Paraguay’s president was removed from office and arrested after the country’s largest digital bank merged, leaving half the population without access to funds and plunging the country into a political crisis.
Ueno, a youth-friendly banking app, collapsed amid allegations of insider loans and proximity to the long-time ruling party, closely aligned with Washington.
The app has been credited with expanding access in a region where up to one in four adults do not have a bank account; its implosion was a “kind of tsunami in the end,” one political scientist said, and put at stake “the credibility of a country that has spent years trying to establish itself as a stable and reliable destination for international investment,” a regional analyst wrote in Americas Quarterly.
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