The Specialized Court of Appeals for Economic Crimes and Organized Crime, First Chamber, overturned on Tuesday the sentence that acquitted Chief Commissioner Hugo Adalberto Ayala Quiñónez, former head of the 4th Police Station in Asunción, Sub-Officer Carlos Alfredo Mendoza, and lawyer Jorge Darío Cristaldo Ruiz Díaz. They were accused of being part of a criminal organization and obstructing criminal prosecution by protecting Eduardo “Piska” Aparecido de Almeida, identified as the PCC leader in the country.
The decision, recorded in Agreement and Sentence No. 50, was signed by judges Mario Camilo Torres Leguizamón, Jesús María Riera Manzoni, and Paublino Escobar Garay. Prosecutor María Irene Álvarez, from the Specialized Unit for Organized Crime, had appealed the acquittal handed down on December 22, 2025, by the Specialized Trial Court, presided over by Lourdes Garcete and composed of Manuel Aguirre and Rosana Maldonado.
In her appeal, Álvarez pointed to “flaws that translate into contradictory reasoning” in the acquittal, arguing that the trial court omitted decisive evidence and violated the rules of critical reasoning. The original trial took place in 2021, when the three were convicted—the lawyer to six years in prison and the police officers to five years. That conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of Justice, which ordered a new trial. In 2025, in the second trial, they were acquitted, but now the acquittal has also been quashed.
Appeals judge Camilo Torres voted against the prosecution’s appeal, arguing that the acquittal did not lack reasoning. Judge Paublino Escobar, followed by Jesús Riera, found that the trial court had developed a “fragmented and disjointed assessment” of the evidence, examining it in isolation and without considering contextual correlation, which artificially weakened the probative value. Escobar classified the acquittal’s reasoning as insufficient to rationally justify rejecting the body of incriminating evidence.
With the annulment, the three defendants will face a third oral and public trial. The prosecution was represented in the second trial by prosecutor Ingrid Cubilla, from the Specialized Unit for Combating Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime.