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Home Lifestyle

Residency, Citizenship, And Opportunity In Paraguay

Kathleen Peddicord by Kathleen Peddicord
Apr 26, 2015
in Lifestyle, Paraguay
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Opportunity In Paraguay
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This Country Will Steal Your Heart

Paraguay’s biggest problem is a lack of marketing. If Madison Avenue were on this, Paraguay would steal Americans’ hearts. This country’s story’s got everything—heroes, rogues, dictators, and true villains… cowboys, damsels, poets, and philosophers… intrigue, treachery, legend, hubris, and love affairs.

Paraguay is a country with a twisting, turning, complicated past that, at one time in its history, almost ceased to be at all. The Triple Alliance War, which pitted Paraguay against Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, cost this country 90% of its male population, 60% of its total population, and 25% of its land mass.

What was all the fuss about?

Like everything in Paraguay, it’s hard to pin down an answer to that question. Locals blame the whole disastrous experience on the British and their tea. At the time (1864), Paraguay was a middling regional power with a booming economy based largely on agriculture… including tea. Paraguayan farmers produced high-grade tea at less cost than tea from Great Britain and decided to try to expand the market for it from the Americas to Europe. When Paraguay offered their cut-rate tea leaves to Germany and France, Britain responded with a vengeance.

Could tea be that important, even to the British? Paraguayans sure think so, though historians don’t always agree and suggest other factors behind the conflict. Regardless, one thing is for sure: This country has only very recently even begun to recover from those six years of holocaust. In the end, women and children were fighting naked to try to defend what was left of their country.

Outside Paraguay and the region, few have ever heard of the Triple Alliance War. I share the story with you because I think it gives insights into what’s going on in Paraguay today.

More than 90% of the country’s male population gone and much of the total remaining population sick and wounded following the war, Paraguay did something very smart. It sent out a call, far and wide. Come, settle our fertile land, Paraguay offered the world, and we’ll give you a small piece of it. You can farm and develop as a Paraguayan.

The global homesteading offer attracted adventurers, opportunists, and carpet-baggers, a mixed lot, for sure, whose descendants make up this country’s eclectic modern-day population. It also explains the country’s open-minded policies to do with residency and citizenship. This is the easiest place in the world to establish residency and to get a second passport. Paraguayans we’ve met with speak of it often and openly.

“You should become Paraguayan,” one told us. “It’s easy.”

Of historic necessity and also, I think, genuine good-heartedness, these are very welcoming people who are trying, for the first time in their history, to make a go of democracy. Young Paraguayans we’ve spoken with are naively, innocently embracing the idea. Their enthusiasm for what the future could hold for their now democratic nation reminds us how worn and weary we’ve become. One young lady, an attorney, spoke with such pride of her country’s past and such commitment to its future that I was inspired.

“Paraguay was rich before, and we will be rich again…”

We’ve heard that refrain from many.

“When I was a child, we imported everything, even toilet paper and toothpicks, mostly from Argentina,” explained one Paraguayan gentleman we spent time with last week. “Today this is changing. Now we make more and more things ourselves. We’re even exporting some things to Argentina…”

One specific opportunity that has my attention isn’t to do with manufacturing but property, in the old town, where a riverfront revitalization project is under way. Just back from the river stand grand colonial structures, the kind that get my romantic imagination whirring… and that might just be available for a song. I’m working to pin down figures.

Reminds me of the first time I saw Granada, Nicaragua (28 years ago), and Casco Viejo, Panama (almost 20 years ago), with one important exception. Paraguay’s old town is much larger than either of those two colonial zones. Larger, too, than the colonial neighborhoods of Montevideo or Quito…

More on this soon.

Kathleen Peddicord

Tags: citizenship in paraguayexpats in paraguayhistory of paraguayinvesting in paraguayliving in paraguayresidency in paraguaysecond passport in paraguaytriple alliance war
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Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord has covered the live, retire, and do business overseas beat for more than 30 years and is considered the world's foremost authority on these subjects. She has traveled to more than 75 countries, invested in real estate in 21, established businesses in 7, renovated historic properties in 6, and educated her children in 4.

Kathleen has moved children, staff, enterprises, household goods, and pets across three continents, from the East Coast of the United States to Waterford, Ireland... then to Paris, France... next to Panama City, where she has based her Live and Invest Overseas business. Most recently, Kathleen and her husband Lief Simon are dividing their time between Panama and Paris.

Kathleen was a partner with Agora Publishing’s International Living group for 23 years. In that capacity, she opened her first office overseas, in Waterford, Ireland, where she managed a staff of up to 30 employees for more than 10 years. Kathleen also opened, staffed, and operated International Living publishing and real estate marketing offices in Panama City, Panama; Granada, Nicaragua; Roatan, Honduras; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Quito, Ecuador; and Paris, France.

Kathleen moved on from her role with Agora in 2007 and launched her Live and Invest Overseas group in 2008. In the years since, she has built Live and Invest Overseas into a successful, recognized, and respected multi-million-dollar business that employs a staff of 35 in Panama City and dozens of writers and other resources around the world.

Kathleen has been quoted by The New York Times, Money magazine, MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, the AARP, and beyond. She has appeared often on radio and television (including Bloomberg and CNBC) and speaks regularly on topics to do with living, retiring, investing, and doing business around the world.

In addition to her own daily e-letter, the Overseas Opportunity Letter, with a circulation of more than 300,000 readers, Kathleen writes regularly for U.S. News & World Report and Forbes.

Her newest book, "How to Retire Overseas: Everything You Need to Know to Live Well (for Less) Abroad," published by Penguin Random House, is the culmination of decades of personal experience living and investing around the world.

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