Paraguay’s presidency changed hands in a single afternoon. On 5 November Santiago Peña said he would step down, and within minutes the Chamber of Deputies voted 78–0 to send impeachment charges to the Senate. Vice-President Pedro Alliana is in line to finish the term through 2028; a separate bid to impeach him failed. The spark was the central bank’s resolution of Ueno Bank earlier in the week.
Ueno had ballooned from a niche lender into a mass digital bank that says it serves about three million customers — roughly three in five adult Paraguayans. Once regulators intervened over insolvency, apps, cards and transfers froze. Families queued for cash for food and daily costs; tens of thousands of pensioners and hundreds of millions of dollars in public deposits were caught in the freeze. Protests filled Asunción, and bank executives were detained as anger spilled into the streets.
Peña, in office since August 2023 and a shareholder in the bank’s owning group until early last year, denied wrongdoing and cast his past stake as an ordinary investment he had already sold. In a video he apologised if he had failed anyone, framed the resignation as protecting stability and democratic institutions, and urged that savings and public funds be restored. Pressure from inside the Colorado Party, including from former allies, left him isolated as lawmakers moved.
Analysts call the episode one of the sharpest banking-and-trust shocks of Paraguay’s democratic era. With the Senate still to act on impeachment and authorities racing to repay depositors, attention turns to Alliana’s early decisions and whether millions can reclaim their money without lasting damage to the financial system.
For Asunción and the wider country the open tests are how fast depositors regain access and whether the succession can proceed without fresh unrest in the streets.
