Paraguayan lawmaker killed after engaging in shootout with police during drug raid

SEATTLE - Prominent Paraguayan rancher and lawmaker Eulalio "Lalo" Gomes was killed on during a pre-dawn police raid targeting a drug smuggling haven in the city of Pedro Juan Caballero, near the country's border with Brazil, authorities said.

Gomes served as a deputy of the Colorado Party, the country's largest political organization. He was linked to money laundering and drug trafficking operations.

Security forces equipped with firearms and search warrants arrived simultaneously at the homes of Gomes and his son, 32-year-old Alexandre Rodrigues Gomes, looking 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, leading them to fire back, fatally wounding the 67-year-old lawmaker. His son also opened fire at officers and fled the scene before ultimately turning himself to the authorities in the department of Amambay.

Emiliano Rolón, Paraguay's public prosecutor, said his office had issued an indictment just before the Aug. 19 raid, charging Gomes and his son, along with three other suspects, in a trafficking scheme that links them with a prominent Brazilian cocaine kingpin.

"We have a community in turmoil, the public needs answers," Rolón said. "We're dealing with organized crime, and that's not an easy thing."

After the incident, the Gomes family released a statement in which they shifted the blame towards law enforcement, saying they used excessive force and also denied the allegations of drug trafficking. "My dad was hiding and the police just killed him," said Larisa Gomes, "Lalo" Gomes' daughter.

Oscar Tuma, the family's lawyer, questioned why the police squad launched the raids at night, kicking down the front gates of the homes rather than summoning both suspects 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.

But Rolón said that police had no other choice but to conduct the raid when they did, as Gomes had armed bodyguards patrolling his mansion. The isolated Paraguayan province has a homicide rate roughly 10 times of the national average, according to government figures.

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

Corruption has been ingrained in Paraguay's politics for quite some time. The country ranks 136th out of 180 on Transparency International's corruption perception index. Only Venezuela (177th) ranked lower than Paraguay among South American countries in the 2023 report.

In 2023, the U.S. government accused former Paraguayan president Horacio Cartes and former vice president Hugo Velázquez of "significant corruption" and barred U.S. companies from doing business with them. And just earlier this month, the Biden administration unveiled new sanctions on Paraguayan cigarette producer Tabesa for funneling millions of dollars in payments to Cartes.

"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," he added.