Police shootout during a drug raid kills Paraguayan lawmaker, exposing the country's challenges

ASUNCION, Paraguay -- A pre-dawn police raid targeting the home of a Paraguayan lawmaker in a notorious drug smuggling haven near the country's border with Brazil turned into a chaotic shootout on Monday, authorities said, leaving the lawmaker dead and the nation on edge.

The killing of Eulalio “Lalo” Gomes, a 67-year-old rancher and lawmaker from Paraguay’s long-ruling Colorado party, also served as a grim reminder of the web of collusion between politicians' families and organized crime in Paraguay, experts said.

“This is not an isolated case, on the contrary, it's the continuation of many other cases linking politics to narco-trafficking and organized crime,” said Paraguayan lawyer and political analyst Leonardo Gómez Berniga.

Security forces equipped with firearms and search warrants arrived simultaneously at the separate homes of Gomes and his son, 32-year-old Alexandre Rodrigues Gomes, early Monday in the lush borderland to look for evidence in what authorities described as a wide-scale investigation into drug smuggling and money laundering in local real estate.

Officers said Gomes greeted them with a hail of gunfire. Police fired back, fatally wounding the conservative Colorado lawmaker.

“We have a community in turmoil, a public who needs answers,” Emiliano Rolón, Paraguay's public prosecutor, said as he emerged from the morgue of Asunción, Paraguay's steamy capital city some 276 miles (445 kilometers) southwest of Pedro Juan Caballero, the border outpost where the raid took place. “We're dealing with organized crime, and that's not an easy thing.”

Rolón said his office had issued an indictment just before Monday's raid charging Gomes and his son, along with three other suspects, in the trafficking scheme that entangles the gang of a prominent Brazilian cocaine kingpin imprisoned across the porous border.

Brazilian authorities have helped investigate the case, he said, the latest example of how growing regional cooperation against drug-trafficking has ratcheted the pressure up on Paraguay to play its part.

As a lawmaker, Gomes was immune from prosecution. His son Alexandre had opened fire at officers and fled the scene before ultimately turning himself into police in the department of Amambay, authorities said. There were no other injuries in the gun battles, which erupted at the two houses some 10 blocks apart.

The Gomes family denies the allegations of narco-trafficking and accuses the police of using excessive force.

“My dad was hiding and the police just killed him," Larisa Gomes, the daughter of the slain lawmaker, choked out through sobs before retreating back into the morgue to wait for autopsy results.

The family lawyer, Oscar Tuma, questioned why the police squad launched the raids in the dead of night, kicking down the front gates of the homes rather than summoning the father and son for interrogation. “The conditions were not correct and there was no urgency for this raid to be carried out at 3 a.m. when our national deputy was sleeping with his wife," he said.

Public Prosecutor Rolón said that police had no choice but to conduct the raid when they did. During the day, he said, Gomes had bodyguards armed to the teeth patrolling his white mansion in Amambay — an isolated province with a homicide rate roughly 10 times Paraguay’s national average, according to government figures.

Monday's botched drug-bust and deadly shootout captivated Paraguayns because of Gomes' status as a lawmaker in the dominant right-wing Colorado party led by tobacco tycoon Horacio Cartes, who served as the country's president from from 2013 to 2018.

But experts said the dramatic episode reveals something quite ordinary about Paraguay, which ranks 136th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perception index, among the lowest in South America.

Corruption and clientelism have long characterized Colorado governance in the South American country, where the capital's roads and power lines are in precarious shape and petty embezzlement runs rampant among low-paid public servants.

“This is entrenched through all political parties, at all levels,” said Christopher Newton, an investigator at Colombia-based research organization InSight Crime. "When it comes to people who have the power to make changes, a lot of those people are the ones who will likely benefit from not making changes.”

As the country's corruption fight stalls, outside pressure is mounting.

Last year, the U.S. government accused Cartes and former vice president Hugo Velázquez of “significant corruption," and barred U.S. companies from doing business with them. This month, the Biden administration unveiled new sanctions on Tabesa, a major Paraguayan cigarette producer, for funneling millions of dollars in payments to Cartes. The former president denies allegations that he built his vast wealth through money-laundering.

Over the past decade, Europol, the European Union’s police agency, has increasingly traced major trans-Atlantic drug busts back to Paraguay’s river ports.

The seizures shine a spotlight on the country's institutional weaknesses and insecurity even as it tries to tout its success story as one of Latin America's fastest-growing economies. Earlier this month, Moody’s rating agency became the first to upgrade the country’s credit score to investment grade, handing a victory to President Santiago Peña, a former International Monetary Fund official.

But the mayhem Monday in Pedro Juan Caballero once again exposed “a very dangerous dimension,” said Gómez Berniga, the analyst. “Political and business sectors and judicial authorities are all under intense scrutiny to see how diligently they end up resolving this.” ___

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