The Boss Is Back: Cartes Crushes Colorado Rivals
The Weekly Post | 09.06.26
TOP STORY
Camilo Crowned Cartista Candidate
By Daniel Duarte Braga
Paraguay’s municipal primaries delivered a blunt message on Sunday: the Colorado Party is not just alive and kicking, but overwhelmingly loyal to former president (2013-18) and party boss Horacio Cartes.
Camilo Pérez — the sports executive picked by Cartes and his Honor Colorado faction to run for mayor of Asunción — won the ruling-party primary with ease, beating former mayor Arnaldo Samaniego by nearly 38,000 votes.
Pérez, president of the Paraguayan Olympic Committee and a member of the International Olympic Committee, took more than 81,000 votes or 61 percent — a striking haul for a candidate who entered the political arena a few months ago.
The result gives the Colorados their candidate for the October 4 municipal election in the capital, where Pérez will face Soledad Núñez, the former housing minister chosen by the opposition alliance Unidos por Asunción.
But rather than Pérez, the bigger story is the machine behind him.
More than 132,000 Colorado voters turned out in Asunción alone. That’s higher than the eventual vote total with which disgraced former mayor Óscar “Nenecho” Rodríguez won city hall in 2021. Honor Colorado also dominated the race for the municipal board, with its lists capturing roughly 70 percent of the ANR council vote in the capital.
The Colorado opposition, which included figures aligned with former president Mario Abdo Benítez and senator Lilian Samaniego, managed a respectable but politically insufficient showing. Samaniego quickly accepted defeat and said he would back Lista 1, while reminding the Cartistas that their camp still represented 43,000 votes. That was about as much rebellion allowed by the abrazo republicano, the Colorados’ traditional post-primary unity pact.
Raúl Latorre, president of the Chamber of Deputies and Pérez’s campaign chief, moved fast to declare unity. In less than 24 hours, both camps agreed to rally behind a single candidate in Asunción. Basilio “Bachi” Núñez, the Senate president and leading Honor Colorado enforcer, said HC won in 241 out of Paraguay’s 263 municipalities, strengthening Cartes’s hold over the party nationwide.
Honor Colorado swept most key cities, including much of the population-dense Central department. In several districts, like San Lorenzo, the real race was not between cartismo and dissidents, but between two candidates carrying the HC brand. The old Colorado habit of internal competition has not disappeared; it has simply migrated inside the dominant faction.
As for the opposition, the Liberal Party elected new authorities besides municipal candidates. Alcides Riveros, the outgoing mayor of Fernando de la Mora, won the presidency of the Liberal Party by a large margin. His victory strengthens the Nuevo Liberalismo faction led by Central governor Ricardo Estigarribia, the 2028 presidential hopeful who is trying to rebuild the PLRA. Dionisio Amarilla, the liberal senator seen as close to Honor Colorado, finished far behind.
Minor opposition parties also held primaries on Sunday, but without major surprises. Núñez’s candidacy had already been agreed upon by the coalition and was formally ratified under the Patria Querida banner, while the alliance also settled on a single joint list of council candidates.
The primaries were not short on local colour. Indigenous voters were, again, rounded up and transported to Fuerte Olimpo, the Tomáraho slept on the floor of a municipal shed before voting. Prosecutors reported a dozen arrests and described schemes including tiny cameras and voters being placed in wheelchairs to allow for “assisted” (i.e., controlled) voting.
In Alto Paraguay, voters and party operators openly discussed payments of 200,000 to 300,000 guaraníes. An influencer and his mother were arrested for flaunting a wad of bills at a voting station. A Luque council candidate was in preventive detention for money laundering while his name remained on the ballot.
Sleazy shenanigans aside, the core result is hard to miss. The ANR mobilised. Honor Colorado consolidated. Party dissidents wilted. And the opposition now has a much clearer picture of the wall it needs to climb in October.
THE POST TAKE
For Soledad Núñez, Sunday’s result complicates the script.
Her campaign was built around the idea that Asunción might be ready for a technocratic reset after years of municipal dysfunction, corruption scandals, unpaid bills, potholed roads, broken sidewalks, collapsing waste services, left by Nenecho. The hope was that a clean, managerial, nontraditional profile could win not only the usual opposition vote but also Colorados fed up with grubby machine politics.
Honor Colorado seems to have read the same memo. Pérez is not a ward boss, senator, or mayoral retread. He is a sports administrator with a résumé built around the Olympic movement and the successful hosting of major events. In other words, cartismo has chosen to fight Sole with a Sole-adjacent profile: technical, managerial, outside the usual municipal swamp — but plugged into the most powerful party structure in the country.
That matters because Núñez cannot win Asunción by uniting the opposition alone. She needs politically homeless voters, non-cartista Colorados, and people who dislike the ANR’s municipal record but are not ideologically opposed to the party. Pérez’s victory suggests Honor Colorado will try to muscle into that lane.
The numbers are sobering. The ANR’s roughly 132,000 voters in an internal contest are not a guaranteed ceiling for October, but they are a real mobilization floor. They also show that cartismo can still turn out its base even after Nenecho and the city’s finances became a national punchline.
Historically, Colorado primaries were the great internal watershed: the moment that revealed the opposition inside the party. Sunday suggests that era is fading. In today’s ANR, winning the general election increasingly means taking all the internal machinery, too. Honor Colorado is not just the ruling faction inside the Colorado Party but also the party’s operating system. Cartes himself seems to have bounced back from a mini-stroke earlier this year, noticeably slimmer but still trading barbs with the press.
One strategically useful result for the opposition came in Ciudad del Este, where the Zacarías dynasty lost ground. That matters because CDE remains Miguel Prieto’s national launchpad and the only major urban arena where the Colorados have recently been beaten.
Inside the PLRA, Nuevo Liberalismo’s victory strengthens Estigarribia and with it the argument that a Liberal should lead the 2028 presidential ticket. That may be good for rebuilding the PLRA’s self-esteem. It may be less useful for opposition unity: the PLRA is running its own council board list. And while Prieto, Estigarribia, Soledad, Kattya González, and other anti-cartista figures can all agree that the Colorados should go, they are much less likely to agree on who gets to drive.
October will test whether Asunción is genuinely ready to break with Colorado rule, or whether anti-Nenecho outrage has already been absorbed by a refreshed cartista brand. But 2028 is the larger prize.
The ANR emerged from Sunday looking more centralized, more disciplined, and even more under Cartes’s thumb. The opposition emerged with some promising municipal footholds but also the same old question: unity behind whom?
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Court blocks Kattya comeback · EPP hostage reappears · Paraguay’s next banking crisis? · Warning over bogus PhDs · La Albirroja prepare for World Cup glory · Starlink comes to schools · Smuggling weight-loss drugs · ATOME hiccup
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