On October 23, 2025, Paraguayan President Santiago Peña officially enacted a new controversial Non-Profit Transparency Law (Ley N° 7363/24). Initially passed by the legislature in October 2024—and quietly signed into law amid the euphoria of the men’s national soccer team’s upset of Argentina in World Cup qualifiers—the bill creates a system for registering and monitoring the activities of non-profit organizations. While its proponents promise that it will reduce corruption in Paraguay’s non-profit sector, numerous international watch groups including the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, Amnesty International, and the United Nations Rapporteur on the Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association have warned that it will have serious implications for freedom of speech and assembly. These concerns have led critics to call it la ley garrote (the club/cudgel law) or the anti-NGO law.
The bill mandates that any non-profit organization that seeks to influence public policy must report its funding sources, activities, and expenditures to Paraguay’s Economic and Finance Ministry. Those who spearheaded its passage claim that they want to increase transparency and that organizations with nothing to hide have nothing to worry about. Yet, the law requires onerous semi-annual reporting and fails to clearly define what constitutes an attempt to influence public policy.
Opponents of the bill believe that corruption in Paraguay’s non-profit sector is real, especially in the case of organizations linked to politicians, but they argue that corruption discourse is being weaponized against the opposition. To critics, the law represents the latest and most restrictive measure among a web of policy mechanisms designed by the ruling Cartismo political movement to curtail dissent. In a country with one of Latin America’s lowest tax rates, high levels of informality, and meager social assistance programs, NGO workers fear that the bill will drive self-censorship and limit their abilities to fill the void left by a negligent state.
Cartismo and the Global Far-Right Movement
The law comes amid a broader crackdown on Paraguay’s political opposition led by the president’s political party, the right-wing Asociación Nacional Republicana (National Republican Association, ANR). Also known as the Colorado Party, the ANR has dominated Paraguayan politics nearly-uninterrupted since 1947. In recent years, the ANR has consolidated itself around Horacio Cartes, a tobacco magnate who served time in jail during an investigation for currency fraud in the 1980s and has been accused of having ties to smuggling and drug trafficking groups. In 2012, Cartes positioned himself as a political outsider to win the party’s internal primaries and was elected president the following year. During his administration, he maintained the ANR’s staunch commitment to social conservatism but bucked its tradition of appointing party insiders to cabinet posts, instead surrounding himself with technocrats and liberalizing key sectors of Paraguay’s economy.
Peña was one of these technocrats, having served as Cartes’ Minister of Finance from 2015-2017 while still a member of the rival Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico (Authentic Radical Liberal Party, PLRA) before emerging as his hand-picked successor. A former economist at the IMF with a master’s degree from Columbia, he gives a clean-cut image to Cartes’ political movement, which many have likened to a form of mafia capitalism. Peña won the Colorado Party’s 2022 primaries, during which Cartes was also chosen as the ANR president, and would go on to win the general election in 2023.
NGO workers fear that the bill will drive self-censorship and limit their abilities to fill the void left by a negligent state.
Under Cartes’ leadership, the Colorado Party has aligned itself with the transatlantic far-right movement and positioned Paraguay at the vanguard of the battle against a foreign “globalist” agenda. In 2025, the country hosted global conferences organized by the American Conservative Union and the anti-communist Madrid Forum run by Spain’s radical right party Vox. In his opening speech at the Madrid Forum, Peña railed against socialism, cancel culture, and anti-family values, while praising Paraguay for being a “bastion of morality in a polarized region that has stood for decades as an unyielding guardian of fundamental Western values.” At both events, the Colorado Party received plaudits from foreign activists and leaders. Vox’s president Santiago Abascal praised it as a model for the defense of democracy and traditional values, and Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei called Paraguay an economic model for all of South America while emphasizing its importance in the cultural war against what the continent’s left.
Cartismo’s Crackdown
Cartes’ allies in Paraguay’s congress have actively embraced this discourse, and the new NGO law has become another tool to discredit their opponents. Taking a page from President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Operation Car Wash in Brazil, they stoked fears over corruption to expel Kattya González—one of the country’s most prominent opposition politicians and anti-corruption crusaders—from the Senate on dubious charges. In August 2025 Congress also ousted Miguel Prieto, the outspoken mayor of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay’s second largest city, for the supposed misuse of municipal resources.
The Cartes-controlled legislature also created a bicameral anti-money laundering commission in August 2024 and stacked it with some of their most loyal supporters, including PLRA senator Dionisio Amarilla and ANR senator Gustavo Leite, who has been accused of corruption. The commission has leaked sensitive data on journalists and anti-corruption activists and attacked NGOs, businesses, banks, and media groups seen as critical of Cartes. They have also targeted individuals and organizations linked with USAID in retribution for the Biden administration’s levying of sanctions against Cartes and his business enterprises.
The commission has also been racked with its own corruption scandals. Leite’s wife, Paola Serrati de Leite, runs an NGO offering “spiritual guidance” to drug addicts, for which Leite once served as treasurer. An investigative report found that the NGO was not registered with the Paraguayan government’s anti-money laundering secretary and that it had received at least $40,000 from Cartes’ tobacco company, Tabacalera del Este. In October 2024, a leaked audio recording of Leite insinuated that the law was a calculated attempt to discredit NGOs critical of the ANR and Cartismo, confirming critics’ suspicions.
Despite these scandals, Trump’s election and the hemispheric rightward turn have emboldened Cartismo. Leite is now ambassador to the U.S., which lifted Cartes’ sanctions in October 2025. Amarilla, who was tasked with presenting the commission’s findings on USAID to the Trump administration, referred to the openly-gay Biden-appointee Marc Ostfield as “Missus Ostfield,” not-so-subtly promoting accusations advanced by another powerful Cartista senator that the former ambassador had used public money to promote homosexuality in Paraguay.
“Gender ideology” and the assault on LGBTQ+ rights
Amarilla’s comments are emblematic of Cartismo’s efforts to deepen the Colorado Party’s socially conservative agenda. When running for president, Cartes compared gay people to “monkeys” and said he would “shoot [himself] in the testicles” were his son to marry another man. Peña, who once espoused support for gay marriage, now celebrates conservative Christian values.
Much of this discourse has focused on the country’s children. In 2017, the Ministry of Education issued the world’s first resolution banning the teaching of “gender ideology” in schools. In November 2025, it went a step further by removing phrases like “equality,” “gender equity,” and “gender perspective” from educational materials.
This vitriol surrounding “gender ideology” may offer prescient insight into civic life under the new Non-Profit Transparency Law. Before Peña’s election, FEIPAR, an organization advocating inclusive educational programming regarding sex and gender equality, was invited to contribute to an ongoing working table on educational programming through the Ministry of Education. When they refused to capitulate to the Ministry’s conservative stance on gender expression, they were removed.
As a result, the organization began preparing their own educational materials to fill in the gap created by the 2017 law, a move which enraged the Minister, said FEIPAR’s president Silvia Rolón. “Now the Minister [of Education] has publicly come out against our materials. This is a problem,” said Rolón. The organization has been barred from further participation in working tables with the Ministry of Education, a move that Rolón characterized as retaliation for their work. This blatant punishment of dissenting views on gender is particularly concerning in a context where instances of childhood pregnancy and gender based violence, including femicide, are high.
This vitriol surrounding “gender ideology” may offer prescient insight into civic life under the new Non-Profit Transparency Law
The justification of the Non-Profit Transparency Law continues in this line of attacking anti-Cartismo politicians and policy positions. Advocates for the bill repeatedly insinuated that foreign-funded “globalist” organizations are imposing a pro-abortion and anti-family agenda against “traditional Paraguayan values.” They have further stoked moral panic around so-called “gender ideology” to build support for the measure by invoking unsubstantiated images of children being indoctrinated with pro-trans ideology.
Plotting Resistance
Among Paraguay’s non-profit sector, the bill has driven uncertainty and fear. Dante Leguizamón, the director of CODEHUPY, an organization that coordinates legal action among numerous local progressive NGOs, expressed concerns that the law will disproportionately impact the smallest NGOs, which often do frontline work with some of the country’s poorest communities. “They’re going to disappear because they won’t be able to bear the bureaucratic and administrative costs the law imposes,” he said.
Critics also worry that NGOs will begin to self-censor given the vagueness of the law’s definition of “public policy.” Juan Antonio León of the agrarian think-tank CEIDRA fears that NGO workers will be held accountable for their private social media accounts and activism not directly affiliated with their organizations. “One of the law’s clauses states that if you participate in public policy, then you must be previously registered [with the government] to express your opinion, to promote, or to petition for the approval of that law…That statement then gives the government the grounds to persecute me. They’re looking for self-censorship,” he said.
In a country where basic needs are often met through clientelist networks, the law has the potential to subject humanitarian aid to a partisan logic.
For León, the stakes are high, “We exist because there is no social safety net. There are no public policies to defend the people and their land.” In a country where basic needs are often met through clientelist networks, the law has the potential to subject humanitarian aid to a partisan logic, further transforming basic assistance into a tool for political control rather than social protection.
The situation is particularly dire for Paraguay’s Indigenous Peoples, who are three times more likely than the general population to live in poverty and are highly dependent on non-profits. Miguel Lovera, a former administrator under former President Fernando Lugo and founder of the NGOs Amotocodie and Heñoi, said that the law is “designed to restrict the activity and influence of Indigenous organizations and peoples and their allies” and that he fears his organizations will “have to get permission to do anything now in a way that we didn’t before. It severely restricts us.”
It remains to be seen how strictly the law will be enforced and whether these fears are well founded. As organizations quietly prepare during the initial 90-day registry period, CODEHUPY and other non-profit allies launched a formal response on December 16, 2025, initiating litigation before Paraguay’s Supreme Court. The lawsuit contests the law’s constitutionality on the grounds that freedom of expression and assembly are both enshrined in the 1992 constitution. Organizations opposed to the law have also pledged to systematically monitor its implementation through public information campaigns designed to expose its political uses and abuses. The success of these efforts might very well hinge on the broader Paraguayan populace’s tolerance for Cartismo’s consolidation of power, which will be tested at the ballot box in the country’s municipal elections next October.
Michael Cary is a PhD candidate in Development Sociology at Cornell University.
Jamie Gagliano is a PhD candidate in Geography at Rutgers University whose research examines agrarian transformations in Paraguay.