Paraguay's maquila is still a way into Brazil. After the ueno bank collapse, choosing the bank is part of the due diligence.
Paraguay remains one of the most practical ways into Brazil for a manufacturer: the collapse of ueno bank changed the bank you should choose there, not the reasons for going.
Latin America is not one market
Seen from Europe, Latin America is often a single line in an export plan, with one difference noted: Portuguese in Brazil, Spanish everywhere else. The language is the smallest of the differences. Tax systems, customs rules, labour law, banking and the way public money moves change at every border, and inside Brazil they change from one state to the next.
That is why a series about the corridor between Europe and Brazil also looks at Paraguay. Not as a market of its own, with fewer than seven million people, but as a door. Every year hundreds of companies, most of them Brazilian, produce in Paraguay to sell in Brazil and the rest of the Mercosur, the customs union of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
The week of 3 November tested that door. On 6 November, on Jornal da Globo, Rede Globo's Buenos Aires correspondent Ariel Palacios described the mood in Brazil before the crisis as "an urban legend: that Paraguay had become the Switzerland of South America and a new, subtropical Silicon Valley". The legend did not survive the week. The reasons that made Paraguay attractive to Brazilian manufacturers mostly did. Tom Jobim's line that Brazil is not for beginners applies to its neighbour too.