The Senate of Paraguay rejects Santiago Peña's request for an extension and gives way to the impeachment trial over the banking scandal

The political psychodrama of Paraguay grew in intensity this Friday with the challenge to Congress by the resigning president Santiago Peña, who demanded more time to prepare his defense in the impeachment trial to which he is going to be subjected, and with the subsequent rejection by the Senate of that postponement. So you are expected to attend the session.

"Without a doubt, a period of less than twelve hours is insufficient for a process to meet the standards of the rule of law," Peña said in a letter sent early in the morning to the president of Congress, Basilio Núñez.

The still Paraguayan president, whose resignation on Thursday was not accepted by Parliament and will be subjected to a political trial, points out that he received the accusatory libel "of 15 pages and an annex of 300 pages" at 10:15 p.m. on Thursday and that, being summoned at ten in the morning on Friday to exercise his defense, time is insufficient.

Núñez was in favor of granting more time to Peña, abandoned by Horacio Cartes, leader of the Colorado Party, and all his companions.

"If we do not take into account deadlines that were taken even with previous presidents and we carried out a situation with a bang, we have the total possibility that later, two or three years from now, the one who will pay is the Paraguayan people," said Núñez, who recalled what happened in 2012 with the impeachment trial of President Fernando Lugo.

"In his case, he is taking action (before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights) and they even tell me that they have a chance of winning, as has already happened with other ministers. I cited yesterday the case of Raúl Cubas Grau, that even though the chamber had already decided, his resignation was still accepted."

The leader of the Legislative Branch criticized the decision not to accept Peña's resignation. "I believe this also arose from the foolishness of a sector of the opposition and even colleagues in my party to not finalize an inevitable resignation and prolong a situation that has already been decided."

Shortly after, Peña published a photo with a stern gesture with his two lawyers: "We are waiting for the Senate to grant my request for an extension of the deadline to exercise my constitutional rights of defense, given its notorious insufficiency."

The Paraguayan political crisis was precipitated this week with the fall of Ueno Bank, a digital bank. Pressure on the entity had been increasing for weeks, after inspectors discovered that it lacked adequate reserves and had granted loans to companies in the Vázquez Group, the bank's owner, without an adequate risk assessment.

Ueno Bank was intervened by the Central Bank of Paraguay (BCP), and the financial debacle led to the resignation of its president, Carlos Carvallo, who had been a senior executive at Ueno before Peña appointed him to head the regulator. Peña himself, who took power in August 2023, was a business partner of the group that owns the bank until March 2025.