RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The complex internal conflict in Paraguay’s ruling party had another chapter today with the accusations of the Interior Minister, Arnaldo Giuzzio, to former President Horacio Cartes, whom he compared to the famous Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, and who he accused of laundering contraband money through his companies.
“That model that he generated and intends to follow, compared to Pablo Escobar, he is a creature with a lollipop,” said Giuzzio, who last week had denounced Cartes for money laundering and illicit enrichment.
The Minister’s words are a direct consequence of the impeachment request against him – to be analyzed tomorrow by the Chamber of Deputies -, initiated by opponents of the Radical Liberal Party (PLRA) but backed by legislators who respond to Cartes, who is at odds with President Mario Abdo Benítez.
Giuzzio appeared today before the Permanent Commission of Congress to explain Sunday’s attack at a music festival in San Bernardino.
In the event, supposedly the work of hired assassins, two people were killed, and six others were injured, two of them allegedly linked to drug trafficking and with arrest warrants against them.
According to ABC Color and Última Hora, the Minister reviewed the achievements of his administration, compared drug seizures with those of the Cartes presidency, and stressed that since 2019 the focus has been on “weakening criminal structures, and not on pursuing drug shipments because that had no effect and the organizations continued to grow.”
Giuzzio warned that there had been “atomization of the leadership and that produces an internal dispute between the groups” and denounced that “before, even politicians negotiated with the visible faces or narco referents of the border areas a fictitious peace in exchange for letting tons of drugs pass through.”
“The border congressmen will know that, for decades, there was a fictitious peace; the drug traffickers negotiated with the politicians, but that had the cost of letting drugs pass through,” he said.
He considered that the attempt to prosecute him “is a political retaliation, a vendetta typical of the mafia” and returned to the figure of Cartes to warn about the movement of money through his companies and even suggest an agreement with criminal groups to access Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
“Do you think that in Mexico, an organization that traffics cigarettes will be able to enter without the consent of the narcos?” he asked.
“This is how organized crime starts: how many companies are investigated and then change their name with the same partners?” he ironized and went further: “This man was black and wanted to launder”.
The official described the alleged mechanism by which the money from cigarette smuggling is returned to a bank owned by Cartes, which then grants loans to his companies, and warned that the group’s foreign exchange operations are eight times more than the gross domestic product of the country.
“That model that he generated and intends to follow, compared to Pablo Escobar, to (Ramón) González Daher… they are creatures with lollipops. Terrible for our economy”, he sentenced.
González Daher was a Paraguayan senator also convicted of drug trafficking (as was one of his sons), who died last year, owner of a fortune.
Beyond what happened on Sunday at the music festival, Giuzzio’s administration had already been questioned by the kidnappings, murders, and the actions of the EPP and ACA organizations, and President Mario Abdo Benítez had given him two months to show results, but that deadline has been exceeded.
The only voice in defense of the Minister today was Vice President Hugo Velázquez: “I do not believe that Giuzzio has to be removed by impeachment; that the political class does not lend itself to the Cartismo for these things”, he affirmed.
“We have to recognize Giuzzio, perhaps, he may have flaws like any human being, but nobody can doubt his honesty and courage to face any kind of mafia, ” stressed Velázquez, who aspires to succeed Abdo Benítez in next year’s elections.