cold infusion of yerba mate that many locals drink every day.

But the families that host criadas often fail to hold up their end of the deal. And amid a growing campaign to end the practice, critics argue that criadazgo is tantamount to forced child labour — and leaves children vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse.

The centuries-old tradition, survivors say, also splits families apart, producing trauma that ripples down the generations. In some struggling households, some or even all the offspring become criadas.

“When my eldest sister went to another family, the pain was immense,” Sandra recalls, her eyes clouding with tears. “For us, it felt like she had died, you know? Then, when I left, my younger sisters felt the same.”

“That’s how we all went, one by one,” she adds. “I honestly wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

The origins of criadazgo, experts say, lie in the colonial period. The Spanish conquistadors that founded Asunción in 1537 shared out Indigenous children to serve their households: a practice known as naboría.

The War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) against Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina — which wiped out nine in ten of Paraguay’s male population — left huge numbers of orphans to seek shelter in unfamiliar households.

Amid the wars, dictatorships and mass exiling of political opponents in the twentieth century, the practice became even more normalised. The most recent government survey, in 2011, found that roughly 47,000 Paraguayan boys, girls, and teenagers were living in a situation of criadazgo.

Camila Corvalán, a sociologist and researcher with the NGO Enfoque Niñez, says criadazgo represents a “complex violation of human rights”, falling somewhere in between labour exploitation and human-trafficking.

Families often send their kids away in the hope of a better life, she adds, because they’re desperately poor and government help is all but absent.

Sandra recalls how her stepmother mistreated her, and how leaving home was almost a relief: “In the end I wanted to be anywhere else, because at least we ate and had clothes.” But forty years later, she still bitterly regrets not being allowed to stay in school.

And Corvalán explains that criadas often find themselves trapped in “violent and exploitative situations that are far worse” than where they came from.

According to Paraguay’s Ministry for Children and Adolescents, in June 2026 1,264 calls were made to a helpline recording human rights violations against children, including lack of care, mistreatment, and sexual abuse.

In 2020, the ministry discontinued a dedicated phone number for reporting cases of criadazgo. But in an interview in the same year, one top official said that the number of criadas was likely on the rise due to the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

One 2016 government report found that in 59 cases of criadazgo reported to the helpline in the previous two years, 47 involved young women and girls.

“There’s clearly a question of gender behind all this,” says Corvalán. “There are very fixed ideas about what a woman can aspire to, beyond being a servant.”

“For me, that’s the word at the core of criadazgo,” the researcher adds: “Servitude.”

A forced choice

Campaigners say Paraguay is violating multiple laws — both internationally and at home — by failing to curtail criadazgo.

Article 54 of Paraguay’s constitution requires the state to ensure the “harmonious and holistic development” of children and protect them against “abandonment, malnutrition, violence, abuse, trafficking and exploitation.”

Law 57/90, in line with the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, similarly requires the authorities to guarantee the wellbeing and participation in society of every child in the country.

But research by Enfoque Niñez indicates that even children who have supposedly been protected by court orders after suffering violence at home have ended up as criadas in other households.

Corvalán has also found that the phenomenon has mutated due to new technologies. If Sandra’s generation of criadas lost contact with their families for years, criadas today often have mobile phones and are in constant connection: although this can produce other kinds of violence and control.

“Criadazgo today is a teenager who has agency,” she explains. “She’s someone who decides, even though it’s hard to hear it, [to be a criada] as an escape from economic precarity, when faced with a system that can’t keep her in school and doesn’t train her for work, and a culture that says that her body and physical labour is the only thing she has to offer.”

According to a 2025 government household survey, 44,261 Paraguayan children and adolescents — 5.3% of the total — are engaged in some form of work.

CONNATS, a nationwide union of child workers, defends the right of young people to earn a living — but is categorical that criadazgo is a forced labour and a crime.

“Work is supposed to help you grow, to learn, to improve yourself, and help your family,” says Fabiola, a passionate 17-year-old who is one of the union’s spokespeople.

Criadazgo — she says via videocall from Ciudad del Este, on Paraguay’s border with Brazil — does the opposite by starving young people of opportunities to play, study, and socialise.

Junior Fernández, Fabiola’s 15-year-old brother, says their peers need to be taught to identify and prevent situations of criadazgo. The government, he adds, should support families so giving their kids away doesn’t feel like their only option.

Also on the other end of the call is Doris Ramírez, a social worker and the coordinator of Callescuela, a non-profit that supports child workers. She describes how CONNATS is sparking conversations about criadazgo through workshops and talks with parents and young people.

”We need to overcome the idea that criadazgo is somehow beneficial for families or kids,” she says. “Junior and Fabiola are clear on that, because they’ve been building that awareness.”

But Ramírez cautions that families from the countryside sending their children to live with relatives in the capital to get a better education shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush as criadazgo.

“In our communities, there often aren’t public schools or even private ones,” she explains. “That’s why many people migrate and are uprooted, but as part of solidarity between families.”

A failed legislative attempt

In 2024, members of Paraguay’s opposition proposed a law that would have enshrined legal protections for children against criadazgo.

Sponsored by congresswomen Johanna Ortega and Dalia Estigarribia, and drafted in collaboration with non-profits, government ministries, and children and young people, the bill took a holistic approach to the issue.

It sought to reinsert criadas in the school system, spread awareness among teachers, government officials and community leaders, and offer livelihoods to low-income families that might otherwise send their children away.

But in May 2025, Paraguay’s senate rejected the proposal. One of the most vocal opponents was Senator Gustavo Leite: a senior figure in Paraguay’s governing Colorado Party, who recently served as the country’s ambassador to the US.

“This law is anti-nature, anti-Paraguay, and against Paraguayan culture,” Leite argued at the time, comparing criadazgo to football and tereré.

Contacted by The Paraguay Post, Leite said Paraguay already has laws that protect children and teenagers from abuse, and that efforts to eliminate criadazgo belong to a foreign agenda.

“The ideas of other cultures can’t be imposed on Paraguay,” added Leite, who has in recent years backed bills seeking to clamp down on NGOs and so-called gender ideology. “I’m not in favour of child abuse, far from it, but nor should we apply globalist ideas.”

Ortega, the congresswoman, called such arguments excuses from the conservative movement that has dominated Paraguayan politics since the late 1800s.

“They’re the same people who have historically been complicit in propping up this system of exploitation and inequality,” Ortega told the Post. “There’s an elite that still thinks that poor girls are destined to be their criadas or servants.”

The lawmaker with the centre-left País Solidario party said Paraguay’s government describes itself as “pro-life” and “pro-family” to win votes, but has failed to take meaningful action to protect households from being split apart.

”If it’s a bill proposed by the opposition, they’ll take any excuse to vote it down”, Ortega adds.

Transforming pain into purpose

Some of those who experience criadazgo have gone on to seize greater opportunities: and refuse to let it define them.

Tina Alvarenga spent eight years working as a criada for a Paraguayan couple from the age of 10. Now 60, she’s an anthropologist, an activist for the rights of children and Indigenous women, and irrepressibly joyful.

Alvarenga was also one of the first criadas to write and publish about her experiences, including in a volume in the early 2000s that lightly fictionalised survivor’s stories called Criadazgo: How Much Longer?

“Sometimes people say to me, ‘but if you hadn’t been a criadita you wouldn’t be where you are today,’” Alvarenga tells the Post. “I think I would have clearly always been more than a happy housewife and mother.”

Alvarenga, unlike many other criadas, did receive schooling while living away from her family. And she says education has helped erode the practice in recent decades.

At the turn of the millennium, the activist together with Global Infancia launched a campaign bringing together lawmakers, government ministries, churches, and schools to change public opinion about criadazgo.

”The teachers were fundamental to that transformation, because to begin with they also had criaditas,” Alvarenga recalls. “Once they understood the reality, things began to change.”

Still, campaigners and researchers say it’s common to hear people defend the practice: and for host families to say they treat their criadas “like another daughter.” Survivors, meanwhile, rarely say they felt that way.

“Your real daughter doesn’t get up at five in the morning and go to bed at 11 at night,” Corvalán, the sociologist, emphasises. “She doesn’t skip school because she needs to look after the baby.”

Beyond a specific law that prohibits criadazgo, specialists say Paraguay needs to commit more public policies and resources to support families with limited income and few opportunities.

The Paraguay Post asked the Ministry for Children and Adolescents about its efforts to support current and former criadas and their families, but didn’t receive a response by the time of publication.

Healing an inherited trauma

Rosita Del Valle, a 33-year-old filmmaker, struggled to understand her mother, Julia. She carried a deep sadness that her daughter couldn’t reach.

In 2024, Rosita based her university thesis on her mother’s life. The result was Lula, a documentary short based on Julia’s early experiences as a criada. She was mistreated, often went hungry, and wasn’t allowed to finish school.

“I’m still suffering,” Julia relates in the film. “I wanted to be someone in life, but I couldn’t.”

“I would have liked to be a teacher, a nurse, or a doctor,” she adds. “I begged to be given time to study but they told me, ‘no, go somewhere else if that’s what you want.’”

Rosita, in common with many children of survivors of criadazgo, condemns the practice as violent, and says it had severe consequences for her mother. She hopes in the coming years to produce a fictionalised film to explore the issue in depth: her way of raising awareness about the issue.

When she completed her degree, her professor told her something that stayed with her: that as the daughter of someone who was denied the chance to flourish, she was now ending the cycle.

“That’s how it felt,” Rosita recalls: “Like breaking a chain.”

Ending criadazgo will involve helping criadas look to their future beyond domestic work — giving them hope, opportunities, and greater prospects. Young people like Fabiola, of the child workers’ union, are also writing a new script for their generation.

”I dream of Paraguay being free from violence against boys, girls and teenagers,” she says. “And for the spaces where decisions are taken to really listen to us.”

“It’s difficult to talk about something that matters to us,” she adds, “and create public policies that benefit us, if we don’t even have a seat at the table.”

Editing and translation by Laurence Blair.

Additional reporting and editing by Norma Flores Allende.

TOP STORY

Defending the Médanos del Chaco

Hundreds of demonstrators marched through Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, on Tuesday to protest new plans to open the Médanos del Chaco National Park to drilling for oil and gas.

A young crowd convened by the #PorLosBosques coalition of eighty non-profits gathered downtown and posed for photos before continuing on to congress. Protesters carried signs reading “Paraguay is not for sale” and “Hands off the Médanos.”

“The Paraguayan state needs to protect our national park,” said Isabelino Bogado of the Guaraní Ñandéva people. He said his community, Pykasu — which lies inside the reserve — had not been consulted about the plans.

At stake is the Médanos del Chaco National Park, a remote reserve 400 miles from Asunción encompassing six thousand square kilometres of dry scrub and rare wildlife — including the tiríka, an endangered wildcat, and the guanaco, a camelid common to Andean regions but found nowhere else in Paraguay.

One of the last surviving extensions of native vegetation of any real size in Paraguay, the Médanos del Chaco features unique formations of sweeping sand dunes that give the park its name.

It sits atop the Yrenda Aquifer — the main freshwater reserve in Paraguay’s arid Chaco region — and contains historical sites from the Chaco War, a brutal conflict fought between Paraguay and Bolivia between 1932 and 1936.

Today, it’s home to Guaraní Ñandeva Indigenous communities, who have strongly opposed the search for hydrocarbons on their doorstep.

Organisations representing the native Ayoreo people say their uncontacted relatives also use the Médanos park, an ancestral territory, for shelter and sustenance — and warn of the “risk of genocide” if prospection goes ahead.

Diri Etacore, the president of the Asociación Garaigosode del Pueblo Ayoreo, said Médanos del Chaco — together with the adjacent Defensores del Chaco National Park — represents Paraguay’s “last forest.”

“Our brothers and sisters in voluntary isolation take refuge there with their families,” he told The Paraguay Post. “In the forest, in the native trees, they can find lots of medicines.”

“People with money are destroying what we, the poor, want to protect forever,” he added.

The protests follow a bill by congressman José Rodríguez — a member of a wing of the ruling Colorado Party loyal to former president Horacio Cartes — that would modify the 2016 law that declared Médanos del Chaco a protected wild area and authorise the extraction of oil, gas, and minerals.

Rodriguez notes that Paraguay’s hydropower surplus from the Itaipú dam is due to run out as soon as 2027. He argues that extracting gas from the Médanos would unlock critical resources for the country — and develop the isolated and poor Chaco region — “without depending on any foreign body.”

Supporters of the scheme have insisted the park won’t be touched unless comercially viable deposits can be found — and that it can even be explored by satellite.

But the Asunción lawmaker’s proposals explicitly authorise “exploitation” of the park’s resources, not just exploration. And they go beyond a previous failed attempt in 2023 to unlock the northwestern national park for drilling.

As well as hydrocarbons, Rodríguez’s bill would authorise the extraction of lithium and uranium: minerals crucial to the country’s nascent energy transition, and claimed by industry insiders to exist in large quantities in the arid Chaco subsoil.

The congressman also says that the 2016 creation of the park unfairly affected land — including gas exploitation rights — belonging to the Cano Martínez family firm, which briefly extracted small amounts of natural gas from the Chaco to supply generators in the town of Bahía Negra before its concession was cancelled.

The bill envisions freeing up some 40,000 hectares, or six percent of the park, to extraction. But opponents say permitting drilling in even part of the territory would put the whole ecosystem at risk.

Paraguay’s Environment Ministry, MADES, has said the proposals would set a dangerous precedent for other natural reserves — and violate international treaties that prohibit Paraguay from rolling back environmental protections.

Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, has not publicly commented on the bill itself. But asked about the topic in July, he spoke of the need to explore Paraguay’s mineral wealth in order to diversify the economy beyond cattle and soybean.

Ana Romero, an environmental defender and member of the Guaraní Occidental people, said Médanos del Chaco represents a “unique habitat” and feared fossil fuel prospection would have “devastating” consequences for local communities.

“We’re being sold a policy of economic development that’s based on destruction,” Romero told the Post. She said the loss of the Médanos would worsen extreme weather in the area, including heavy winds and hurricanes, and affect local water sources, flora and fauna.

“The impact will be catastrophic,” she added.

THE POST TAKE

Paraguay has been chasing the mirage of commercially viable fossil fuels in the Chaco for over a century.

Dozens of wells have been drilled in Paraguay’s sparsely-populated western outback. Many have showed traces of oil and gas. But none have led to lasting extraction.

British firm President Energy spent a decade searching. It trumpeted an “immense”, world-class prospect in 2014 — supposedly representing a billion barrels of oil — only for it to later admit that no commercial deposits had been found.

The chances that the Médanos just happens to be the only spot where Paraguay can feasibly access huge underground fossil fuel reserves — of the kind enjoyed by neighbouring parts of Argentina and Bolivia — seem remote as the park itself.

The Peña administration risks tearing up a rare untouched ecosystem and damaging its carefully constructed “green” credentials abroad for nothing. In that eventuality, of course, it’s not hard to imagine miners, cattle ranchers, and even farmers of GM soybean filling the gap and pouring into the park.

But the new urgency to search for fossil fuels, uranium, and lithium in the area reflects the undeniable — and self-inflicted — energy crunch facing Paraguay.

”The government of Santiago Peña is desperate to find alternative sources of energy because they’re giving away our hydropower at miserable prices to electro-intensive industries,” Mercedes Canese, a former energy minister, tells the Post.

The country’s electricity consumption jumped by a combined 31% over 2024 and 2025, in large part reflecting cryptocurrency mining operations and foreign-owned data centres.

Paraguay’s energy minister Mauricio Bejarano has even suggested that natural gas could be used to power these industries, according to reporting by Consenso.

“According to our laws, hydrocarbons are property of the state,” Canese added. “It’s always interesting to know what’s underground.”

But she noted that Paraguay’s constitution and international treaties oblige it to get the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples before carrying out projects on their land — something that’s impossible in the case of the isolated Ayoreo thought to live in the Médanos del Chaco.

“There’s no way of doing it,” Canese said. “It’s their land since before the Paraguayan state existed.”

Rodríguez’s proposal to tear up the park’s protections face stiff hurdles — including a 2019 Supreme Court ruling and opposition from a dissident wing of the Colorado Party led by congressman Mauricio Espínola and former president Mario Abdo Benítez.

And though few foreigners ever visit the Chaco, the fracturing of one of its last carbon-dense native ecosystems could have “planetary consequences”, warned Romero, the Guaraní Occidental activist.

Like much of the world, parts of the Chaco broke extreme heat records earlier this year, with temperatures in some parts measuring above 42 Celsius (107.6F).

“My grandparents always said difficult times were ahead,” she added. “I think we’re living them now.”

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Also in this issue:
Peña’s bulletproof cabinet · Japanese royalty in Paraguay · Yguazú: Paraguay’s Silicon Valley? · Chinese steel · Paraguay’s unaffordable beef · New café, restaurant and bar openings · A geological wonder · Aura farming in San Lorenzo

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TOP STORY

Paraguay as a punchline

by Laurence Blair

Paraguay is used to being the butt of jokes: a pop culture byword for somewhere so faraway and obscure that merely mentioning it provokes a smile.

It’s often a throwaway reference — in The Office, Gilmore Girls, Anaconda, and Wedding Crashers — or a place to run away and hide, as in Mark Knopfler’s Postcards from Paraguay or Iggy Pop’s Paraguay.

Comparing the dismal health insurance of the United States to the generous welfare states of Canada, Europe and Japan, Homer Simpson tells Marge: “You can thank your lucky stars we don't live in Paraguay.”

But when the man reaching for the P-word punchline is the second-most powerful person in the Western Hemisphere — a man operating as Donald Trump’s de facto Viceroy of Venezuela, starving Cuba of fuel, and defending the bombing of alleged “narcoboats” off South American shores — it hits a little different.

Appearing on the podcast of former Trump administration staffer Katie Miller on 11 August, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described how he had undergone the high-protein keto diet a few years ago.

“You go through this massive withdrawal from sugar and carbohydrates for the first 72 hours,” the US secretary of state chuckled. “It was a near-psychotic event for me.”

“It’s true”, laughs his wife, Jeanette, seated next to him.

“Like, if I did it in this job,” the US foreign policy chief continued, “I would be, ‘Mr. President, we must bomb — you know, you know — Paraguay.’”

“And it’s like, ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know, I’m just really mad; I haven’t had any sugar.’”

The cautionary anecdote from Rubio, whom Miller described as “the funniest person in the administration,” was quick to catch press attention in Paraguay.

ABC Color called it an “unusual joke”. The tabloid Extra suggested that Rubio’s trigger-happy hangriness made him pirevai. El Nacional noted that the attempt at humour “took on a different dimension” coming from Trump’s top diplomat.

But from Paraguay’s government, which had just days previously demanded explanations from Brazilian president Lula over his comments regarding a nineteenth century war? Crickets.

THE POST TAKE

If Rubio’s low blood sugar has failed to trigger a diplomatic incident, it’s probably because the idea of the US launching an attack on Paraguay — its top ally in the Southern Cone — seems obviously ludicrous.

The government of Santiago Peña has marched in lockstep with the Trump administration: signing deals on military cooperation and critical minerals, designating Brazilian gangs and Islamist groups as terrorists, sticking up for Taiwan, cosying up to Israel, and turning its back on China.

Mere days before his Katie Miller Pod appearance, Rubio had signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with his Paraguayan counterpart, Rubén Ramírez Lezcano. Bombs probably wouldn’t mix too well with the small nuclear reactors envisioned as helping to power the smaller country once its hydropower runs out.

Yet Rubio’s department recently put out a bellicose video defending the Monroe Doctrine and asserting that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never again be questioned”.

And as the US military campaign against so-called narcoterrorists across the hemisphere heats up — including a murky series of bombings in Ecuador on land and at sea, with more operations planned for Colombia, Bolivia and Central America — some are on high alert for signs that Paraguay could be next.

The Peña administration has sought to pour cold water on the idea of a US military deployment. Top officials say deploying foreign troops in Paraguay for crime-fighting in border areas would violate national sovereignty and risk further provoking Lula’s Brazil, Paraguay’s top economic partner.

Watch the clip, and you can almost see the Cuban-American former senator and 2028 hopeful scrambling to think of a country that he can joke about bombing without causing a geopolitical crisis. Paraguay — relatively small, distant, and desperately eager to please the White House — fits the bill.

Yet many a true word is spoken in jest. And few would have guessed a year ago that Trump could invade Venezuela to kidnap Nicolás Maduro, wipe out Iran’s senior leadership in a lightning bombardment, or come to the brink of war with Denmark over Greenland. Rubio was surely joking. Right?

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In this issue:
Peña: three years of wins? · Cartes plots another ANR term · Estigarribia joins 2028 race · Paraguay’s big energy reshuffle · Moody’s warns on government cash flow · Maquila exports surge · SENAD killings raise questions

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TOP STORY

Paraguay’s financial reckoning

For months, Paraguay’s government insisted it was on course to bring the fiscal deficit back within the legal limit of 1.5% of GDP this year. It now admits that was never realistic.

Economy Minister Óscar Lovera has confirmed that the gap between what the state spends and what it takes in will instead reach 3.2% of GDP in 2026, more than twice the target. Worse, the government expects it to rise further to 3.9% in 2027 — before supposedly plunging back to 1.5% in 2028, Santiago Peña’s final year in office.

The reason is simple: Paraguay owes a lot more than its official accounts let on.

At the end of 2025, the state had accumulated $1.27bn in unpaid bills, according to Lovera — around $1.05bn owed to pharma suppliers and another $220m to public-works contractors. The government had treated much of this as deuda flotante, or floating debt: invoices that had not yet been paid and therefore did not show up in the headline deficit in the same way as actual cash spending.

Think of it as balancing your household budget by simply leaving several months of utility bills unopened on the kitchen table. Your bank account may look healthy, but your true financial position is not.

This is precisely what critics have long accused the Peña administration of doing.

In November, the Post reported that delayed payments to drug companies, road builders, and suppliers to the Hambre Cero school-meals programme were allowing the government to present an artificially flattering fiscal picture. Former Central Bank president José Cantero estimated that including those unpaid obligations would push the real deficit towards 3.9%.

The government’s new figures amount to a belated admission that those concerns were justified.

Lovera argues that the underlying picture is less dramatic. Strip out the accumulated arrears, he says, and this year’s deficit would be around 2%; in 2027, about 1.9%. The extra spending is effectively the cost of finally putting old invoices through the books. Slower tax revenues — partly blamed on the strong guaraní reducing customs receipts — and lower income from the binational hydropower dams like Itaipú have also complicated matters.

But this is now Paraguay’s third attempt to return to the 1.5% ceiling established by its Fiscal Responsibility Law, last achieved back in 2018 (1.3%). The original post-pandemic timetable envisioned reaching it in 2024. When Peña took office in 2023, he accused his predecessor Mario Abdo Benítez of hiding unpaid debts to make the deficit look smaller, borrowed an extraordinary $600m to clear the slate, and pushed the deadline to 2026.

Three years later, Peña’s government is doing essentially the same thing — only with an even larger pile of unpaid bills.

The political backlash has been broad. Opposition senator Rafael Filizzola accused the administration of lying to Congress and the public about respecting fiscal limits, claiming that international scrutiny from the likes of the IMF ultimately forced it to acknowledge the true situation. Dissident Colorado senator Mario Varela likewise called for a more transparent and predictable fiscal policy.

Even Gustavo Leite, one of the more combative senators from Peña’s own Honor Colorado movement, has called the deficit revelations “very serious,” demanded around $400m in spending cuts, and lashed out at “inept” Economy Ministry officials. Others, like Yo Creo senator Rubén Velázquez, suggested raising the legal limit to 2.5%, given the current ceiling has only been respected three times in eleven years of the law’s existence.

The private sector is nervous, too. Economists and bankers warn that Paraguay’s hard-won investment-grade status can’t be treated as permission to keep accumulating debt. Former finance minister César Barreto says Paraguay’s reputation has already been damaged by repeatedly missing its fiscal promises.

And the new 2028 target may prove the least believable promise of all. Hitting 1.5% would require either significantly higher tax revenues, substantial spending restraint, or both. Yet 2027 brings mounting expenditures on social programmes, thousands of new government employees, and pressure for public-sector wage rises.

2028 after all, is an election year: hardly the moment when politicians take an axe to spending.

THE POST TAKE

There is nothing inherently scandalous about Paraguay temporarily running a deficit above 1.5%.

Governments sometimes need to borrow to clear overdue obligations or invest during difficult periods. Paraguay arguably can afford to tax, borrow and spend much more on things like health, education, and infrastructure.

The scandal is the accounting theatre.

Peña came to office as the technocrat who would tidy up Paraguay’s finances. A former finance minister and IMF economist, he castigated Mario Abdo Benítez for leaving unpaid invoices off the books, borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to clean them up, and promised that fiscal normality would quickly return. Then his own administration allowed the same arrears to pile up.

Paraguay’s economic success story is built less on spectacular wealth than on a reputation for reliability: low inflation, manageable debt, predictable rules, and conservative fiscal management. Those credentials informed decisions by Moody’s and S&P to award the country investment-grade status and underpin Peña’s relentless pitch to overseas investors.

Being seen to cook the books — even through accounting practices that may technically be legal — corrodes precisely that asset.

The gimmick wasn’t harmless. The government spent months trumpeting growth, investment and macroeconomic stability while construction companies went bankrupt and laid off workers and patients complained of missing hospital supplies. All the while, former Economy Minister Fernández Valdovinos dismissed any suggestion of raising the debt ceiling.

Cleaning up the arrears will make the headline deficit look much worse in the short term, but that is preferable to continuing the fiction. The harder question is what comes next.

Returning from 3.9% to 1.5% in a single year would demand considerable political pain. Raising taxes remains taboo. Cutting popular programmes is electorally toxic. Slashing patronage, privileges, and inefficient spending would mean confronting interests inside the Colorado Party itself.

And the timing could hardly be worse. An emerging El Niño is expected to bring greater rainfall volatility and extreme weather over the coming months. For an economy heavily dependent on soy, beef, river transport, and hydroelectric power, floods, crop losses, or disruption along the Paraguay-Paraná waterway could weaken revenues just as the government needs them most.

Paraguay’s fiscal problem is therefore no longer mainly an accounting question. It is a test of whether Peña’s government is willing to make difficult choices or simply hand the bill, once again, to whoever comes next.

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In this issue:
Shell station on Costanera stirs scandal · Asunción mayoral race kicks off · Prieto heads to trial · Pharmacy mega-merger advances · Crypto entrepreneur found dead in Asunción · Real-estate developer calls in creditors · Cartes to the Senate?

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Here comes the rain

A potentially historic El Niño is gathering strength in the Pacific — and Paraguay is preparing for months of unusually heavy rain and hugely disruptive floods.

The US Climate Prediction Center says the weather phenomenon has an 81% chance of becoming “very strong” between October and December, potentially ranking among the most powerful El Niño events recorded since 1950. In Paraguay, officials expect a wetter spring and summer, with especially heavy rains from September through December and possibly into early 2027.

Eduardo Mingo, Paraguay’s director of Meteorology and Hydrology, says the first local sign is a relatively mild end to winter. As the phenomenon gathers energy, it could then intensify the thunderstorms that normally accompany Paraguay’s transition into spring and its hot, humid summer.

Every El Niño is different, Mingo cautions. The 2023–24 event produced serious flooding along the Paraná basin in Ñeembucú, Misiones, and Itapúa, while parts of the Chaco were drier than normal. Even so, some officials are sounding apocalyptic.

Defence Minister Óscar González claimed on Monday that there was a 99% chance of El Niño affecting Paraguay “in its worst version” from late August.

He put military vehicles at the disposal of the remote Alto Paraguay department and is negotiating fuel-storage facilities with Petropar in Chaco towns like Fuerte Olimpo, where prolonged rain can turn roads and airstrips into mudbaths and isolate settlements for weeks.

Emergency Minister Arsenio Zárate has meanwhile warned that Paraguay could receive around 200mm more rainfall than usual in late 2026. Engineering units have been deployed to clear waterways in Asunción and the surrounding Central department.

Cities in Paraguay face two distinct flood risks. Intense storms can unleash raudales — violent torrents that rush through streets, damage homes, and sweep away pedestrians and cars. These are worsened by the rubbish clogging streams and drains, while asphalt and concrete make it harder for water to disperse.

A slower, more inexorable danger comes from sustained rainfall across the Pantanal and the Paraguay and Paraná river basins, which can eventually push rivers over their banks.

For riverside communities, especially Asunción’s bañados, that second danger can mean evacuation into improvised roadside camps. In Alto Paraguay and Ñeembucú, entire settlements may become accessible only by boat or aircraft. In the exceptionally strong El Niño of 2015, roughly 27,000 people were registered as flood victims in the capital alone.

For Paraguay’s export economy, however, rising rivers are a mixed bag. The landlocked country moves most of its international trade by barge through the Paraguay–Paraná waterway. More water can improve navigability, allow heavier loads and reduce delays caused by low river levels — although unusually high water, storms and strong currents can also disrupt ports and navigation.

The same ambiguity extends to agriculture. Édgar Mayeregger, the Agriculture Ministry’s risk-management coordinator, says crop and livestock yields during El Niño years often exceed national averages. Abundant rain can replenish soil moisture and revive pastures, but too much at the wrong moment can delay planting and harvesting, prevent machinery from entering fields, reduce crop quality, and favour pests and fungal diseases.

Hugo Pastore of grain exporters’ association Capeco says the sector’s biggest concern lies “outside the farm”: heavy rain can turn unpaved rural roads into mud, leaving grain and livestock stranded way before reaching silos, ports, or slaughterhouses.

Paraguay’s hydroelectric dams Itaipú and Yacyretá may benefit from stronger Paraná River inflows, lifting electricity generation after weaker hydrological conditions. But Paraguay is consuming more and more of its allocated power, meaning that less of this surplus will be available for sale to Brazil and Argentina.

THE POST TAKE

The government’s early preparations are welcome: meteorological agencies have been coordinating since March, the SEN is running simulations and stockpiling supplies, and municipalities are clearing channels and drawing up evacuation plans.

But there is a major gap between preparing to respond to a disaster and reducing the conditions that turn heavy rainfall into one.

Storms do not create rubbish-choked streams, neglected flood defences, homes built on floodplains, or roads that dissolve into mud. They expose failures that have accumulated for decades — in places officials already know, from past El Niño events, will suffer first.

The SEN is right to urge residents not to throw trash into waterways. But that message risks shifting responsibility onto individuals for failures rooted in irregular waste collection, uncontrolled urbanisation, and decades of weak drainage and housing policy. In Asunción, families are repeatedly evacuated from the bañados into improvised camps of clapboard houses in public squares — only to return to the same floodplain once the river falls.

The same contradiction runs through the economy. Record yields will mean little if crops cannot leave the farm, while extra hydropower will offer limited relief if the grid remains fragile, household demand surges, and the country continues courting power-hungry data centres.

Paraguay could emerge from El Niño with fuller rivers, stronger harvests, and greater electricity generation. Or excessive rain could swamp fields, cut off towns, spread mosquito-borne diseases, and once again drive thousands of poor families from the riverbanks.

Most likely, it will do some of both.

El Niño will therefore be a nationwide test of whether the government’s preparations amount to more than press conferences — and whether one of Latin America’s fastest-growing economies has invested enough in the roads, drainage, housing, and planning needed to withstand a predictable climate shock.

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In this issue:
2028 field gets crowded · Peña eyes extractive energy boom · New fiscal deficit ceiling? · More jobs, more underemployment · Paraguay signs US nuclear cooperation deal · Yankiguayo influencer accused of exploiting Ayoreo · Paraguay’s gift to friendship

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Lula’s haphazard history lecture

By Laurence Blair

Brazilian President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva has sparked outrage in Paraguay after blaming it for a nineteenth-century war thought to have wiped out half the smaller country’s population.

Speaking on Friday at the recently revived Avibras missile factory in Jacareí, São Paulo, the leftist leader described how his nation had long prioritised diplomacy to resolve disputes.

But he argued Brazil now has to invest more in defence, noting that geopolitical threats could emerge from nowhere — and reaching for a controversial historical example.

“We like peace,” Lula told the assembled ministers and military chiefs, “but we can’t forget that, one fine day, Paraguay decided to invade Brazil. It invaded Corumbá and at the same time invaded Uruguay and at the same time Argentina.”

“And that war,” he added, “which looked like it wouldn’t amount to much, lasted five years.”

Lula’s remarks have reopened painful historical wounds in Paraguay, which suffered a traumatising defeat in the 1864-70 War of the Triple Alliance.

Raúl Latorre, the president of Paraguay’s Chamber of Deputies, accused Lula of “speaking far too lightly about the greatest tragedy of our history, the greatest genocide of our continent.”

Opposition congressman Rubén Rubin said the veteran Brazilian leader was “distorting history” and called on Paraguay’s government to demand the return of war-era trophies from Brazil.

Popular historian Fabián Chamorro meanwhile said Lula, 80, was “scattered” and “confused,” and that his version of events “has half-truths at best.”

Paraguay’s strongman ruler, Marshal Francisco Solano López, seized a Brazilian vessel bound for Mato Grosso, imprisoned its governor, and launched attacks on Brazilian forts late in 1864.

But Paraguayan historians have emphasised that López’s actions were preceded by a Brazilian invasion of Uruguay that October. Troops loyal to Pedro II then installed a puppet government the following year.

López had warned that any intervention in Uruguay would be an unacceptable challenge to the regional balance of power — and that he would take measures in response. Brazil, an increasingly expansionist power, ignored him.

After López raided Brazil in response — and marched his troops across northern Argentina to come to the aid of his Uruguayan allies — the governments of Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and occupied Uruguay signed a treaty declaring war on Paraguay and vowing to overthrow López on May 1, 1865.

Paraguay mounted a desperate defence, but was ultimately vanquished.

It lost huge swathes of territory and most of its adult men — including López, who was shot dead fleeing the battlefield after being wounded at Cerro Corá in 1870. Brazilian troops occupied the capital, Asunción, for six years: looting the city, enslaving children, and stabling their horses in López’s palace.

The victors in what many Paraguayans call simply the guerra guazú (The Great War) have long been accused of war crimes: including the slaughter of women, children, and the wounded.

In 2022, a subcomission of regional parliament Parlasur declared the Allies were responsible for “genocide in modern terms”. Brazilian delegates boycotted the inquiry.

Lula’s simplistic explanation of the war’s causes — and the implication that Paraguay could one day attack again — have yet to meet with a public response from Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, or his diplomatic service.

Vice-president Pedro Alliana, a 2028 presidential hopeful, said the war had “massacred our children, burned hospitals, and looted Asunción.”

In a social media post, he said he was “focused on the future”, but that the return of war-era trophies by Brazil “could be a gesture of brotherhood that helps to make amends for the past.”

THE POST TAKE

The Paraguayan War — the bloodiest inter-state conflict in Latin American history — is still being fought over.

The dominant view abroad, which Lula seems to share, is that López’s Paraguay was to blame for the bloodshed.

His delusions of grandeur arguably made López fatally overestimate the strength of his forces — and needlessly prolong the carnage.

For decades, many Paraguayans agreed. Post-war governments made it illegal to praise the marshal and his supposed megalomania.

Yet a popular counternarrative gradually emerged: that Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay — backed by London banks and even the British crown — had plotted from the outset to dismember the emerging Paraguayan superpower.

Only López’s strategic genius and heroic sacrifice, this meandering theory runs, saved Paraguay from being wiped off the map.

This point of view was championed by the Alfredo Stroessner regime (1954-89) — and more subtly by the Peña administration, which describes Paraguay as a reawakening “giant.” Today, López is claimed by every political tendency.

A splinter cell from the EPP — the leftist guerrilla group which allegedly perpetrated a deadly attack on a police station last week (see below the paywall) — called itself the Army of Marshal López (EML). Paraguay’s footballers were given a replica of López’s sabre before heading to the World Cup.

More recent scholarship has emphasised how hazy post-colonial borders and disputes over river navigation — as well as nationalistic miscalculations on all sides — set the region on the road to war.

In my book Patria — chapter eight contains a whistle-stop journey through Paraguayan history — I describe the conflict as “a clash over the control of Montevideo city hall that had spiralled out of control, becoming a civilisational struggle with ugly racial overtones.”

Perceptions about the morality of the war also vary among the victors.

Uruguay was quick to repent, returning looted war trophies to its as early as 1885. Argentina followed suit, with Juan Domingo Perón bringing back seized weapons and flags when he attended Stroessner’s inauguration in 1954.

In the 1980s, Brazil returned thousands of documents seized during the war from Paraguay’s national archives. But popular legend in Paraguay has it that important or incriminating records have been held back.

The Christian Cannon — a massive artillery piece forged by López from church bells — still sits in the courtyard of the National Historical Museum in Rio.

(Paraguay, to be fair, still has a couple of Brazilian warships sitting on its riverbeds and at an open-air museum called Vapor Cué.)

And while the experience of mobilisation and victory paved its way to South American superpower status, few in Brazil today give much thought to the conflict.

Lula’s unexpected saunter down memory lane puts Peña in a tricky position. He has talked up Paraguay’s pre-war greatness and claims the country is once more taking its place as a regional player.

But Paraguay depends on Brazil as the buyer of 35% of its exports — especially soybean, maquila manufactured goods, and hydroelectric energy — as well as the source of a third of Paraguay’s foreign investment in 2025.

Over 20,000 Brazilians applied for residency in Paraguay last year — over half the total. Brazilian aerospace firm Embraer also sold Paraguay six Super Tucano attack aircraft.

The two countries have only recently gotten past an espionage scandal where Brazilian spies hacked Paraguayan officials renegotiating the future terms of the shared Itaipú dam.

And Brazilian buy-in is crucial if infrastructure projects like the Bioceanic Highway — and the related cross-border bridge at Carmelo Peralta, due to be completed in September — are to bear fruit.

Despite claiming to be the heirs of López, the ruling Colorado Party isn’t exactly known for standing up to Brasília or wealthy brasiguayo settlers.

Former president Horacio Cartes (2013-18) — the power behind Peña’s throne — famously told a drinks party of Brazilian investors gathered in the Palacio de López to “use and abuse Paraguay.”

There’s a broader question about how much mileage Paraguay — arguably Donald Trump’s closest ally in the Southern Cone — can get from playing the victim 150 years later.

The Peña administration has signed a controversial military cooperation deal with the White House and declared Brazilian criminal organisations the PCC and CV to be terrorists, sparking a rift with Brazil.

The prospect of a ramped-up US military presence in the next-door nation — and the abduction of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro by US special forces in January — may be playing on Lula’s mind as he faces elections this October.

And with Lula now on course to defeat the scandal-ridden Bolsonarista right and remain in power for four more years, Peña’s best option may be to apply the refrain from a popular British sitcom: don’t mention the war.

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In this issue:
Police killings revive EPP spectre · Prieto sketches 2028 platform · Residency applications surge · Paraguay apologises for journalist’s murder · Paraguayan science spotlighted · Beijing cultivates business ties

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TOP STORY

Horacio meets Marco, and Landau

Former president Horacio Cartes (2013-18) briefly met US Secretary of State Marco Rubio while attending the World Cup final, in an encounter celebrated by his allies as proof of political rehabilitation.

The warm exchange of words captured on camera at the MetLife stadium in New Jersey carried obvious symbolic weight. Cartes had been designated “significantly corrupt” by the US State Department and placed under Treasury sanctions in 2023 over alleged corruption, accusations he has repeatedly denied.

Yet those financial sanctions were lifted in October 2025 — officials said they were no longer serving U.S. foreign-policy interests — clearing the way for the tobacco magnate to set foot on North American soil once more.

Rubio’s presence in the VIP box made the moment particularly striking. During a visit to Guatemala in February 2025, the newly appointed secretary of state said changes to sanctions against officials accused of corruption and anti-democratic conduct had not been discussed by the Trump administration. His comments wrong-footed cartistas, who had expected the ouster of the Biden administration to bring Cartes immediate relief.

Yet after rubbing shoulders with Rubio and other top dignitaries over the weekend, Cartes was also formally received by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, whose father served as US ambassador to Paraguay during the 1970s.

For Honor Colorado, the dominant faction of the ruling Colorado Party, the message was clear: its leader was no longer being treated as a diplomatic liability, but as someone welcome in Washington’s political orbit.

Cartes holds no official government position beyond the presidency of the Colorado Party. Yet the encounter underlined the parallel influence he exercises over Paraguay’s government, particularly given that President Santiago Peña was not present at the Argentina–Spain final.

The timing was also striking. Days later, Peña’s government confirmed that Gustavo Leite would leave Paraguay’s embassy in Washington and return to his Senate seat on July 22, less than a year after taking up the diplomatic post.

Leite’s short tenure coincided with an unusually close phase in US-Paraguay relations. Paraguay signed a controversial Status of Forces Agreement facilitating the presence of US military personnel and contractors, while also expanding an arrangement allowing migrants rejected by the United States to be transferred through Paraguayan territory.

Yet Leite’s performance as ambassador was repeatedly questioned at home. Cartista senator Natalicio Chase described him as a “luxury ambassador,” but struggled to point to concrete achievements. Opposition senator Rafael Filizzola was harsher, characterizing the posting as a year of “diplomatic tourism” focused on Honor Colorado and one wing of the GOP rather than Paraguay’s national interest.

Leite also created friction inside Peña’s government. In April, he criticised departing Economy Minister Carlos Fernández Valdovinos and said that under Cartes there had been “not even the smell of a bribe” — something, he implied, that stood in sharp contrast to the Peña administration. Foreign Minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano formally reprimanded him.

His early departure will not be cheap. ABC Color estimates that terminating the posting requires the state to pay Leite more than $30k in additional salary, on top of the cost of housing, representation, relocation and his months in Washington. His return also forces substitute senator Carlos Liseras to surrender the seat.

Leite’s recall forms part of a wider diplomatic reshuffle. The moves cover eight embassies and mix routine rotations with more politically awkward removals — including a career diplomat in Lebanon accused of swiping on Tinder during working hours. But Leite’s successful matchmaking mission between the Trump White House and HC is the one making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

THE POST TAKE

Leite’s Washington mission now looks less like an ordinary diplomatic appointment than a political assignment with a defined objective.

His return to the Senate was announced almost immediately after Cartes secured the photographs Honor Colorado had been seeking — first beside Rubio at the World Cup final, then in a formal meeting with Landau. The sequence has the feel of a mission-accomplished statement.

Measured by that standard, Leite’s brief posting may have been successful. His public defense of Cartes, his attacks on Peña’s own officials, and the lack of clearly identifiable national-policy achievements all reinforce the impression that the embassy served as an extension of factional politics.

Peña may formally direct Paraguay’s foreign policy. But the World Cup photograph suggests that, when it comes to the relationship with Washington, his political patron is once again the figure Honor Colorado most wants in the frame.

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In this issue:
Investment grade (and fiscal strain) confirmed ⋅ Property buyers beware⋅ Spanish casino giant arrives ⋅ The asphalt mafia strikes ⋅ A new mega-dam? ⋅ Paraguay adds three restaurants to 50 Best ⋅ Did the Guaraní invent football?

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TOP STORY

The Post Presents: Parts Unknown & Los Paraguayos

by Laurence Blair

“For most people, Paraguay is an empty space on the map of Latin America,” a voice intones, over shots of a dustblown downtown Asunción.

The country is best known, the narrator continues, as a “refuge for fleeing Nazis and a long line of extremely unpleasant dictators”, where even the guidebooks tell you “to buy a gun.”

Cue harp music, and a freewheeling 40-minute documentary in which Anthony Bourdain gently challenges the clichéd version of Paraguay as a dangerous, godforsaken den of vice.

Bourdain said this 2014 episode of his popular CNN travel show Parts Unknown — which The Paraguay Post is screening tomorrow with our friends at Cineclub Itinerante — was some of his crew’s “best work”.

The globetrotting chef samples fish stew in the Mercado Cuatro and tries sopa paraguaya, Paraguay’s famously solid soup. He wolfs down a lomito at a roadside copetín (“all my greasy meat dreams have come true”).

And he heads upriver with a cigar-smoking East German exile — friend of the Post Peter Gardner — coming across a shotgun-wielding capybara hunter in a rowboat and the detritus of a failed French colony called Nouvelle Bourdeaux.

The show has a deeply personal dimension, too.

The “spine” of the documentary, Bourdain later wrote in his fieldnotes, is a quest to find his lost great-great-grandfather: a French hatmaker called Jean Bourdain who reputedly emigrated to Paraguay in the 1850s.

And Bourdain, then 58, also seems to be searching for solace amid the glare of global fame.

Over beef empanadas at the storied Lido Bar, the Kitchen Confidential author tells a private investigator called Pedro that he’s “the longest living male Bourdain in possibly ever.”

“So you’re lonely in the world,” the grizzled PI replies, in a penetrating malapropism.

“I’m lonely in the world,” Bourdain agrees, his eyes telegraphing a flash of vulnerability.

Four years later, Bourdain — who had spoken openly of his past addiction to hard drugs, and his struggle with “existential despair” — would take his own life in a French hotel room.

But despite lingering on themes of death, corruption and decay — cue multiple shots of the crumbling ballroom ceilings at the Gran Hotel del Paraguay — the show ultimately strikes out for a sunnier conclusion.

Bourdain pokes around the ransacked tombs of the Recoleta cemetery, jumbled bones exposed to the elements, before breezily concluding: “Nobody here I know.”

B-roll shows regular Paraguayans of all shapes and sizes hanging out in the park, drinking tereré, and smiling at the camera: a far cry from a Hobbesian hellhole.

A satisfying twist meanwhile suggests a family legend about Jean Bourdain’s real profession may not be too far off the mark.

And the episode ends with the chef happily sharing a barbecue with all the trimmings on a ranch among the peaceful, forested hills of Piribebuy, serenaded by the strains of Bienvenido, hermano extranjero.

“This was not the Paraguay I expected at all,” Bourdain concludes.

THE POST TAKE

Parts Unknown doesn’t exactly offer a politically correct take on Paraguay.

Bourdain plays up the country’s eccentricities, unfairly pins the blame for the War of the Triple Alliance entirely on the “tinpot dictator” Marshal López — and fantasises about his ancestor amassing a harem of Indigenous wives.

He previously wrote that, after witnessing the destruction caused by the U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia, “you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”

So it’s striking that he dedicates a minute or so to Alfredo Stroessner without adding that presidents Eisenhower through to Ford propped up his 35-year regime with guns, cash, and torture tips.

But the documentary is a stylishly shot and heartfelt artefact of how outsiders have, over the centuries, tended to view Paraguay through the lens of our own hang-ups.

Tomorrow — from 7pm at CheckPoint Downtown Bar, Palma, casi Caballero — we’ll be using the show as a springboard for a discussion (mainly in Spanish, probably) about how foreign perceptions of Paraguay are fuelling the country’s contemporary migration boom.

We’ll hear first-hand from some of the tens of thousands of foreigners to relocate to the country in recent years — as well as why nearly a million Paraguayans have meanwhile headed for the exit.

To close things off, we’ll be showing Los Paraguayos (2006): a lesser-known documentary by leading local director Marcelo Martinessi. Made for audiences in Brazil and Europe, the short film explores the origins and contradictions of Paraguayan identity, from the Guaraní to the present day.

If you’re a paid subscriber to the Post, make yourself known, and your first chopp of Munich is on us — just one of the many perks received by our valued community of supporters. Nos vemos!

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In this issue:
Paraguay tightens residency rules ⋅ Fake degree scandal widens⋅ Liberal Party fades from picture ⋅ China hacks Paraguay’s government, again ⋅ Soy leads trade rebound ⋅ Forgotten stories of colonial resistance ⋅ Restoring Stroessner’s symbols

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TOP STORY

Does Paraguay Have a Racism Problem?

A prominent Paraguayan senator has triggered international uproar for directing racist abuse towards Kylian Mbappé after he scored the penalty that eliminated Paraguay from the World Cup on Saturday.

In a welter of angry remarks posted on X, Celeste Amarilla branded the top French forward an illiterate “brute” and a “colonised Cameroonian, desperately trying to pass himself as French.”

“He suckled on coconuts instead of mother’s milk,” added the 61-year-old lawmaker for the opposition Liberal Party (PLRA). “The most educated thing he listened to were chimpanzees.”

Mbappé quickly hit back on the same platform, calling Amarilla a “despicable woman and unworthy of your position.”

The Paris-born player of Algerian-Cameroonian parentage said the senator’s “brazen racism” had overshadowed Paraguay’s “historic effort” during the World Cup and “given the worst possible image” of their country.

The French Football Federation called the senator’s remarks “utterly unacceptable” and filed a complaint. The Paris prosecutor’s office said it was investigating whether to charge Amarilla with inciting racial hatred: an offence punishable by up to a year in jail and a €45,000 ($51,000) fine.

French president Emmanuel Macron also weighed in, saying Mbappé had “scored another goal” against racism. “All my support,” he added. “When words smear, our values respond: dignity, respect, fraternity.”

As the scandal went viral worldwide and was even criticised by the UN, Amarilla deleted the original posts. She then published an open letter to Mbappé in which she expressed regret for using “the same insults” she had received as a mixed-race person.

But she blamed her outburst on the 27-year-old Real Madrid star for comparing Paraguay’s physical tactics to playing in excrement — and failing to shake Paraguayan goalkeeper Orlando Gill’s hand after the final whistle.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Amarilla admitted to racism, which she said she “hated” and was trying to unlearn.

“I grew up in that global society,” she said by way of explanation, “where saying negro de mierda was common.”

The senator, who claims to have received “millions” of messages of support, also threatened to sue Mbappé for gender-based violence.

“Read my letter, if he knows how to,” she added. “Don’t mess with us Paraguayans, Mbappé, because we already put Ronaldinho in jail for being corrupt.”

The affair is the latest scandal involving allegedly racist and sexist comments by Paraguayan public figures to erupt in recent weeks.

Prior to Saturday’s match, the former goalkeeper, TV commentator and sometime political candidate Jose Luis Chilavert said “in the ‘98 World Cup we played the French, and now Paraguay is facing an African team.”

Last month, Paraguayan tennis star Adolfo Vallejo was fined $65,000 by the French Open after he said a match he narrowly lost to French teenager Moise Kouame should have been umpired by a man.

And in March, Paraguayan influencer Carmiña Masi was kicked out of the Argentine version of Big Brother after she said fellow contestant Jenny Mavinga looked like she had “just been bought, fresh off the boat.”

Masi — who also explicitly likened the DRC-born Mavinga to a “little monkey” and a “slave” — subsequently apologised. But like Amarilla, she also tried to play the victim and ride out the scandal.

“I’m leaving with my head held high,” she said.

THE POST TAKE

Mbappé-gate has triggered a fierce debate about sportsmanship, sovereignty, the limits of free expression — and Paraguay’s peculiar relationship with race.

Many Paraguayans swear their country is colour-blind.

Widespread racial mixing under Spanish rule — later made a state policy by post-independence dictator Dr. Francia (1814-40) — means most locals have some Indigenous ancestry.

While declining in use, the native-origin language Guaraní is spoken by 66.6% of the population: a rarity in Latin America.

Especially during international tournaments, Paraguayan politicians and coaches like to talk of the garra guaraní: the tenacity and cunning supposedly inherited from the country’s pre-Columbian inhabitants.

Visitors from the US and Brazil are sometimes struck by Paraguay’s apparent lack of segregation by neighbourhood, race-based identity politics — or everyday prejudice towards Black people.

Amid the Amarilla-Mbappé fallout, one Cameroonian resident of 26 years interviewed by TV news said he had “never felt discriminated against” in Paraguay.

”I don’t know any other country where the people are as warm as this,” Kwetta Kenneth Nju told Unicanal.

Mexico and Brazil have their beloved caramelos. Here, the perro delmer — the tan-coloured, market-variety mongrel — has come to signify Paraguay’s sense of its own pedigree: a bit of everything, and proud of it.

But scratch the surface and you find a clear connection between race, class, wealth and power in Paraguay.

Paraguay’s political elite is overwhelmingly lighter-skinned and Spanish-speaking. No Indigenous person has ever held national office, despite multiple qualified candidates running for congress. Some 66% of the country’s native population lives in poverty: nearly three times the average.

Paraguayan countryfolk often have little in common — and even struggle to communicate — with their Mbyá, Avá Guaraní, or Paĩ Tavyterã neighbours. Paraguayan Guaraní, say scholars, has long ceased to be an Indigenous language.

That’s to say nothing of the diverse linguistic and ethnic groups in the Chaco — the vast outback that makes up Paraguay’s western half — where reports of discrimination, forced labour, and even a slow-motion genocide of uncontacted Ayoreo nomads by white settlers regularly surface.

Two hundred years ago, almost half the population of Asunción was Black or mixed-race — the product of the trans-Atlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans to work in Paraguay’s farms, mines and households.

The incomplete 2012 census registered nearly 4,000 people who identified as Afro-Paraguayan, mainly in working-class barrios like Kamba Kuá in Fernando de la Mora and the nearby town of Emboscada.

A 2024 study suggested the real figure could be 85,000 or more: roughly 1.5% of the population. Yet Afro-Paraguayan organisations say they are often made to feel invisible — or exoticised and discriminated against.

The Grupo Tradicional San Baltazar — a cultural collective from Kamba Kuá — criticised Amarilla’s outburst, saying it was likely to “increase hatred and persecution towards afrodescendants.”

And while officials from Paraguay’s ruling Colorado Party were quick to condemn Amarilla’s attack on Mbappé — and to hint that she could be suspended from her seat — critics argue the government has done little to combat racism.

Article 46 of Paraguay’s constitution prohibits discrimination of all kinds. But legislation that would give that provision teeth has stalled in the Colorado-controlled congress for decades.

Interviewed by Latitud 25, left-wing senator Esperanza Martínez criticised her colleague, while warning against any attempt to remove Amarilla — one of Paraguay’s few remaining opposition figures.

Asunción mayor Marrio Ferreiro, senator Kattya González, and Ciudad del Este mayor Miguel Prieto have all been unseated amid dubious judicial manoeuvres in recent years.

“Hatred isn’t freedom of expression,” Martínez wrote on social media. “Let’s debate the law, the violence in our society, and the responsibility shared by the media and politics.”

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Also in this issue:

Paraguay’s economy: the best it’s ever been? · IMF tells Paraguay to pay its debts · Community radio station shut down · Government critic silenced · Post-match post-mortem · Leo DiCaprio in Paraguay · Paraguayan soldiers in Ukraine

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

In this issue:

Mercosur courts Japan · Peña complains over EU quotas · BBC spotlights Paraguayan economy · Foreign investment tops $1bn · Dictatorship crimes return to court · Facial recognition challenged · Business blasts Peña’s football holiday

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