The dismissal of Peña, a Paraguayan-style 'House of Cards' for the return of Horacio Cartes as the undisputed "strong man" of the country

House of Cards died almost at the same time that Kevin Spacey's career collapsed, but from time to time it returns in real life: this is the case of Paraguay, the scene this week of a conspiracy plot for the envy of any screenwriter.

Most recent scene: Santiago Peña, dismissed from the Presidency on Friday night, is transferred this Saturday from the Presidential Escort Regiment to the State Attorney General's Office to testify for alleged breach of trust, administration for personal gain and influence peddling. Peña was supposed to spend the night at home, under house arrest, but the threat that protesters would climb the walls to attack the former president in his home convinced police authorities to transfer him to a regiment to guarantee his safety.

Previous scene: Pedro Alliana, until Friday vice president, enters the López Palace, the headquarters of the Government, at 6:30 in the morning, to erase, as the new president, the memory of who until a few days ago was his boss and friend.

Key scene: former president Horacio Cartes types everything and without being seen.

After hours of testimony, Peña was charged by the Prosecutor's Office, identified as fundamentally responsible for the Ueno Bank digital bank scam against a large part of the Paraguayan population. But the president's mismanagement had been evident for some time. What changed then? Peña's failed attempt to become independent from Cartes, his mentor, and establish himself as a central power within the Colorado Party, which governed for 74 of the last 79 years of Paraguayan life.

"Chartism is back, and with more force, because it returns with a thirst for revenge," opposition senator Celeste Amarilla tells EL MUNDO.

Cartes governed Paraguay between 2013 and 2018 and is president of the National Republican Association (ANR), the official name of the Colorado Party. Amarilla, of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA), believes that the opposition is "useless" because there are "too many egos, too many small parties that do not get votes."

When it comes to explaining who Cartes is, Amarilla does not exactly opt for lukewarmness: "Cartes is a mafioso, who introduced money from any side more forcefully into the elections, the purchase of votes, the purchase of wills, extra salaries for parliamentarians so that they do what he says... It is money from cigarette smuggling with a strong smell of drug trafficking, because they share the routes. That has been proven. He is a guy without scruples or morals, used to buying wills, votes, women".

EL MUNDO contacted Cartes on several occasions without success to obtain his comments.

Beyond the power of Cartes, what did Peña, who was Cartes' Minister of Finance at the age of 36 and became a world-traveling president who sold the benefits of Paraguay, do?

"Peña planned this since he won the 2023 elections," Rafael Filizzola, opposition senator and member of the Democratic Progressive Party, told this newspaper.

"He opened a company in Luxembourg, bought some financial companies and banks. And a concentration of public resources was generated in the closed bank. There is a lot of evidence that links Peña to all this. Not only did they hoard public savings, but they also hoarded businesses. For example, with a 5G company that did not have even a centimeter of fiber optics and was given half of the cell phone spectrum."

Amarilla and Filizzola agree that the outbreak of the Ueno case was inevitable and that Peña has many and serious responsibilities in it, but they add that it was Cartes who precipitated everything. "And not precisely because of patriotism," Amarilla ironically says.

"For some reason, either they got tired of the boss, or they had already obtained the necessary financing and decided to get rid of a Cartes who mistreated them, President Peña and Vice President Alliana began to disagree with him. That's when Cartes takes out the bank. And in revenge, he sinks Peña and puts Alliana saying: 'You stay, asshole, and do what I tell you, or you go with your friend.'"

Amarilla speaks with passion in the halls of Congress, and apparently without fear of the consequences of her statements: "I applauded Alliana when she rebelled, but now she submits, she came back with her head bowed and her tail between her legs."

Filizzola highlights that "Cartes' movement accelerated things" and that Alliana "was with Peña until the day she found out about the bank's collapse."

Alliana's face, in fact, was striking in the climactic minutes of the brutal transfer of power in Paraguay. He seemed shocked, perhaps overwhelmed, although one of his first sentences was to the contrary: "I don't want lukewarm people for this mission." A way, perhaps, to honor his first name, Hercules.

There is no doubt that the new Paraguayan vice president, Antonio Barrios, is loyal to Cartes: he is his friend and personal doctor.

And on a Saturday in which Peña's statement before prosecutors lasted for hours, a key piece of news: the Central Bank of Paraguay reported that Ueno Bank had 1.8 million depositors, and not the 2.9 million that was talked about during the week. A figure that represents a very high percentage of the 6.1 million Paraguayans, anyway. Nearly 1.2 million account holders have already recovered all or part of their deposited money.

What's next for Paraguayans?

"The Government is going to have to make tough decisions, make an adjustment," believes Filizzola. "It is highly unlikely that Paraguay will distance itself from Trump, but we must have a different relationship with Brazil, which is our main market. We have to coordinate our energy policy with Brazil, something that Peña did not do."

And the recently announced CIA office in Paraguay? "We know very little, decisions have been made about military agreements or about the figure of the third country that we certainly don't know about," admits the senator. "The United States ambassador is a de facto power in Paraguay, but we never had a relationship as submissive as the one Peña and Cartes had."