Paraguay Visa & Residency

Urban legend says you can also use the cedula as a travel document throughout the Mercosur region. This is a half-truth: Paraguayan citizens can indeed travel on their cedulas with no need for a passport.

However, cedulas issued to foreigners should technically be accompanied by the foreign passport when crossing borders. It may well be that some border officials won’t notice the difference or won’t care.

And indeed, on some Paraguayan borders, such as from Ciudad del Este into Brazil, there is basically no border control anyway—you have to go and search for an immigration official to stamp your passport.

The problem would occur if you want to fly out of Sao Paulo or Rio, hundreds of miles away, to an international destination and the Brazilian authorities find you have no entry stamp in your passport.

The long version on Paraguay residency is a bit more complicated. Of course, there are different residency categories under which you can apply. There is temporary residency as well.

And, if putting down a US$6,000 deposit is a problem, you could apply by setting up a company instead, by showing that you have employment lined up, or by marrying a Paraguayan, for example.

Equally, there are a bunch of other bureaucratic requirements I haven’t mentioned, such as getting certified translations of your certificates, getting a certificate of residency in Asuncion witnessed by your local police station, getting a local credit report, getting a certificate that you are not wanted by Interpol, and so on.

You can do the process yourself, starting by sitting in line at the immigration office. I know people who have done this, and it took them about a month of many visits to different government and police departments.

However, the easy solution is to use the services of an attorney or local immigration consultant. These people have lots of experience to the extent that they’ve almost got it down to mass production.

They will handle most of the bureaucracy for you in the background, even providing you with the requisite local address, so all you really need to do is show up once at the immigration office, once at the police, and once at the bank with your US$6,000 cash in hand to make the deposit (remember it’s a cash society…you could technically use a check or wire transfer but you would significantly delay the process).