In Paraguay it took one working week. On Tuesday the central bank announced that Ueno, the country’s fifth-largest bank by deposits, had fallen below the legal solvency standards. It seized the bank and moved what assets remained to other lenders. By Friday the president, a man once named as a shareholder of the bank’s parent company, had been impeached, removed and placed under house arrest. His vice president, Pedro Alliana, 52, had taken the oath in Asunción as the republic’s 53rd president, as Al Jazeera reported.
The bank of first accounts
Before this week Ueno was a success story. It took on the Ueno brand in 2023 and said it had brought in more than a million people who had never held a bank account. By the end it had about 3 million members, close to two-thirds of Paraguay’s adults. Its growth was fed by $800m in public money. About $355m of that was state pension funds.
When the central bank stepped in, millions of customers were cut off from their accounts and their pensions. Those are the bare figures. Behind them are people who had been invited into the formal financial system for the first time, many of them only recently, and who found the door locked.
A reflection, not a finding: the poor are always told that a bank account is the road to safety. Rarely are they told who owns the road, or that the state may be pouring their retirement money into it.
The shareholder
Santiago Peña took office in 2023, with Alliana as his vice president. That same year he was named as a shareholder of Ueno’s parent company. He says he sold his shares in early 2025. In the same years, pension money from the state was going into the bank.
The net now reaching for him is wide. Prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Carlos Carvallo, the former head of the central bank, who resigned earlier in the week. At least 27 people face charges, among them Miguel Vázquez, the bank’s lead shareholder. The suspected crimes include attempted fraud, breach of trust, misappropriation of funds and influence peddling.
Thursday: a resignation refused
Peña tried to leave on his own terms. He offered to resign, citing “the need to preserve our democratic institutions.” Congress said no. The Chamber of Deputies voted 78–0 to impeach him, a vote that, according to the Associated Press report carried by OPB, came only minutes after he announced he was stepping down.
The reason for refusing a resignation is written into Paraguayan practice. A president who resigns can take a Senate seat as a former head of state, and that seat comes with legal protection from prosecution. So resigning would not have been an exit. It would have moved him into the one room in Asunción the prosecutors could not enter, and Congress closed that door.
The Colorado Party moved against him too. It has dominated Paraguayan politics for most of the time since 1948. Horacio Cartes, a former president and the party’s leader, said the aim was “to restore the republic’s institutions.” So in the space of a day the falling president and the man who let him fall both claimed to be saving the institutions. Neither of them mentioned the depositors.
Peña asked for more time to prepare his defence and called the time he was given “clearly insufficient.” He did not get it.
Friday: forty-four votes
The Senate sat the next day. According to Al Jazeera, 44 of its 45 members voted to remove him and one abstained. The charge was poor performance in office, tied to the collapse of Ueno. Peña did not come to the hearing. He sent his lawyers and a written farewell: “I take my leave with gratitude.” He said he did not want his presence “to be a source of greater division or instability.”
Then the prosecutors acted. Peña was placed under house arrest on suspicion of breach of trust and other crimes. He has said he will cooperate with investigators.
The region has seen this before. In neighbouring Brazil a bank fraud case hung over the presidential election only weeks ago. In Paraguay the scandal was not just hanging over the presidency. It brought it down.
The man from Ñeembucú
Alliana is a conservative from the south. He started out as governor of his home department, Ñeembucú, then spent nearly ten years in the Chamber of Deputies, three of them as its president. He has been vice president since 2023, through the same years the pension money went into the bank. Lawmakers decided not to open impeachment proceedings against him. He will serve out the term, which runs until August 2028.
So the presidency has a new occupant, and the Colorado Party, in power for most of the past 78 years, still holds it. Three million account holders, and the pensioners whose $355m went into Ueno, are still waiting to learn what they will get back.