‘Very strange, very sad’: Paraguay bank collapse fells a presidency and leaves millions broke

Santiago Peña’s links to Ueno Bank scrutinized after crisis led to his house arrest and froze millions of bank accounts

Pedro Volpe had just woken up last Tuesday when he saw a message from a friend asking whether his bank account was down, too.

It was a day after payday, and Volpe, 50, a writer and lawyer, opened his banking app and panicked: he could not even see his balance.

Volpe was among nearly 3 million Paraguayans, about 60% of the country’s adult population, whose accounts had been frozen overnight. All were customers of Ueno Bank, a digital lender that aggressively expanded across the South American country in recent years, and which, on Monday night, the central bank ordered into resolution over insolvency.