Paraguay Bets On Air Cargo To Escape Its Landlocked Limits

Key Points

• Air cargo to and from Paraguay is growing around ten times faster than the global average.
• The country is quietly turning its main airports into export platforms for higher-value, time-sensitive goods.
• A pragmatic alliance between government and business is using “empty” flights to Europe to redraw Paraguay’s trade map.

Paraguay does not have a coastline, but it is suddenly behaving like a country with a major seaport in the sky.

Between January and September 2025, goods flown into the country reached 25.4 million kilograms, up 32 percent on the same period a year earlier. Air exports hit 2.23 million kilos, rising 28 percent.

September’s snapshot shows the same pattern: imports by air jumped 34 percent year-on-year, exports 26 percent, and aircraft movements reached 5,386 for the month and more than 43,000 in the year to date.

For a small, landlocked nation that long treated air cargo as a side business, this is a structural change, not a blip. What makes it striking for outside observers is the comparison with the rest of the world.

Global air freight is growing at under 3 percent a year. Paraguay’s cargo volumes are expanding roughly ten times faster, turning Asunción’s Silvio Pettirossi and the Guaraní airport in Alto Paraná into some of the most dynamic cargo gateways in South America.

Behind the numbers lies a deliberate choice. For decades the country depended on pushing bulk soy and beef down the Paraguay–Paraná waterway.

Now, policy makers and entrepreneurs want something more resilient and sophisticated: processed foods, dairy products, textiles, aluminum and manufactured components produced under the maquila regime, whose exports already exceed one billion dollars a year.

The National Logistics Plan 2030 treats Silvio Pettirossi and Guaraní as the backbone of a broader logistics hub connected to river ports and new infrastructure in the east. That vision is being advanced through quiet, business-friendly cooperation rather than loud ideological battles.

Trade officials, the Industrial Union and exporters are working with Air Europa Cargo to fill “empty” return legs to Europe and route Paraguayan goods through Madrid to wider European and Asian markets.

For expats, investors and foreign readers, the story is simple but revealing: a small country often ignored in regional debates is using open trade, stable rules and private initiative to turn runways into lifelines.

If momentum holds, Paraguay will look less like a landlocked appendix of Mercosur and more like a nimble export platform at the heart of it.

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