A full month in Asunción, where I live, and the capital of Paraguay, for those who don’t know.
I’ll start with the wildest story of my time in South America.
Spring in Asunción 🇵🇾
I was driving home from the gym in the truck and rolled through a light as it flicked from yellow to red. A policeman on a motorbike followed me the whole way home. As I pulled up to park, my neighbours came out to see what the fuss was about. I explained the light, and that the officer seemed less interested in writing me a ticket than in discussing a cash figure.
What happened next I would never have predicted, and I am confident none of you would have either.
The neighbours heard the number and decided they had seen this movie too many times. They told him to leave the street. He refused and kept pressing for the money. So they picked up cobblestones and started throwing them at him. He went for the bike, and the rocks kept knocking him about until he barely scraped out of the street.
I have never seen law enforcement dealt with like that anywhere in the world, and I lived four years in Indonesia. I am not endorsing it. I just sat there in the truck trying to process what I was watching.
The neighbours explained it afterwards in simple terms. They are done with police shakedowns, and this is a street with enough standing to say so. They also saved me from handing over a decent stack of cash, because it was my first ever run in with Paraguayan police and I had no idea what the protocol was.
I repaid them the Australian way, a carton of cold beer. And it is fair to say I will never again argue with them about where I park the truck, which I once stupidly did.
A bloke from rural Tasmania does not always understand how these countries actually function.
That was as big an eye opener as I have had in South America!
On top of that, I have finally got the truck back and ready for a big road trip. Everything is working great with the new turbo, except for the price of diesel and a 6.7L engine averaging 25L per 100km…
I have paid the registration to the city of Asunción and I am now waiting on the new cédula verde (green card) for the vehicle, which means I can drive it anywhere in Mercosur.
Why Paraguay
I keep trying to prove myself wrong on this. Every time I rerun the numbers on another jurisdiction, Paraguay wins again. Portugal, Dubai, Panama, Uruguay, Georgia, the lot. Here is why:
No investment requirement. No property to buy, no deposit locked in a local bank. Paperwork gets you temporary residency, then permanent.
No 183 day leash. One visit a year while temporary, one every three years once permanent.
A real tax number that runs off your RUC, not a day count. Territorial system, flat 10%, foreign source income generally untaxed.
Panama, everyone’s first guess, wants US$200,000 locked up and 183 days a year for the tax certificate.
Paraguay Discussion
The more time I spend here, the more I am starting to scratch the surface of how things actually work, much like I did in Argentina when I was writing about Buenos Aires.
Banking here is hard. Fresh residency gets you a basic account with training wheel limits. Some banks will not open the door until you hold permanent residency. Cards start tiny and grow only as fast as your declared income record.
You can get by fine with USD accounts from crypto based platforms like UglyCash and Meru (my favourite), but one quote from a Paraguayan local recently stuck with me: