Paraguay's Congress presses ahead with impeachment trial of Santiago Peña, who submitted his resignation
The lower house unanimously approved the charges tied to the Ueno Bank case; Peña says he will defend himself in the Senate, which needs 30 of 45 votes to remove him
Translated from the Portuguese original by the Panorama newsroom. Read in Portuguese
Summary written by the Panorama newsroom from the sources listed below. Facts are attributed to the original publications.
Paraguay's Congress decided on Thursday (5) to press ahead with the impeachment trial of President Santiago Peña over the Ueno Bank case, even after he had submitted his resignation hours earlier, BBC News Mundo reported. The Chamber of Deputies unanimously approved the charges and sent them to the Senate, which will decide on his removal.
The resignation was neither formally accepted nor rejected: it was left pending because pro-government deputies walked out of the joint session of both chambers, which lost its quorum. Party leaders in the Senate then agreed to continue the process. How he leaves matters: had the resignation been accepted, Peña would have become a senator for life, with parliamentary immunity, a status the Constitution denies to former presidents convicted in an impeachment trial. Removing him requires 30 of the Senate's 45 votes.
In a message on X, Peña said he will appear and exercise his right to a defense with arguments and evidence, even though, in his view, the decision has already been made. When announcing his resignation in a video, he had apologized to the public in case he had failed at any point; in a later message, he said that paying back savers cannot depend on what happens to him.
The crisis erupted this week when the Central Bank intervened in Ueno Bank — which has about 3 million customers in a country of 6.5 million people — after the institution's capital fell below half of the required minimum. The bank also managed about US$850 million in public funds. Peña was a shareholder in the group that owns the bank until last year, and the charges point to an alleged conflict of interest.
The lower house rejected, by 48 votes to 30, a similar request against Vice President Pedro Alliana, who is expected to take over and complete the term, which ends in 2028, if Peña leaves office. Outside Congress, protesters demanded that the resignation not end the process.