Santi's Holiday Season from Hell
President Peña's 2025 has got off to a rocky start.
Even as the mercury hits the high 30s — that’s around 100F for our yanqui readers — Paraguay’s political temperature tends to drop in the first few weeks of the year. The schools are out, congress is on its generous two-and-a-bit-month recess, and políticos and media hacks alike have decamped to Punta del Este, Balneário Camboriú, or San Bernardino to buzz around on jetskis and cool off.
But after a bruising 2024, Paraguay’s president Santiago Peña started this year in hot water, stumbling from scandal to gaffe. There have even been renewed rumblings of impeachment. No-one has produced evidence of serious wrongdoing by the president himself. But the fallout has strengthened the narrative that Peña is a political lightweight, out of touch with regular Paraguayans and unwilling — to unable — to rein in gross corruption at the highest levels of the state.
The first media storm broke in January. ABC Color revealed how the president has built an ostentatious US$2m summer house, complete with infinity pool, in a gated community above SanBer with a privileged view of Lago Ypacarai. The luxurious construction raised eyebrows, not least because in 2017 Peña famously told Telefuturo he didn’t have “a single peso” to his name. Since Horacio Cartes tapped him to become finance minister a decade ago, the president’s declared net worth has in fact rocketed, growing from US$115,000 in 2014 to nearly US$3m in 2024.
“I’m not a millionaire,” Peña told reporters as the story hit headlines. “I consider myself an honest, hard-working person that’s worked since the age of 18, married for 28 years to my wife, who has also worked all her life.” He justified his personal wealth as reflecting a long career in the private and public sectors, as well as for international organisations. He intimated that the scandal had been confected by ABC and its owners, the Zucolillo business empire, to intimidate him. “I don’t represent any economic group,” he argued, but “all those Paraguayans that want to get ahead.”
Yet questions continued to swirl, including as to why the property is registered as belonging to Walter Raúl Ruiz Maciel, a former judicial official and cartisa candidate for office in Alto Paraná. And rather than driving between the SanBer pad and his official residence in Asunción — a journey that takes barely an hour, even without a motorcade — Peña had taken 37 round trips in an Air Force helicopter in just three months. The costly seven-minute flight could be justified as freeing up time for his official duties. But added to his nearly 40 foreign trips in 18 months, the impression has been cemented that Peña lives not in the real Paraguay but in the clouds.
The next scandal was more serious. Eulalio “Lalo” Gomes had a genuine rags-to-riches story. The late congressman, rancher and real-estate magnate went from selling ice-cream as a seven-year-old boy between Pedro Juan Caballero and Punta Porá, Brazil to garnering a declared fortune of nearly US$130m, including 14 properties, seven vehicles and a small aircraft. Also close to Cartes — and formerly employed by his Banco Amambay — Gomes and his son were charged last year in a 54-page dossier with laundering cash for Comando Vermelho narcotrafficker Jarvis Chimenes Pavão. Gomes was then shot dead in a joint DEA-police raid in August after reportedly opening fire on officers. His family claimed he had been deliberately silenced.
Yet at the start of this month, Gomes deliver a nasty surprise from beyond the grave. The judge Osmar Legal revealed that messages on Gomes’s phone detailed a sprawling network of bribery implicating prosecutors, judges, and legislators.
As more chats were leaked to the press, the picture emerged of Gomes not only as a regional capo but a national kingmaker, able to pick and choose pliable judicial officials — and with presidential candidates, ministers, military officers and journalists offering him sensitive intel and even guns. Most prominent among those implicated are cartista congressman and JEM member Orlando Arévalo — who has since resigned both positions — anti-money-laundering minister Liliana Alcaraz, intelligence minister Marco Alcaraz (her brother), and Jalil Rachid, the embattled minister of anti-drug force SENAD. All have denied any wrongdoing.
The scandal laid bare the weakness of Peña, who — so far at least — has not been named in the chats. Invited by journalists to comment on the case, Peña repeatedly refused. His only interventions have been to reiterate that the Alcaraz siblings still have his “complete support”, and to convene a “summit of powers” to tackle corruption in general. Yet the resulting photo op of an all-male group of Colorado lifers, including several linked to Gomes, has only entrenched the sense that LaloGate is being swept under the carpet.
Seemingly anxious to flip the script, last week Peña trumpeted official data that “100,000 new jobs” had been generated in the first 16 months of his administration. This would put him on track to fulfill his improbable campaign promise of boosting employment by half a million. Polls show Paraguayans rank the creation of stable, well-paid work as their number one priority. But within a day, the success story had crumbled before press scrutiny. Officials admitted the 100,000 figure referred not to formal employment but occupation — encompassing categories like unpaid domestic labour and informal self-employment — and said that Peña, a former IMF economist, had been badly briefed. The real number of private sector jobs added: 39,000.
Amid such an annus horribilis in the making — and captain, it’s February — it’s unsurprising that the murmurs of impeachment that first emerged after Gomes’s killing in August have resurfaced. Peña could be scapegoated for the rolling scandals and have his term seen out by his VP, cartista loyalist Pedro Alliana. This would allow Cartes’s Honor Colorado movement to field a fresher face, like football empresario and dynast Robert Harrison, in the run-up to municipal elections in 2026 and party primaries the following year. The pressure is unlikely to ease off in March, when Paraguayans traditionally take to the streets and set things on fire.
Yet inasmuch as the media onslaught has cut through, most of the public already had Peña pegged as wealthy and politically weak. The president’s good relationship with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio could persuade Cartes, desperate to get the sanctions cancelled, to keep him around.
And — slips or deliberate mistruths aside — Peña has a grasp of public policy far beyond the murky figures jockeying to replace him. With the left and liberal opposition still in the wilderness, perhaps the most likely scenario is for Paraguay’s airborne ambassador-president to keep soaring above the political turbulence.
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