Pablo Callizo, a member of Asunción’s municipal council, and Sebastián Garay, a candidate for the Municipal Council representing the Patria Querida Party (PPQ), were taken by the National Police to the 10th Metropolitan Police Station after taking part in a protest featuring stuffed teddy bears outside the residence of former President Horacio Cartes on Avenida España in Asunción. Both were released about two hours later.
The participants presented the protest as a symbolic show of support for the medical sector’s demands and criticism of Santiago Peña’s government. Callizo and Garay said the group — made up of about 10 to 15 people — was on the sidewalk, in a public space, without blocking entrances or traffic. The two said police did not explain which rule had allegedly been violated.
Callizo said officers tried to remove the toys and that the protesters formed a human chain to prevent them from being confiscated. He then reported that there was pushing, that the two men were restrained, handcuffed and taken to the police station. In an account released after their release, Garay said the stuffed toys were also taken to the cell and that the protesters’ belongings were collected.
Callizo disputed the police report’s claim that there had been a “disturbance of the public peace” and denied that they had refused to identify themselves. He announced that complaints would be filed and that there was a possibility of appealing to international bodies. Garay also said police repeatedly used the phrase “so they learn,” which, in his assessment, evokes authoritarian practices of the past.
The episode triggered a political dispute in the Chamber of Deputies. Pro-government lawmaker Yamil Esgaib, linked to the Honor Colorado movement, a faction of the National Republican Association (ANR, the Colorado Party) led by Cartes, argued that the right to demonstrate must respect residents’ rights and called the protesters “pelotudos” — roughly, “idiots,” in Spanish.
Lawmakers Johanna Ortega asked National Police Commander César Silguero and Interior Minister Enrique Riera who had ordered the protesters to be taken to the station. Rocío Vallejo compared the seizure of the toys with the confiscation of books during Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship. Raúl Benítez described the case as a democratic setback and questioned the political use of police force.
Lawyer and former senator Mario Paz Castaing also criticized the state’s response. In his view, a resident may request police assistance when a group gathers outside his home, but intervention crosses a line when it leads to the pursuit, handcuffing and confinement of protesters. “Any act that restricts public freedoms is a bad precedent,” he said.
Callizo and Garay maintain that the police action was politically motivated because it took place outside Cartes’s residence, as he is the ANR’s president. That accusation has not been independently substantiated in the available information, while the formal justification cited by the protesters was the alleged disturbance of the public peace. The case is now at the center of debate over the limits of police action during protests in public spaces and comes amid the campaign for Asunción’s Municipal Council.