The Congressman, the Cell Phone, and the Corruption Ring
Football, guns, Freemasons, cocaine: the Lalo Gomes story has it all.
By La Volanta*
The property magnate and rancher Eulalio ‘Lalo’ Gomes Batista served as a congressman for the Colorado Party in the northeastern department of Amambay — until he was shot dead on August 19 last year. His killing came during a police raid on his residence in Pedro Juan Caballero under the aegis of Operation Pavo Real II, a sweeping probe into narcotrafficking and money-laundering.
The episode plunged Paraguayan politics into turmoil. Gomes’s death is still being investigated. His family say he was deliberately executed, while agents claimed that they returned fire after Gomes shot at them. Among the evidence recovered during the raid were the politician’s cell phones. And the contents of one of the devices — leaked to the press throughout the past month — have also proved explosive.
WhatsApp chats show Gomes wielding his political clout, connections and considerable personal wealth to influence the hiring, firing and conduct of public servants: from mid-ranking police officers all the way up to senior judges and government ministers. Below, we delve into Gomes’s murky backstory, exploring how the leaks have laid bare the rot at the heart of Paraguay’s political system.
From rags to riches
The late legislator came to prominence as a prosperous entrepreneur in Pedro Juan Caballero, a city a few metres from Brazil. Official sources indicate Gomes was born on the other side of the unmarked border, in Ponta Porã, on January 25, 1956. People familiar with his background say that he came from a humble family but rapidly grew in stature soon after entering the business and ranching worlds in Amambay, eventually serving as the president of the regional chapter of the Asociación Rural del Paraguay (ARP), a powerful agribusiness lobby group.
His formal entry into politics came in the early 2020s as a congressional pre-candidate backed by Fuerza Republicana: the Colorado Party bloc dominated by former president Mario Abdo Benítez and his vice-president Hugo Velázquez. But once Gomes won the primaries, he defected to the ranks of Honor Colorado — the grouping loyal to former president Horacio Cartes — before taking up his seat in 2023.
In his most recent official declaration, Gomes reported that his net worth was roughly US$130m, including ranches, houses, companies, an aircraft, dozens of luxury vehicles and a serious quantity of hard cash. This remarkable personal fortune made him one of the wealthiest elected officials in Paraguayan history, comparable only to Cartes.
Though Gomes’s links with organised crime have been widely reported for years, especially in the Brazilian press, Paraguay’s judiciary always looked the other way. In 2015, Última Hora revealed how Darío Messer — the adoptive “soul brother” of Cartes, a money-changer and fixer for organised crime, at that point on the run from the authorities on both sides of the border — had celebrated his birthday in the company of Alexandre, Gomes’s son.
Alexandre has since been detained under investigation for alleged links with organised crime. Messer was sentenced to 13 years behind bars in Brazil in 2022. And the birthday was apparently no impromptu gathering. It subsequently emerged that the party took place at the home of the Mota family, known to have long controlled the drug trade on that stretch of the Paraguay-Brazil border.
“Nobody messes with us”
The relationship between the Mota and Gomes families was further laid out in September 2023, when Brazil’s revista Piauí published WhatsApp conversations from May 2019 between Gomes senior and ‘Tonho’ da Mota, the patriarch of the criminal clan.
After Mota complains that Paraguayan police have raided one of his ranches, Gomes reassures him that the matter will be swiftly resolved: “Nobody messes with us.” Gomes asked Paraguay’s interior minister to remove Rafael González, the police head of investigations: a request that was complied with less than a month later.
In November 2022, when Santiago Peña was on the campaign trail in Pedro Juan Caballero, a group of heavily armed mercenaries served as additional security. Their boss was Iuri da Silva Gusmão, a former Brazilian soldier who served as security chief to Antonio Joaquim da Mota — alias Motinha — Tonho’s son. Gusmão later told Brazilian police that his group of gunmen had been loaned to Peña’s security detail by Motinha as a favour to Gomes.
And after the elections, there came further evidence of ties between Gomes and organised crime. In December 2023, Paraguay’s anti-drug force SENAD carried out Operation Sanctus, which had the objective of capturing the Brazilian narcotrafficker Ronaldo Mendes Nunes. However, Mendes Nunes hid at a property belonging to a ranching firm partly owned by Gomes, later managing to escape in his own vehicle that was parked there.
Leaks that speak volumes
Gomes’s influence over political and judicial affairs was an open secret. Yet the conversations obtained from one of his cell phones and published by the press in recent weeks have been striking in their brazenness.
In the WhatsApp chats, Gomes suggests or directly demands changes to the composition of the Jurado de Enjuiciamiento de Magistrados (JEM), a judicial panel that selects magistrates, prosecutors and public defenders, and investigates and fires those suspected of wrongdoing.
Whether via written messages or audio recordings, the late congressman also demands that judicial officials charge or free suspects accused of various crimes. In some exchanges, prosecutors and judges themselves ask the congressman how to proceed in certain cases — or ask him to intercede on their behalf to help them win promotions or escape being fired:
Public prosecutor Katia Uemura sought Gomes’s intervention to absolve her in an JEM probe into her alleged links with narcotrafficking via her husband, Daniel Montenegro, who had been arrested. According to press reports, Gomes told her “we’ll sort it.”
Public prosecutor Stella Mary Cano communicated with Gomes when the JEM was investigating her for malpractice. Gomes told her that the then-president of the panel, the cartista congressman Orlando Arévalo, would help her. In a subsequent vote, Gomes managed to keep her position.
Orlando Arévalo was in constant communication with his fellow legislator Gomes. Their chat log contains bank statements and photographs of cheques deposited in an account belonging to Arévalo, apparently in return for whitewashing the investigation into Uemura. Arévalo called Gomes mi querido hermano (“my beloved brother”) and wrote messages in code commonly used by members of Freemasonry.
Marco Alcaraz, Paraguay’s intelligence chief, and his sister Liliana, head of anti money-laundering agency Seprelad, also conversed with Gomes. The border ranching magnate asks Marcos, at that point an anti-drug prosecutor, to intervene in several cases and even invites him to his son’s wedding. Gomes meanwhile promised to support Liliana’s candidacy in elections for the Asociación de Fiscales, an influential social club and lobby group for public prosecutors.
Lt. Col. Luis Apesteguía offered Gomes two of “the best pistols in the world” — a pair of brand-new Sig Sauer P320s, complete with three clips — for US$1600 each in January 2022. Since it came to light, the proposed sale of the semi-automatic firearms has cost Apesteguía his job as spokesman for the FTC, the military-police task force created to combat armed groups in northern Paraguay.
Diego Benítez, the former manager of Olimpia football club and currently wanted by Interpol for alleged links to narcotrafficking, was also in contact with Gomes. In one exchange, Benítez asks Gomes to “pick up a patient from the street”. This could be a reference to a witness in a case involving another former Olimpia boss, Marco Trovato, who was ultimately expelled from the club.
Other chats indicate that Gomes sought to put Trovato forward as a presidential candidate. In one conversation, Gomes asks him to receive in his office a friend from Pedro Juan Caballero, Rodrigo Alvarenga Paredes, who would later be detained and extradited to Brazil for allegedly trafficking cocaine to Europe.
And while only a few communications between Gomes and Horacio Cartes have come to light, their relationship was clearly amicable, with the congressman calling the tobacco baron "mi presidente”.
Peña stays silent
Lalo Gate has dominated the political agenda for weeks — perhaps only eclipsed by a scandal involving an intensive care unit recently inaugurated by President Peña, which soon turned out to have a fatal shortage of functioning equipment.
Yet Paraguay’s head of state is yet to make any public comment on the case implicating multiple figures in his government and political movement — other than to call a generalised anti-corruption “summit of powers”, and to say that the Alcaraz siblings have his “complete support.”
Nor has attorney-general Emiliano Rolón shown much interest in examining further the contents of Gomes’s phone.
Instead, responding to a lawsuit filed by Arévalo, Rolón last week ordered an investigation into Osmar Legal: the very judge that exposed the intimate conversations between Gomes and Paraguay’s great-and-not-so-good.
It’s a piece of legal chicanery that Gomes himself might have been proud of.
*Aldo Benítez and Gabriela González Escalada form part of La Volanta, an independent investigative journalism outlet covering organised crime and corruption in Paraguay.
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