Santiago Peña, unanimously dismissed from the presidency of Paraguay after an exhausting day of political psychodrama

The political psychodrama of Paraguay closed this Friday with the dismissal of President Santiago Peña, a popular cry that does not hide the key issue: the eternal power of the country, the Colorado Party, cannot be challenged. Minutes later, the Paraguayan Prosecutor's Office ordered the arrest of the former president for "injury of trust."

"Peña is not a piece of rubbish, he is political garbage. In every street, in every corner of the country there is a scammer," said opposition senator Ever Villalba minutes before the vote that, unanimously, put an early end to Peña's five years of government, which were to end in August 2028. The new president is the until now vice president, Pedro Alliana.

The seat of Paraguayan popular sovereignty was financed by Taiwan. And in that building renovated thanks to the money of capitalist China, the Republic of Paraguay carried out, in just a handful of hours, an exercise in political guillotining with few precedents: a financial crisis that suddenly turned into a political crisis, a president who resigns, a Parliament that says no, that it will take him to impeachment to remove him, and a president who resists.

Institutional drama

An institutional drama, almost a Netflix series under the humid 35 degrees of Asunción. On a day of tension and agony, Peña's political destruction was only possible because his own party, the Colorado Party that governed 74 of the last 79 years, including the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, gave him the thumbs down. In Paraguay, the opposition is not enough, it is the Colorado factions that decide.

And the most powerful faction is that of Horacio Cartes, former president and powerful businessman who made Peña pay for his intention to emancipate himself, to create a "peñismo" among the Colorados. Cartes raised doubts in the media and Parliament about Ueno Bank, a fintech that became a popular digital bank, and Peña's dream collapsed: the Prosecutor's Office and the overwhelming majority of the political circle assure that the former president benefited financially from his help to the bankrupt bank, in which the government deposited an important part of the pensioners' money, and which left a good part of Paraguayans on tenterhooks regarding their savings.

Peña, 47 years old and closely linked to Donald Trump and Javier Milei, had notably raised the international profile of Paraguay, a country traditionally under the radar. When he noticed that Cartes, in 2023 his promoter, had lowered his thumb, he met with the United States ambassador to Paraguay, another great power in the Guaraní nation, to tell him that Cartes would try to remove him. The help expected from Trump never arrived, only in the last hours a statement in which the embassy, ​​"as a friend and historical ally" of the country, "expresses its solidarity with the Paraguayan people during the situation they are going through at this moment."

Vaudeville

In the days after Cartes' move, Peña tried to resist, but finally, this Thursday, he resigned. Congress, however, did not accept his resignation, and from there, between Thursday night and late Friday afternoon, an astonishing political vaudeville unfolded.

The legislative branch confirmed that on Friday morning the president, who continued in the full exercise of power despite having announced his resignation, would be impeached. At seven in the morning, Peña sent a letter to the president of Congress, Basilio Núñez, asking for three days to study the 15 pages of the accusation libel and the 300 attached pages that he had received at 10:15 p.m.

"Given the continuation of the impeachment trial, I will appear and exercise my right to defense. I will do so with arguments and evidence, with respect for the Constitution and the institutions of the Republic. Even when they have already advanced their decision, I will exercise that right," said Peña. Congress responded to the three-day request by giving him an extra half hour.

Peña assured that he would go to Congress and speak with stark sincerity: "I am going to expose my truth, even if it is uncomfortable for many political actors."

It would have added a lot to the spectacle, but instead of appearing in the Senate, Peña presumably went to the Mburuvicha Róga presidential residence to organize the move. Something (someone?) made him see that it was not convenient for him to express "uncomfortable truths."

In the hands of lawyers

The defense was left in the hands of his lawyers, one of them Adolfo Ferreiro, who in 2012 tried to prevent, without success, the dismissal of Fernando Lugo. Núñez was in favor of giving Peña more time to prepare his defense, and thus avoid any claim before international bodies, which the former president's lawyers announced that they would file.

"If we do not take into account deadlines that were taken even with previous former 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 pays is the Paraguayan people," said Núñez, who recalled what happened with Lugo's impeachment trial.

The session was more intense than tense, with moments of relaxation thanks to traditional Paraguayan humor, but also strange comments such as that of the lawyer Ferreiro: "There cannot be active senators and passive senators, as if they were homosexuals."

Under the heat of the oppressive Asunción spring, the Plaza de Armas, in front of Congress, displayed a few hundred citizens eager to protest and see Peña removed, but as the afternoon progressed and night approached, more people gathered to throb the expected outcome.

Impeachment

"Peña knew that the bank was going to fail," accused the Patria Querida Party deputy, during the accusation stage this afternoon in the Senate. "And the people, stupid, put their money in," he added before retracting and withdrawing the "stupid." "This is a political trial, but the penalty will soon come to Peña."

With the abrupt end of the Peña government, Paraguay once again falls into the institutional instability that marked much of the current democratic era since its beginning in 1989, with two dismissals, a resignation of a president and the assassination of a vice president.