Peña Charged as Ueno Fallout Spreads

Al Jazeera reported that Peña spent the morning at the attorney general’s office in Asunción before prosecutors filed charges a day after he was impeached. Reuters, cited by Al Jazeera, said the charges include breach of trust and administration for personal gain. Prosecutors are also seeking pretrial detention for Peña and central bank chief Carlos Carvallo.

What makes this larger than the standard spectacle of an ousted president in legal trouble is the scale of the banking shock underneath it. Regulators took control of Ueno over concerns about its solvency, and the fallout has reached far beyond elite politics. Thousands have protested in the streets demanding access to their money, with some demonstrations turning violent.

The allegations against Peña are serious enough to explain the speed of his political collapse, but they remain allegations. According to Al Jazeera, prosecutors accuse him of using his influence to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds into Ueno while shielding the bank from regulatory scrutiny as concern grew over risky lending. The same report said Peña had held a stake in Ueno’s parent company until March 2025 and is further accused of allowing Paraguay’s state pension fund to deposit $355 million at the bank above legal limits.

Peña has denied wrongdoing, arguing that the bank’s problems were a regulatory matter. That defence may matter in court. In political terms, though, it lands badly when the regulator has already had to seize the bank and customers are still trying to recover basic access to their cash.

Ueno’s rise is part of the story too. Al Jazeera said the bank expanded rapidly during Peña’s presidency, helped by more than $800 million in public funds, and attracted millions of customers. Rapid growth in finance is not proof of fraud, and a digital bank is not automatically a reckless one. But once public money, political proximity and supervisory questions begin appearing in the same file, the collapse stops looking like a routine accident.

Carvallo was also charged on Saturday, Al Jazeera reported, with breach of trust, producing false public documents and administration for personal gain. Prosecutors have linked him to the affair partly through Peña’s 2023 appointment of him to lead the central bank after his earlier role at the company that later became Ueno.

The central bank said 1.2 million customers had already received partial or full reimbursement of their insured deposits. That has not done much to calm the country. The useful fact is not that some depositors have been repaid; it is that a banking failure became a street crisis before the legal case had even settled into place.