Horacio Cartes

Horacio Cartes (born July 5, 1956, Asunción, Paraguay) is a Paraguayan businessman and politician who was elected president of Paraguay in 2013, thereby restoring executive power to the centre-right Colorado Party, which had lost the presidency in 2008 after ruling the country since 1947. Constitutionally barred from running for reelection, he left office in 2018.

Cartes’s father, a pilot who obtained the Paraguayan franchise for airplane manufacturer Cessna (now a subsidiary of Textron, Inc.) in 1958, encouraged his son to pursue a career in the aeronautics industry. After attending prestigious private schools in Asunción, Cartes studied in the United States at the Spartan School of Aeronautics (now Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology). He returned to Paraguay at age 19 and began a long career as an entrepreneur that would eventually make him one of the wealthiest individuals in Paraguay. Among his early business ventures was a currency exchange that made him the target of investigation in the mid-1980s by the dictatorial regime of Alfredo Stroessner. Having spent some four years as a fugitive (probably abroad), Cartes returned to Asunción in 1989 and was briefly incarcerated but was then freed when charges of currency fraud were dropped.

His currency-exchange business expanded to become the powerful Banco Amambay in 1992, as Cartes amassed a business empire that grew to include livestock enterprises, beverage companies, and cigarette manufacturers. Over time he controlled some 25 companies, but it was as president of Club Libertad that Cartes became a national figure by building that football (soccer) team into a perennial champion.

Cartes’s widespread business success, however, was dogged with accusations of malfeasance and corruption. In 2000 a plane carrying illegal drugs landed at one of his ranches, though Cartes denied any involvement with the incident. In 2004 the Brazilian Congress accused him of smuggling cigarettes into Brazil, and in 2010 one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks indicated U.S. government suspicion of Cartes’s involvement with laundering drug money. Nevertheless, he decided to enter politics, joining the Colorado Party in 2009 and mounting his own movement within it, though theretofore he had never even voted. When the party, impressed by Cartes’s business acumen, dropped its requirement that an individual be a member of the party for 10 years before becoming a presidential candidate, Cartes was free to run for that office in 2013.

His principal opponent in the election was Efraín Alegre of the Liberal Party. The incumbent president, Federico Franco, a Liberal politician who was constitutionally barred from seeking another term, had assumed office in 2012 after leftist Pres. Fernando Lugo was impeached in response to his alleged mishandling of a deadly conflict between peasants and police. Characterized by some as a “legislative coup,” the impeachment earned disapproval from abroad and resulted in Paraguay’s suspension from the international organizations Mercosur and UNASUR. Promising to reset Paraguay’s relationship with its regional neighbours, to eliminate corruption from within the rebranded Colorado Party, to encourage private investment, to modernize infrastructure, and to undertake agrarian reform, Cartes spent lavishly on his campaign, casting himself as incorruptible because of his enormous personal fortune. A strong reaction to homophobic statements by Cartes necessitated damage control for his campaign, but he still won the election, garnering some 46 percent of the vote, compared with 37 percent for Alegre.

Notwithstanding his campaign pledge to clamp down on endemic corruption by appointing individuals to senior posts on the basis of merit alone, by late 2015 Cartes had come to an accommodation with the traditional leadership of the Colorado Party and had chosen to tolerate its patronage system in return for the party’s support in Congress. Cartes also sought to facilitate foreign investment in Paraguay. At least partly as a result of the success of those efforts, the Paraguayan economy (which grew by an average 6.5 percent annually from 2010 to 2015, according to the World Bank) continued to enjoy economic prosperity that was the envy of many of its regional neighbours.

In order to prevent a repeat of the dictatorial rule of Alfredo Stroessner, who served as president from 1954 to 1989, the Paraguayan constitution prohibited a president from serving more than one term. However, Cartes’s supporters sought to change the constitution to allow him to run for the country’s top office again. After their efforts were stymied by a vote in Congress in August 2016, members of the majority Colorado Party began holding “alternative” sessions of the Senate (attended by only some members of the opposition). In one of these sessions, on March 31, 2017, 25 senators (two more than a majority in the normally 45-seat body) voted to amend the constitution. Arguing that approval by a constituent assembly was required to amend the constitution to alter presidential term limits, opposition lawmakers called the vote illegal and branded it as a “coup.” Seemingly as outraged by this procedural violation as they were by the amendment itself, protesters violently invaded the Congress building late on March 31 and set fire to it.

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Cartes responded by saying, “Democracy is not conquered or defended with violence, and you can be sure this government will continue to put its best effort into maintaining order in the republic.” By mid-April, however, Cartes had announced that he no longer intended to seek reelection. Before the month was over, the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of Congress) added a coda to the affair by voting down the amendment passed by the “alternative” Senate. In the election of April 2018, voters chose the Colorado Party’s Mario Abdo Benítez (the son of Stroessner’s principal adviser) as Cartes’s successor.

Cartes remained head of the Colorado Party, but he continued to be dogged by accusations of corruption, including allegations of involvement in money laundering and tobacco smuggling. In January 2023 he and Vice Pres. Hugo Velázquez were sanctioned by the United States, which accused them of “rampant corruption” and involvement with Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group that the U.S. government considers a terrorist organization.

In the run-up to Paraguay’s national elections on April 30, 2023, a rift opened in the Colorado Party that found Cartes and Abdo Benítez heading up competing factions that backed different candidates for the party’s presidential nomination. Ultimately, the candidate supported by Cartes, former finance minister Santiago Peña, not only captured the nomination but also was the winner of the general election.