Before his sudden political collapse, Santiago Peña was a kind of model politician, a darling figure of the Latin American right. Because Peña had achieved a small miracle: Paraguay, a country locked in the heart of South America between Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, had an international profile never seen before.
"We are a small Qatar of sustainable energy, but also a solution for the demand for food in the world," Peña said in an interview with this newspaper in December 2024, when his figure generated astonishment among his peers.
Peña appeared at every Summit, forum or presidential inauguration there was, rejecting the traditional low profile of Paraguayan presidents, almost a historical complex in a country that had between 1954 and 1989 the longest dictatorship in the history of Latin America: the 35 years of Alfredo Stroessner.
Educated in American universities, elegant and with a great command of English, Peña was capable of approaching Bill Gates in the middle of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games to pose a riddle: "I am the president of the only country in the world that runs on 100% renewable electrical energy, a country that is larger than Germany and that is the largest exporter of clean energy per capita in the world. Do you know what country it is?"
No, Bill Gates did not know, as expected, what country the man who was speaking to him came from. In the English-speaking world, Paraguay is confused with Uruguay too many times. Or directly ignored, as the now-defenestrated president, who came to public knowledge as a very young Minister of Finance more than a decade ago, knew well.
"I studied at Columbia University in New York. The economist Jeffrey Sachs gave a two-hour conference in which he analyzed Latin America, country by country. He knew about everyone, from Mexico to Argentina. When he finished speaking he said: 'The only country I'm not going to talk about is Paraguay, because I don't know anything about Paraguay.' It was a key moment in my life, I was a young student and I told myself that I had to change that," Peña told this newspaper during the electoral campaign that led him to the Presidency.
A product of the Paraguayan upper class in a country in which the middle class is small and the lower class is very large, Peña had indeed been dazzled by the idea of an internationalized Paraguay, the country with the lowest taxes in the region, a magnet for investors: from an Artificial Intelligence (AI) hub, to a fiber optic cable that connected South America through Asia, passing through a regional office of the CIA.
Loquacious and smiling, Peña was capable of maintaining such good relations with two political enemies such as Javier Milei and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
But, although he sometimes forgot it, Peña was still president of a very complex country called Paraguay. A very young country: a quarter of its 6.1 million inhabitants are between 15 and 29 years old. A youth largely using Ueno Bank, which had almost half of Paraguayans as clients. Today, with the fear that their money would disappear, the opinion that young Paraguayans had about their also young president (47 years old) had fallen to underground levels.
A country in which the Colorado Party governed 74 of the last 79 years and in which true power remains in the hands of Horacio Cartes, tobacco businessman, former president and owner of the guillotine that beheaded Peña.
The United States ambassador is another of the great powers in Paraguay. Cartes knows this well, who saw how the American ambassador sank him during a press conference broadcast live in Asunción. "Significantly corrupt person" was the label that the State Department gave him in two steps, in 2022 and 2024.
In October 2025, Peña's excellent relationship with Donald Trump and the United States Government led to the lifting of sanctions against Cartes. A point in favor for the president amid the growing tensions with Cartes, but at the same time a problem for Peña, since the former president stopped needing his former minister and until yesterday president.
