Resistance, Rebellion, Revolution

On November 2, the Central Bank of Paraguay decided to intervene in Ueno Bank, a powerful private conglomerate with a “people’s bank” profile. Within hours, three million customers—nearly half the country’s population—were left without access to their savings. Furthermore, those digital vaults held more than $800 million in government funds: pension funds from the IPS, the state-owned electric utility ANDE, and Itaipú. The old and ever-repeating story of neoliberal plunder.

When he took office, President Santiago Peña (an IMF economist and Trump ally) appointed the former head of Ueno’s predecessor financial institution to lead the Central Bank. Peña himself had been a shareholder in the bank’s owner, the Vázquez Group. During his administration, public deposits at that institution grew to one-third of the total.

People took to the streets, organized vigils in front of Congress, and (understandably) attacked the bank’s branches. On Thursday, the 5th, Peña resigned. Congress suspended his resignation so that impeachment proceedings could strip him of his immunity. A day later, the president was removed from office for “misconduct in office,” pursuant to Article 225 of the Constitution, and placed under house arrest. This piece of history that Paraguay has just gifted to the world is significant, because there is no democracy when the powerful do not fear the people—but rather the other way around.

Of course, this isn’t a revolution, but it’s a start. The streets forced the palace to sacrifice a pawn to save the game, and the Colorado Party (Stroessner’s party, which has governed the country since 1947 with only Fernando Lugo’s brief interruption) let go of its own president. The liberal opposition and the center-left pushed for the impeachment.

Paraguay is a more conservative society than Argentina and Uruguay. Catholic, agrarian, educated for generations in fear and obedience to the boss and the party. When a society accustomed to suffering in silence rises up, it’s not because it has read Marx. It’s because Latin American history is marked by oppression, long periods of submission, and explosive rebellions. Rarely is it the result of a revolution with a popular plan.

The most recent history is also well known. In the 1990s, Menem and Cavallo sold the currency convertibility system as a miracle and the Washington Consensus privatizations as a model for development. The miracle ended in 2001, with Cavallo himself decreeing the “corralito” and a president fleeing by helicopter while armored trucks hauled away the people’s savings—today, the same operation requires nothing more than the press of a key. In Bolivia, Sánchez de Lozada privatized whatever he could; in 2000, the people of Cochabamba drove Bechtel out during the “Water War,” and in 2003, following the “Gas War” and dozens of deaths, the president fled to (guess what) Miami. In Ecuador, the 1999 bank holiday and dollarization cost Mahuad his job. Even earlier, the Caracazo of 1989 had heralded the end of another neoliberal cycle in Venezuela. The neoliberal narrative always ends the same way, and is always rewarded with oblivion.

The same story, but closer to the center of the world. In 2011, the 15-M protesters filled the squares of Spain with a simple cry: “They don’t represent us.” That same year, Occupy Wall Street reminded New Yorkers that the one percent decides for the 99 percent. In 2018, France’s yellow vests demanded a citizen-initiated referendum that would include the possibility of recalling elected officials. In the United States, this Tuesday’s elections show a massive rejection of traditional politics by young people…

But the establishment has the power of unity and always survives revolts and rebellions—but not the third “R” of revolution. It was the establishment that hijacked politics and confined it to Congress to tame it. Citizens are granted one day every few years, after being dazed by addictive propaganda. The rest of the time, they are spectators or defenders of the system that decides for them.

In 2002, Boaventura de Sousa Santos co-edited Democratizing Democracy, in which he identified the hegemonic liberal model as a “low-intensity democracy,” reduced to electoral procedures and delegation. That model, he argued, suffers from a dual pathology: (1) a lack of participation, manifested in voter abstention, and (2) a failure of representation, with citizens who do not feel represented. In response, he proposed demodiversity and complementarity between representative and participatory democracy.

Every time a people protests against an elected government, the same lecture is trotted out: “You voted for them, now you have to put up with them.” It is the dogma that a politician, by virtue of having won an election (financed by donations, pressure, and extortion from oligarchic and financial elites), has a blank check until the end of their term. They can sell what isn’t theirs, burden future generations with debt, and invest retirees’ money however they please. The vote, according to this theology, is an irrevocable sacrament.

No company operates this way. No board of directors waits four years to replace a CEO who isn’t working out. Only here does the strange “right to fire the boss”—limited to an elite—apply. Let’s repeat what was said more than a decade ago: “The worst thing that can happen to a democracy is to leave politics in the hands of politicians”—and for those elected to shut themselves away in their legislative palaces.

We are not facing a crisis involving a bank or a president. We are facing the collapse of a system that concentrates “privatized wealth” (power) at an unprecedented rate. Wars are multiplying; money laundering through investments and taxes is protected by more laws, more propaganda, or more repression.

Social media, which promised to be the public square of the 21st century, has become a group therapy session where strangers are insulted, arguments are had with bots, and—as in an old confessional—one’s own emotions are surrendered to the control of others. A form of therapy that neither heals nor soothes; it poisons. When there were popular assemblies with decision-making power, they were demonized or massacred, as the history of our continent has shown ad nauseam. We are far from true democracy, as practiced by the Iroquois, where everyone had a voice and no one could accumulate enough wealth to buy another’s voice. Those peoples who lived in assemblies advised their ambassadors and messengers not to speak with unknown spirits, because words are the gateway to the soul, and through them an impostor can easily steal it.

The Paraguayans reminded us that the streets can still replace a leader. But the replacement was chosen by the same party, in the same Congress, with the same backers. The foreman changed, not the ranch owner. Next time, perhaps, it won’t be enough to simply demand that they all leave. We’ll have to decide who comes in, how they’re held accountable, and how they’re dismissed. Without assemblies where votes carry real consequences, outrage will remain exactly what those in power want most: a catharsis.

Jorge Majfud, November 7, 2026.