Paraguay's President Santiago Peña announced his resignation on Thursday — and minutes later the Chamber of Deputies voted 78-0 to impeach him anyway, with lawmakers from his own ruling Colorado Party joining the opposition, as the collapse of Ueno Bank froze the savings of millions and sent protesters into the streets of Asunción for a third day. In a video address to the nation, Peña said he was submitting his resignation for the stability of the country, social peace and the preservation of democratic institutions.
The crisis began on Tuesday, when the central bank seized Ueno, the country's largest digital bank, after its solvency ratio crashed to 5.56 percent against a legal minimum of 12 percent. Ueno says its customers number about 3 million — some 60 percent of Paraguay's adult population — and all of them were locked out of the app, their cards and transfers. The central bank plans to move customers' accounts to other banks before liquidating what is left; a guarantee fund covers up to about $38,000 per person, which preliminary estimates say fully protects roughly 97 percent of depositors.
What brought the bank down, the central bank's own criminal complaint says, was lending to itself: Ueno made large unsecured loans to companies inside Grupo Vázquez, its own corporate group, used new borrowing to cover repeated overdrafts, and allegedly simulated a $74.4 million sale of loans to hide the exposure. About a quarter of what the bank held — roughly $800 million — was public money, including deposits from the state pension and health fund and the operators of Paraguay's giant hydroelectric dams. By Wednesday evening a judge had accepted charges against 27 people, eight Ueno executives were detained, and central bank president Carlos Carvallo had resigned after pulling the plug.
The political problem for Peña is that the bank was his world: he was a business partner of the Grupo Vázquez owners and held shares in its holding company until an extraordinary shareholders' assembly cancelled his stake in March 2025. On Thursday morning Horacio Cartes, the former president who leads the Colorado Party, publicly backed his ouster, and Congress opened impeachment discussions; that afternoon Peña announced he was going — and the Chamber voted unanimously to impeach him regardless.
Congress is expected to formally accept the resignation, clearing the way for Vice President Pedro Alliana to be sworn in and serve out Peña's term through August 2028, while the Senate decides whether the impeachment trial proceeds. For ordinary Paraguayans, the immediate stake is their savings: most small depositors are protected by the guarantee fund, but wages, pensions and severance pay sat inside a bank that lent the public's money to its own owners' companies — and Ueno's own employees were in the streets on Thursday demanding pay that is trapped inside it. Peña, an ally of President Trump, is the latest leader to fall to a banking scandal built on lending to insiders.
📰 ProfiloPolitics Member News — choose your news, share it, earn credit:
https://white-curlew-963569.hostingersite.com
Never miss a story — Join our Telegram channel
Breaking U.S. political news, live as it happens — plus the stories the big outlets sit on.
Join ProfiloPolitics on Telegram