Horacio Cartes
Horacio Cartes was president of Paraguay from 2013 to 2018, the tobacco and banking magnate who had joined the Colorado Party four years before the election that he won for it, with forty-six per cent, a year after the Congress impeached Lugo in a day and the neighbours suspended the country from Mercosur. He has since been named by the American Treasury as significantly corrupt and sanctioned, in 2023, for bribing legislators and for links to Hezbollah's financiers in the Ciudad del Este triangle, which he calls persecution. The Colorado machine he still runs calls it nothing at all. The presidency was the growth of four per cent and the investment grade. There were the public-private partnership law that built the roads, the value-added tax on farming, and the twelve hundred police sent against the Paraguayan People's Army guerrilla in the north, who kidnapped and were not caught. There was the attempt of March 2017 to amend the constitution so that he could stand again, passed by the Senate in a closed session in a locked room. The crowd burned the Congress building and a young Liberal activist was shot dead by police in his party's headquarters. The amendment was withdrawn. He then supported Abdo Benítez, whom he despised, against the Liberals. He resigned the presidency two months early, in May 2018, to take a Senate seat for life, which the Senate refused to swear him into. He went back to the tobacco company. He was born in Asunción, the son of the Cessna dealer. He was jailed for currency fraud in 1989 and cleared. He built Tabacalera del Este into the source of most of the contraband cigarettes in South America, and owned the Banco Amambay. He was president of the Club Libertad football team. The American cables of 2010 had already called him a money launderer before he was a politician. He is president of the Colorado Party. The government of Peña since 2023 is his. The sanctions have not touched the party's control of the state. That is the thing about Paraguay.
- Lived: 1956 CE – ?
- Nationality: Paraguayan
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
