Something Stinks at Asunción City Hall
Corruption is hollowing out Paraguay’s capital. Can anyone fix it?
Though still at university, Carlos was a well-known figure in his neighbourhood. So he was the natural person to turn to when – some 15 years ago – a Colorado Party candidate for Asunción city council was looking to drum up guaranteed support.
“He asked me for at least a hundred votes,” says Carlos, who asked for anonymity to be able to talk openly with The Paraguay Post. “I got him more than a hundred.”
The young student organised meetings for supporters, and cross-referenced attendance with the ballots cast in his district. “If people in my area voted for him, they know it was me that got them.”
In exchange, Carlos got a government job. He is now director of a major department in la municipalidad, Asunción City Hall. Nowadays, he adds, the asking price is just 30 votes. And once you’re hired, you don’t even have to show up at the office.
“They said I didn’t have to turn up, but I wanted to, because I was looking to build a career within City Hall,” he explains. “Out of every ten employees, six don’t work.”
Carlos claims that every city councillor, including those belonging to the opposition, provides fake jobs for cronies – otherwise known as planilleros.
“To be honest, a hundred percent of us here got in without formally applying,” he adds. “There’s no competitive application process for la muni. You just need a councillor, director, or family member on the inside.”
According to official registers, Paraguay’s capital employs more than 9,000 workers, split between the mayor’s office and the city council.
The gravy train doesn’t even stop with death. The Post obtained a copy of a collective contract, signed with City Hall workers in 2010, which remains in force.
Article 51 stipulates that if employees die or are permanently disabled – and are the breadwinner for their family – then a relative has the right to occupy the same or another municipal job “according to their ability”.
Mother’s ruin
In a highly centralised country even by Latin American standards, Asunción remains the political, cultural and economic heart of Paraguay.
According to the 2022 census, the capital is home to 462,000 people. A further 1.3 million workers enter Asunción every day: most of them from the greater metropolitan area, which is split between lesser mayoralties.
Yet as its 500th anniversary nears, the challenges facing the mother of cities are increasingly hard to ignore.
Shoddy drainage systems which flood when it rains, carrying away cars and leaving hundreds of people homeless. Poorly-lit parks and smashed-up pavements that look like they’ve been bombarded with mouldering rubbish. Potholes so perennial that locals have taken to marking them with branches, or filling them in themselves.
City Hall’s inability to get to grips with the squalid situation not only makes life hellish for many asuncenos, as residents of Paraguay’s capital are known.
It also complicates the ambitions of Santiago Peña, Paraguay’s president, to make Asunción the greenest city on the planet, a capital worthy of an awakening “giant”, one able to attract tourists and investors from the world over.
The root of the problem is that City Hall is broke, spending most of its limited budget on an overinflated, idling workforce rather than public works.
According to recently presented accounts, la muni spent 727 billion guaraníes ($91m) on personnel in 2024. That works out as 77 percent of the taxes paid by residents to city authorities in the same year. By contrast, City Hall spent just G91bn ($11.4m) on infrastructure between January and December.
Each new administration not only bequeaths this financial headache to its successor, but makes it worse.
The current mayor, Óscar “Nenecho” Rodríguez of the Colorado Party – an ally of former president Horacio Cartes, and previously best known for appearing on the TV show Baila conmigo Paraguay – added at least 1,000 people to the municipal payroll between 2020 and 2022 alone.
Dancing in the debt
Faced with these empty coffers, mayors have got the capital’s taxpayers up to their eyeballs in debt – supposedly to pay for urban improvement projects.
Asunción’s long-term loan commitments are equal to G837bn ($105m), of which G818bn ($102m) correspond to bond issues.
City Hall’s other long-term liabilities add up to 1.12 trillion guaraníes ($150m), two thirds of which is the interest owed on the bonds.
The total owed by Asunción city hall: 2.7 trillion guaraníes ($336m). This is more than double the G1.1tn ($138m) it received in income in 2024.
Adding to the alarm is evidence that these colossal loans are being misdirected – or even vanishing altogether. Last year, it emerged that some G500bn ($70m) in bonds issued by City Hall and notionally destined for infrastructure projects had seemingly been diverted to different bank accounts.
The scandal led to prosecutors raiding city hall amid an ongoing investigation into Mayor Rodríguez, who is yet to clarify where the funds ended up. However, official documentation indicates that at least part of the money was spent on salaries.
“Nenecho” has also been formally accused of setting up shell companies to appropriate emergency funds during the Covid-19 pandemic, using the fake firms to overcharge for supplying cleaning products to City Hall: a case known as “the golden detergents.”
Mayor Rodríguez has previously denied having any connection to the pandemic-era profiteers, and defended his handling of the G500bn bonds.
“The cash didn’t disappear, it wasn’t diverted, it was used,” he told reporters in June, claiming that an “aggressive” programme of infrastructure projects was underway in all of the capital’s 68 neighbourhoods.
Municipal cabinet chief Nelson Mora told the Post that Rodríguez’s administration had increased storm drain coverage from 16 percent of the city to 36 percent, and was on target to hit 47 percent in 2026. “Our priority has always been investing in infrastructure, without failing to maintain the streets, cleanliness and order,” he added. He also said that the number of neighbourhood councils had been increased from 60 to 250.
Asked about the bonds and the “golden detergents” case, Mora said that City Hall was cooperating fully with investigations, and welcomed their speedy resolution. “We reiterate our commitment to transparency, legality and citizen trust.”
Ferreiro’s failure
In 2015, the broadcaster Mario Ferreiro was elected mayor of Asunción on a platform of transparency and renewal. It was billed as a chance to demonstrate that the opposition could take on the hydra and clean up City Hall.
But Ferreiro was hamstrung by a Colorado-dominated city council. Rather than face them down, he opted for back-room deals. The journalist-turned-mayor ended up handing out top jobs to political allies, turning a blind eye to corruption, and allowing planilleros to proliferate.
His administration was such a let-down that when the Colorado Party later cooked up an alleged corruption scandal to remove him, few bothered to come to Ferreiro’s defence. He resigned in 2019, with the remainder of his term served out by Rodríguez, then a councillor.
Ferreiro then faced lengthy lawsuits that effectively buried his political career – even though the cases were ultimately dismissed.
The sorry tale laid bare the enormous difficulties facing anyone who seeks to transform a system of local government where party-political interests and clientelistic practices – put another way, a culture of corruption – are so deeply rooted.
A woman’s job?
The capital’s financial and physical predicament is increasingly in the spotlight as municipal elections in 2026 approach. And in a sharp contrast to Nenecho’s macho bluster, the two most prominent opposition figures who seem likely to run are both women.
Soledad Núñez boosted her profile in the 2023 elections, when she served as running mate to Liberal Party leader Efraín Alegre. But their ticket garnered just 28 percent of the vote, and Núñez’s former position as housing minister under ex-president Cartes could prove a liability in the mayoral race.
The other is Johanna Ortega, well-known for blasting alleged municipal corruption from her seat in Congress. Ortega previously ran for the position in 2021, winning 4.6 percent of the vote: far outstripped by the Liberal Party’s Eduardo Nakayama (42.1 percent) and Rodríguez (47 percent), who was elected to a second full term.
Earlier this month, eleven opposition parties and movements, including Ortega and Núñez, signed a deal agreeing to work towards a single opposition candidate in 2026. Whether the “Unidos por Asunción” (united for Asunción) agreement lasts remains to be seen.
A clutch of dissident Colorados have also indicated an interest in the job. These include congressman Daniel Centurión, the city’s former top traffic cop Juan Villalba, and Hugo “Musculín” Ramírez, a former city council chief turned enemy of “Nenecho”.
Chau Nenecho?
Last September, amid the G500bn spending scandal, Rodríguez suggested he wouldn’t seek re-election. However, in his characteristically crude manner, he held the door open to a potential comeback: “retired gays and retired politicians don’t exist.”
Speaking to Radio Monumental, he defended his record in investing in public works, and blamed the city’s parlous state on stingy residents. Asuncenos, he griped, “want a first-world city but don’t pay their taxes.” A few weeks later, Rodríguez began to name and shame property owners that have fallen behind on their dues.
The Colorado Party has a home advantage when it comes to municipal elections. Most City Hall employees are Colorados and – like Carlos – are usually made to rustle up votes for the ruling party’s candidate in their households and neighbourhoods.
And even if an opposition candidate were to become mayor again, their chances of turning things around and casting out corruption are slim.
Meanwhile, the capital seems abandoned, adrift and in decline, having lost 10 percent of its population in a decade. You’d have to be mad – or extremely brave – to volunteer to clean up this mess.
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