According to a lawsuit filed against the company “Bebidas del Paraguay” belonging to Grupo Cartes and its Chilean partner Andrónico Luksic, they would be occupying a property in Ñemby, valued at more than USD 10 million. The production and marketing plant for beverage brands such as Pulp, Heineken and others is located on the site. 50.01% of the shares of Bebidas del Paraguay SA belong to the Chilean businessman.
The ordeal of the real owners of the property began in 2003, when the firm “Bebidas del Paraguay SA” occupied the 17 hectares of land with a false title. According to the original title, the property belongs to María Auxiliadora Yegros and Gladys Teresa Legal Sanabria de Rojas. Since then, the owners tried to reach an agreement with the invaders, but all efforts were in vain, since the occupants exhibited a supposedly false property purchase and sale title, made in favor of Francisco Barriocanal Jiménez Gaona in the 2014.
The company accused of usurping the land located in the city of Ñemby, Central department; “Bebidas del Paraguay SA” belongs to the Chilean business group Luksic, which owns 50.01% of the shares, while the remaining percentage is held by the group of former Paraguayan president Horacio Cartes.
The adverse situation described led the victims to initiate a lawsuit against “Bebidas del Paraguay SA” in 2015, but in 2018 the balance favored the then president Horacio Cartes and the Lambaré judge, María Teresa Cardozo, declared herself incompetent and solved the case. Another judicial setback suffered by the victims was in the commercial and labor appeal court of the department of Central, where they confirmed the decision of Judge María Cardozo, arguing exception of incompetence and arguing that the case should be settled in the Capital.
The worst part of the case is that the victims ended up receiving the impositions of all the costs of the process that originated from the processing of the procedural acts, a situation that reveals that the thread of Paraguayan justice is managed by powerful politicians such as Horacio Cartes.
It should be remembered that Horacio Cartes was already sued for occupying 50,000 hectares of land in the Chaco with a false title, where he set up his Chajha agro-livestock company. The title would have been falsified by the notary public Nelida Chávez de González, wife of the late Chartist leader Óscar González Daher.
The Ñemby area where “Bebidas del Paraguay” is located is a strategic place from which raw material is easily extracted, such as water from the Patiño aquifer, used for the production of beverages such as Pulp. In the same area there are also the factories of Coca Cola, Pepsi, among others.
After the United States State Department declared Horacio Cartes as “significantly corrupt”, Andrónico Luksic visited him to assess the situation, taking into account that the Chilean businessman has several partnerships with Cartes, such as “Bebidas del Paraguay” and the fuel distributor Enex.
This story is reminiscent of the fight between David and Goliath and details how Cartes uses the law to dispossess and invade properties with false titles.
