Santiago Peña, Trump's Paraguayan ally who fell after the corralito crisis at the Ueno bank

The president of Paraguay, Santiago Peña, presented his resignation this Thursday. However, Congress failed to gather a quorum to vote on the resignation, so he remained in office until the Senate removed him this Friday after declaring him guilty of "poor performance of duties" in a political trial held in his absence. The Upper House has approved the dismissal with an overwhelming majority of 44 votes out of a total of 45, thus making Peña the first president of the Latin American country to be stripped of office unanimously by both chambers of Congress.

Peña had resigned after the scandal involving the intervention of Ueno bank, a private entity to which he has been linked and which during his management received million-dollar amounts from the State, many of which came from the country's pension system.

Peña is 47 years old. He has been president of the Republic of Paraguay for three years and his term was due to end in 2028. During this time he has been supported by the powerful Colorado Party (right), which has governed Paraguay since 1947, with the only interruption from 2008 to 2013.

From the IMF to the government of Paraguay

Santiago Peña Palacios was born on November 16, 1978, in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción, into an Argentine family originally from Buenos Aires. On his paternal line he is a direct descendant of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, dictator of Paraguay between 1814 and 1840, for two consecutive periods.

Youth was one of the characteristics with which Peña built his political image, Juan David Mosos Franco tells EFE. He became a father at 17 and married Leticia Ocampos at 19, with whom he has two children. He studied Economics at the Catholic University of Asunción and joined the ranks of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA).

He began his professional career at the Central Bank of Paraguay (BCP), where he joined in 2000. He later completed a master's degree in Public Administration at Columbia University (USA). In 2009, Peña joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, where he worked for three years. Upon his return to Paraguay he rejoined the BCP, where he went from economic research to management.

A dizzying political career

In January 2015, when he was 36 years old, President Cartes chose him to be Minister of Finance. Cartes was considered his political mentor. Backed by him, Peña joined the ruling party. In 2017, he presented his candidacy for the presidential election. He ran for the Honor Colorado movement, Cartes' faction within the ruling party, but lost to Mario Abdo Benítez.

He insisted and in December 2022 Peña won the presidential candidacy of the ruling party. He achieved it with just six years of Colorado militancy. Its main letter of introduction was the promise of combining macroeconomic stability with concrete benefits for the population.

On April 30, 2023, he won the general elections (with 42.74% of the votes), running with Pedro Alliana, who assumed the vice presidency. His victory, backed by more than 1.2 million votes, represented the continuity of the Colorado Party in power. The Paraguayan newspaper La Nación says that Peña "opened a stage that promised economic growth, job creation and better living conditions for Paraguayans."

With Trump and his 'Shield of the Americas'

His objective, declared the new president, was to turn Paraguay into the most developed country in Latin America. In these three years he has not achieved it and has not shown that he has great convictions (he is accused of having joined the Colorado Party just to be a minister). In 2017 he was in favor of equal marriage and some proposals on abortion, but shortly afterwards he was against it.

In 2023, in an interview he praised the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, stating that he was "responsible for more than 50 years of stability in Paraguay." In foreign policy, he strengthened his ties with US President Donald Trump and aligned himself with some of his Government's main initiatives for the region.

In March 2026 he participated in the Shield of the Americas summit, convened by Trump in Miami. There he signed the creation of the Anti-Cartel Coalition of the Americas, with which Paraguay joined this regional security alliance.

The bank crisis of half of Paraguayans

In these three years as Paraguayan president, Peña has received criticism for the frequency of his official trips, which the Paraguayan press baptized as "Santi Tour." During his mandate he made more than 70 trips abroad. But the crisis that has really exploded in his hands has been that of Ueno bank.

In a country with almost 6 and a half million inhabitants, the entity has close to three million clients. The bank managed about $850 million in public funds, including pension and health resources and deposits from state companies. This Tuesday, the Central Bank of Paraguay ordered the resolution of Ueno bank after detecting that its solvency ratio had fallen below 50%, the minimum required.