➡ The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has shifted from providing practical aid to Paraguay, such as teaching farming techniques, to funding non-government organizations with a political agenda. This change, which intensified under the Biden administration, led to a $50 million agreement to promote democracy and transparency in Paraguay. However, the funds were misused and the law was violated. Now, there is a legal battle to reveal who received the money, as it is suspected that it was used to finance opposition groups.

➡ The MERCOSUR Europe Free Trade Agreement hasn’t been signed due to Europe’s pushback. MERCOSUR, a common market between Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Bolivia, produces 60% of the world’s food. However, there are concerns about China’s potential influence in Paraguay. The speaker suggests that MERCOSUR should align with the U.S. rather than Europe, and that together they could feed the world.

➡ Paraguay, despite its low average GDP, has prosperous areas due to the hard work and ethics of its Mennonite immigrants. The speaker argues that the current system of aiding the poor is flawed and needs to be replaced with a system that encourages work and self-sufficiency. He also suggests that Paraguay and the U.S. should strengthen their partnership, focusing on business and education. Lastly, he invites Americans to visit Paraguay, describing it as a free, hardworking, and God-fearing country.

Chris. I’m Chris Farrell, and this is On Watch. Welcome to On Watch, everybody. I’m Chris Farrell, and our show today is a really special one. We have in studio with us today Senator Gustavo Lehti of Paraguay. And he’s going to help us recover some lost history and explain some inexplicable details of facts and politics today. Welcome to our studio. Welcome to On Watch, Senator Lehti. Thank you. A pleasure. Great to have you with us. Hello to everyone that’s watching. So you and I met a few weeks ago in beautiful Budapest, Hungary, attending the Conservative Political Action Conference there.

And we hit it off, had a good time talking. I wanted you to invite you today to On Watch, to our show, to talk about, or at least to bring some information to the American public about an area that they’re probably not too familiar with, about a country that they’re probably not too familiar with, but that they should be. And that is your home country of Paraguay. And so it’s in the middle of South America, and it’s landlocked, and it has an incredible history. Give our viewers and our listeners a little overview. What is special about your country? The late Augusto Rojtos said that Paraguay is an island surrounded by land.

We have been there in the middle. We had been the most advanced country in Latin America in 1945. The first railroad, the first telegraph, the first iron ore mines and operations. Then, unfortune struck us with a Triple alliance war in which we took our three neighbors, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. They decimated us. And just for context, that’s the 1860s up to 1870, 1864 through 1870. And there’s numbers that are outrageous, astounding numbers when it comes to the. The losses that Paraguay suffered in that Triple alliance war. Yeah, we lost 90% of the male population and 50% overall.

Right. You lost about half your population total. The country was rebuilt by very strong, very valuable grandmas and mothers and their kids that were left from the war. We came back from that. And for some reason, we are a country that blended with the Spanish. Because when the Spanish came, right after Columbus, 1537, when Juan de Salazar founded Asuncion, the indigenous population were not hostile. They tried to see who are these guys? And the blending started right away. Paraguay is a country where there are no social issues in terms of race, color, and so on. Right.

I think that was good. And it’s not like in Peru there was a conquest, or in Mexico there was a fight to impose the Spanish culture. But in the end, when the Franciscans and the Jesuits came in the 1700s to try to educate us. The indigenous people were very smart and said, you learn our language if you want to educate us. We’re not going to learn your language. And that was the preservation of a native language, which is Huarani, which is still spoken. And that is a radically different history than a lot of other places in Central and South America where a lot of times the indigenous population is wiped out or nearly wiped out.

Yeah. Because if you look at Quechua and Aymara culture in the altiplano, Peru, Bolivia, they speak it, but it’s not spoken in the capital or it’s not spoken at doing business in Paraguay. If you’re into farming, cattle farming, which is 40% of our economic activity, if you don’t speak to your people in Guarani, yes, they’ll understand Spanish. But it’s so much easier, so much better doing it in our native language. Very interesting. Even playing soccer, when we have international friendlies or international real matches, we talk to each other and wear a knee so the adversary doesn’t know what we’re gonna do.

Secret code. It’s almost like. It’s almost got like the Hungarian speaking. Hungarian. Hungarian, Hungarian, Hungarian, Croat and Basque. Yeah. Nobody knows harder than what I mean. Right. You are a senator elected on a nationwide basis to your legislature. And in that position, you just didn’t show up as a professional politician. You’re a guy with a business background. You understand commerce and industry. So give me. And give our listeners and viewers a little background as to. So you’re an important political leader. You’re in the Senate, you’re head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, but you just didn’t show up on the scene and say, hey, I’m here.

I’m a professional politician. You have a whole professional life as a businessman leading up to that. Is that a fair estimate? Well, God works in our lives in funny ways. True. I’ve been in and out of public service three times already. As you say, I am an accident in politics because I was not supposed to be Senator. I know another guy named Trump who is also an accident, probably. President Kartes in 2013 picks me as his Minister of Trade and Industry and puts me into running 65% of our GDP, and we grew 30% and employment grew.

And our administration is still remembered as the most honest administration. After Stroessner left in Paraguaguay, which is 30 something years ago, and then I went back to business. We stopped, and there was other people from my own party that took over. And then in 2022. In June 2022, Santi Pena, who is our president now, Horacio Cartes, who is the president of our party, invited me to lunch. I said, have we got a deal for you? No, no, no. I thought, that’s a good lunch with friends. And I said, gustavo, our party has to offer an array of candidates because we were going from closed list to open list.

That’s a big change in the process. Big change. And he says, they said, we want you to offer you as well. What are you gonna say? I said, yes. And since I’m not used to. I used to be an okay golfer, rugby or soccer player, blah, blah. I don’t like to lose. I can stand losing, but I don’t like to lose. I did my best and I got in. And that’s the story. Now, having been in business and having been in charge of our economy, gives me a larger perspective on things. And I am trying to add everything I can.

From my seat at the Senate. I headed Foreign Affairs Committee for the first year. Now my colleague Antonio Barrios is the head of Foreign Affairs. I am the. And I head the Paraguay Israel Friends Committee in our Senate. I’ve got a question for you about foreign affairs. Paraguay has a very interesting relationship in that it very deliberately has contact with and friendship with Israel and likewise very deliberately has contact with and relationship with Taiwan and both of those things for a variety of reasons. In other countries we are very unfashionable. Not everybody likes or loves Israel, nor Taiwan, especially with the pressure that the communist Chinese bring on countries.

Give me a little insight into why your country has taken that position with both countries. I think they are about the same time because Israel was created in 1947, 1948 and Chiang Kai Shek was sent out of Beijing in 1949. I think that Israel has to do with a Judeo Christian grounds. I mean, we are a very Catholic, very Christian country. Very, very many Catholic, some evangelicals. And if you read the Bible, I mean Jerusalem, Zion in the Old Testament. So we relate to that. Sure. And nobody can deny that 3,000 years ago King David was the king of Israel.

The capital was Jerusalem. And there were no Palestine. There wasn’t Palestine. Palestine is an invention of the Romans to designate a certain piece of land where they all then did the diaspora and took out all the Jewish from there. In the case of Taiwan, I think it has to do with the beginning of the Cold War. Chiang Kai Shek, of course, was an ally of the US and we were very much an ally. We had been forever a very good ally of the U.S. stroessner then decided that we had to stay in that axis and Taiwan developed into a very prosperous, free market, economic, democratic country.

Absolutely. Yeah. We just started a cooperation and very few people know that as part of the work of President Kartes, myself and the group, Paraguay now holds one of the best polytechnic universities through Taiwanese corporation. Interesting. Very interesting. So we are educating Paraguayan youth with what everybody wants, which is the technology of Asia. Right. In association with Taiwan Tech and with the government of Taiwan. Taiwan is already our second largest market for beef. And now it’s going to open up for pork. When it comes to Israel. I think the 4.0 version comes when President Kartes decides after President Trump in 2018 already to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to make a statement.

Take us the end. And well, we changed government. The government of Paraguay, that followed by Mario Abdo Benitez, withdrew back to Tel Aviv. And when President Pena was campaigning, he went and met Prime Minister Netanyahu and said, the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to return here. And we did it. So Paraguay is the only country in the world that moved its embassy to Jerusalem twice. Twice. And we will do it again three times if we need to. So that’s our commitment. That’s fantastic. Staying in the world of foreign affairs and foreign involvement.

President Trump, of course, in his efforts with the DOGE team trying to uproot all kinds of fraud, waste and abuse in our country. One of the principal Targets was the U.S. agency for International Development, USAID. And I know and my colleagues here at Traditional Watch know for years we’ve examined USAID and their various activities. What was the relationship, what was the activities and the conduct of USAID with respect to Paraguay? USAID mutated from an agency of real will to cooperate. They used to send bright, dedicated, committed college students to Paraguay to teach the poor peasants how to better utilize water, how to do small farms, things that are necessary, what you would expect, actual real aid.

Then he moved from financing non government organizations into the work agenda that was exacerbated under the Biden administration. In 2019, 2020 through 2023, there was an agreement signed by which USAID was going to give $50 million to Paraguayan entities to better democracy and democratic values and transparency. And, you know, a whole bunch of lies. Those are very happy words, but usually there’s something behind them. Yeah, but they forgot about something. They forgot that that was a treaty and that treaty had to go through our parliament. And when it went through our parliament, it became our law.

And they violated the law. Why? Because the law, that is the treaty, says very clearly, A, they have to hire at market prices, B, they have to hire under competitive conditions, and C, they have to hire primarily incipient NGOs. They did like in Casablanca. They round up the usual suspects and they give them a lot of money to teach us how to be more democratic. And then the same people, the same people who fail, teaching us how to be more democrat, right, that we’re not doing well, so they spend their money wrongly. And I campaign with a lot of friends and people in Congress to pass a law that passed the last year to control what they do with the money.

We say you can advance the ideas of Karl Marx if you want, but you have to tell us where the money comes from and who you paid to and for what. They hate that. They hate me. But the law passed, and you know that. Now we’re fighting in court to get the receipts and the names of who got that money. Because our suspicion is that they finance opposition operatives. Because that was what the Biden administration wanted in Paraguay. They wanted a woke new agenda spearheaded by the, I say progressive, shady opposition. And when we realized it was good, because people in Paraguay turned in our favor and we won the election by a larger margin.

Because in Paraguay, the US under the Biden administration did blatant political interference, trying to put the opposition instead of us. So from everything that I’ve read and from our conversations, I think Paraguay as a country, it’s sort of instinctively conservative. Obviously, there’s people on the left, people on the right, but just generally speaking, it’s a very Catholic, very Christian country. Its roots, its identity is more conservative, let’s say, than Brazil or other countries. And so when you talk about the woke agenda being pushed, very often that has to do with some radical gender ideology. Very often that has to do with other social issues, frequently pushing abortion, which is a very tough sell in a Catholic country.

And as you mentioned, you normally think about development as being clean water, some entrepreneurial business, maybe some educational or some other computers. Computers, schools, medical supplies. And so when they push this other agenda, this woke agenda on you, I think it’s brilliant that you came up with this, this oversight mechanism to tell these NGOs, you can do whatever you want, but you got to tell us who you are, where the money’s coming from, who you pay to, and for what. Yeah, where it’s going to. Did you have decent compliance? Did you have many that cooperated? None.

They are revolting. They are fighting in court not to give us the information. They are saying that that is of course, very sensitive information, but they’re going to end up being cooked in their own pot because they told us for so many years that they represented civil society, which is bs. They don’t represent anybody. I remember when I was in college in 1984 or 85, Harvard Business Review did an article on who profits from nonprofit foundation and it’s only them because they say, okay, we’re going to create an organization that’s going to defend the trees and they’re going to get money.

Who gets the money? Then show me results. Show me there’s no results. And in the end, this wore them out completely because they were the good guys in society and now they are the hidden part of the people who teach us transparency when it comes to us. When it comes to them. No, no, no. When it comes to them, that’s secret. In Europe and the European Union team up with the U.S. in the last five years. Now the U.S. luckily, Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio are cramping down on money from USAID going for other purposes and real help.

Right? And Europe is now our problem because Europe is not stopping. Europe is a disloyal friend. Does the European Union, do they realize that Paraguay is in South America? I don’t think they care. What are they doing? Why is the European Union trying to poke at or influence your country? Doesn’t make sense. Because the European Union is. European Union is, as Margaret Thatcher put it, nations that are trying to remain nations with a bureaucracy in Brussels trying to make them what they don’t want to be. Right. And the bureaucracy of Brussels decided that the progressive agenda is what they have to install everywhere they are going to give money to.

And Paraguay is a. Paraguay is not a funny place for them because we don’t say yes to everything. Although we in good faith believed up until two years ago that they wanted to cooperate with us in good faith. Because in all the fine, I would say marketing or what they do is they’re good. Who would be against gender equality? Only gender for us is man and woman. For them, gender is LGTB pangender, pro gender, super gender, 72 different. There is an agenda there, but their marketing, their language is always good. I remember they’re great marketers. This is from the 1990s.

There was a commercial with Bill and Hillary Clinton and it’s a picture of them. It’s a long shot picture of them getting off A helicopter and walking towards the White House. And it’s Hillary Clinton’s voice over the image, and she says, we’re fighting for the children. Whose side are you on? Which children? Right. But I mean, like, so, okay, yeah, who’s going to say, yeah, we’re against children? I mean, but that’s part of the game, right? They try to capture the language, they try to frame up the issue so that if you don’t agree with them, you’re obviously a monster.

Right. Well, imagine that. As I said, we awoke to this two years ago when we started our period and there was a movement in our own Colorado Party that said, we want to abolish the cooperation agreement on educational transformation, that the EU, it was paying 17 million euros given to NGOs to get better education, which of course didn’t happen. Well, it’s all LGBTQ underneath, underneath, underneath all abortion. Underneath, underneath women’s reproduction rights. That’s not abortion. It’s women’s reproduction rights. Gender. LGBTQ is. No. No gender equality, because that’s the millennials and the 2030 agenda and so on.

And I always say to them, do you think that Putin didn’t sign that? Do you think that King Salman didn’t sign. Of course they signed that. Who is against. Who would be against equality between men and women? Only in our culture and in Arab culture or in Russian culture is how they do it. And they want to push us. They want to. So Europe is playing a very, very dangerous game with us because we’re going to end up fed up with them and they’re going to lose a very good friend. That’s what’s going to happen. Yeah, that’s the long term.

Europe is in a position now where Europe is losing European capital. Besides Brexit, there’s other countries in Europe. A lot of the people that are organized under Patriots for Europe are a good example of people who are just fed up. Tell you how hypocritical is Europe. They passed what they call Resolution 1115, which was designed to protect their agribusiness. And they said products that come from Paraguay may be suspicious because deforestation. We have our own laws. They have to respect our laws. But they are not suspicious about China. China is the largest polluter of the world.

But with China, they have a great relationship. And those things, fortunately today come out in public. People spread about these things. There are social networks on. And in the end, Europe is playing a very dangerous game because the MERCOSUR Europe Free Trade Agreement has not been signed because of hypocrisy. Of Europe trying all the time to push us farther, farther and farther. And there’s going to be a revolt in the farmers in Latin America or in Mercosur. They’re going to say, we don’t want you anymore. Explain what Mercosur is and how important it is to you.

MERCOSUR is our own version of a common market between Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay with associated countries like Chile and Bolivia. It was designed as a free market area. Unfortunately, under socialism of the 21st century, it became a club of ideology which were slowly getting out of through Milei and through Cartes and now Pena and it’s led by Brazil. It has tremendous potential, though, of course, I mean, we produce 60% of all the food in the world and the future food in the world. And it’s the next fight between China and the US and it’s something that I came here to alert our friends in Congress here in the US is, hey, watch out.

China is going to enter Paraguayan politics with dirty money and going to try to take us out and is going to try to get the opposition in to get the wok and get China in to control our resources. And we don’t want that. So there are many geopolitical wars to be played again in our part of the world because we produce food. So if you look at what Mercosur produces, it produces already more than Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and the whole, the whole Midwest of the US and we can grow still exponentially. And your frontier is already in Minnesota.

So the alliance has to be the US With Mercosur. The alliance doesn’t need to be Paraguay or Mercosur with Europe. They’re broke. They are an open air museum. An open air museum. A progressive open air museum. That’s a very good one. Tell me what Europe, Tell me what Europe does better or more competitively in the world. Except for a little bit in Germany still and champagne and Rochefort and things like that. Nothing. Europe is not competitive and they’re trying to impose their uncompetitiveness into our farming sector. So there are many things that are going to happen that are interesting in our part of the world.

Yeah, that’s why I wanted to touch on Mircosaur because of the potential. It’s. I know there’s a lot of political obstruction because of Brazil, other issues, but fully energized, fully motivated. It is a powerhouse for incredible trade. And like you said, 60% of the world’s food. Paraguay itself has tremendous cattle and soy. Right. That’s the two big. We started with cattle and soy. But now we’re sporting industrialized products. I mean, Paraguay is in a process of transforming our energy, which is hydro clean, everything the world wants. Paraguay has clean energy. A lot of dam project in particular.

Yeah, you put in water, comes out dollars, spectacular project. And that’s going to end up, of course, but we have to keep rebuilding, rebuilding and putting more energy into our grid. And it will be done. I think that what we have to think now, and it’s something that I advocate and many of our friends mainly from the Republican party understand is a new alliance of the common sense. And the common sense is in this country because this, this country with all these problems is the guardian of our values. Freedom, democracy, free market economics. And we need to have better relations with the US we are at a point in which we used to be run by the ambassador who was the vice king.

And we said, the political people, I speak to my own party, the Colorado party, which is the guardian of the Paraguayan ship. We said, no, no, we need to be better represented in Washington. We need to talk to legislators. We have to have good friends with business in the US because the next alliance to me is Mercosur with the US it’s not Mercosur with Europe. And is Mercosur with the US In a friendly free market with Asia? The markets of Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia is bigger than, you know, on the US there’s people that would look at that and say, well, wait a minute, you’re producing the same stuff we do.

We’re actually competitors. We’re not allies, we’re not cooperative on this. You’re doing cattle and soy and many other things, but that’s what we do. I don’t agree with this, in my opinion, but that’s sort of a closed way of looking at it. It could be a point in the 1950s where the markets were small. If we who are 300 million, 400 million with Canada and everything here, plus us make it 700 million, 800 million people produce food for the 8 billion. Aren’t we better off than the other? And aren’t we more intelligent that we do it together because it’s enough market? That’s my point.

My. And thank you for answering it that way because the real objective is for us to then feed the rest of the world. And that’s the market. Where will Japan grow soybean? Or cattle? Or cattle in the middle of the rocks. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to give you one little bit of good news. And where will China do soybean on their spoiled Land, Are they going to do it on rare minerals? We can. We hold the cards, but we don’t hold yet. Is the alliance. We need brilliant minds to sit together and say, let’s design the next 40 years.

And Paraguay wants to have a privileged relation with the US And I think that’s an excellent idea. And I wanted to give you one thing that just popped into my head that you mentioned earlier about being frustrated about the NGOs not revealing where their money is going. This just happened in the last couple of weeks. We had asked the usaid what who are you giving money to in Gaza? And they don’t know. The Department of Justice got in front of a federal judge and said, we don’t want to tell Judicial Watch who we’re giving money to in Gaza.

And the judge said, well, why? And the Justice Department attorney representing the State Department said, if we tell Judicial Watch, then the Israelis will kill them. I’m not kidding. This was said in a U.S. federal court. We’re going to get this fixed. The judge has lost his patience on this. We have a right to know where the money’s going. And so is your taxpayers money. Right. And so. But that just also tells you and your taxpayers money also went to Paraguay and they threw away $50 million. And it is in the best interest of the U.S.

what we’re doing it now in Paraguay to try to find out who took the money and for what, with no taxes. Because that money. Bukele did something interesting. He said, I’m not going to worry about it. Bring all the money you want, but I’m going to tax you 30% like the rest. Because the NGOs, in reality, they don’t pay taxes. And it was interesting because we found with one that was a project of a million dollar to better transparency, whatever transgender ballroom dancing that was in Peru. That’s a real thing. And then they were left with $108,000.

And when they submitted, because we did a bipartisan investigating committee to understand this, and they said, well, since it was $108,000 left, we didn’t give it back. We use it to create new projects. But if you were a company and you were left with $108,000, you would have paid 10% tax on that. Right? Well, that’s how unfair the situation Is with the NGOs. Of course they’re nervous and of course we’re not going to stop. Good. Very good indeed. I know there’s a lot of pressure from some of these outside groups on what they would call agrarian reform.

Which is like an old 1970s Soviet Union call to some kind of communist revolution. So they would always claim, as they were seizing farmland and killing farmers and trying to foment rebellion. They would always say it was agrarian reform. But there’s an effort to try to leverage the indigenous people, the guaranee and agrarian reform as an effort to create pressure on your government. Can you talk a little bit about that? In Paraguay, we have 406,000 square kilometers, roughly 40 million hectares. Round numbers, about 1 million hectares. 5%, no, 5%. 1 million, 2.5% belong to the indigenous population.

It was given to them. And yes, they have different culture, different methods. And yes, we are trying to get the private sector in Paraguay to take them in. I think that in Paraguay, there are about 200,000 small farms with less than 10 hectares size. With that, if you don’t put them together like in co ops, they’re never going to make money. Because the. The challenge is that the poorer peasants or people who live in the countryside become richer by giving away money and poverty. We’re not going to develop. And some 40% of those small farms have already been incorporated into the soybean chain by the private sector.

So the private sector is showing what needs to be done to an inefficient state that for 60 years did wrong. And I’ll tell you why we did wrong. In Paraguay, there are mennonites that immigrated who have areas of Paraguay where GDP is $60,000 per capita, like here, and the average GDP in Paraguay is 6,000. They were given nothing from the government, as opposed to the poor peasants who in the last 60 years were given everything. Seeds, support, chemical irrigation, et cetera. Yeah, doesn’t work. Doesn’t work. The system of assisting the poor needs to be changed too, in our countries.

And the carrot for changing the poor into rich has to be work, make money, not wait for the government to come and give you things that unmaterialize in five days. Yeah, yeah, this is the story over and over again. I can give you. Well, you know, you know better than I do, But I know many, many stories where people end up saying, well, I. I got all this stuff and either I sold it, or, or I’m waiting because in two weeks the truck comes and they’re bringing me everything I need anyway. Right? So it’s. It’s a.

It’s a failed system. It’s interesting though, that mennonites made their way to Paraguay. I mean, that’s a very interesting. They made their way to Paraguay in. Now, in 2027. There’s going to be 100 years of their coming into Paraguay. They came and they gave in. The worst possible area in the world. No water, mosquitoes, you name it, right? You go there, it’s paradise. Prosperous. Prosperous. But they have an ethics and they have a culture. They work hard, they pray and then relax a little bit on Sundays because they forgot. And then Monday morning. Back to work.

We’re back to work. This is a uniquely American conservative audience that you’re talking to, these traditional Watch supporters and subscribers. I tried to bring them folks like yourself from a different perspective, different view, different experience, because very often foreign policy or foreign relations, it’s a tough sell. It’s hard to get people interested and motivated to go, oh, well, why does that matter to me? Right? Because an American sitting at home, they’re paying the bills, they’re taking kids to school, they have a job, they have. They have a mortgage, they’re busy with their life. And they don’t necessarily.

They consider things from the kitchen table, you know, that’s their view, which is normal. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everything starts with the stomach. That’s also true. But it’s important, I think, that Americans first of all know about your country and that we’re natural friends. We have every reason to be good friends and to cooperate, to do business together, to watch out for each other. It’s in our interest. It’s in your interest. The worst thing that ever happened in relations with Central and South America was John Kerry in 2013 going to the Organization of American States and announcing that the Monroe Doctrine was dead.

What an idiotic thing to do. That’s a really. It’s a shameful thing. The Monroe Doctrine isn’t a penalty. The Monroe Doctrine means that we should all be working together. I view it in the best light. I don’t view it in the colonial light. I view it in a way that says we should be cooperating and friendly with each other. I think that this Trump 4.0 second term is a bigger opportunity to get into a new dialogue. I was looking at, China sends you $30 billion of toys. Why don’t we do them in Paraguay with American money and Paraguayan money? We want to be partners.

That’s one thing that the American people need to say. We don’t want your money. We want your partnership. We want your expertise. Let’s do business. Do business, do business. And then we pay taxes. You pay taxes here, we pay taxes there. No problem. Why give away the jobs to the Chinese? And this is something That I did when I was Minister of Industry and Trade. I convinced Madame Rousseff that they brought every year $70 billion worth of underwear, socks, you know, shoes, whatever, from China. Why don’t we do it in part your money, our money. The money that your businessmen make.

They’re going to go and buy apartments in Sao Paulo. They’re going to go beach houses in the beach. The part when people are going to get the jobs. And now we export almost $1.5 billion of manufacturing goods to Brazil. And everybody won. Mr. T maybe lost. That’s their problem. And I think that that’s what we want to bring to the table. And if there’s something that I always dream, you know, that I am partners with Iowa farmers. We have a farm in Paraguay. I took them there in 2007. I even did a road show. An actual roadshow in rural Iowa.

Raising money for our operation. That’s great. And one thing that I fell in love with is the American school system for farmers. By which the kid gets picked up from a yellow bus, is taken to the school, is given education, eats, does sports and return home with the homework done. In Paraguay, we need to be more efficient with education. Because we’ve been spending so much money in education every year. With lesser results in terms of quality. That’s our problem. And Paraguay has for instance, 8,000 schools for 1.4 million public free. Taiwan has 6,000 school for 4.5 million.

So if you concentrate more into the schools, then you get the better teachers. Then you pay your teachers better and then you are more efficient. So that’s something that we need to accommodate. Some lessons to be learned. And there’s something that the American public should know. I don’t know how because I have no the. I don’t have the facts. But some 50 years ago, the state of Kansas decided that was going to give Paraguay and citizens in state tuition benefits. Nice. More than 5,000 Paraguayan came to Kansas, got educated in Kansas, became anti communist in Kansas, became pro business, pro democracy, pro free market economics.

That’s something that we have to explore. The higher education in the US is something that we can benefit from. I know there is a big discussion about who can come and who cannot come. But we are good faith allies. And we need to think a new relationship between the US and Paraguay. Because although we’re small, we’re far. We’re very much alike. We resemble so much the Midwest. It sounds that way to me. Everything that I’ve read and studied up on to talk with you today, there’s far, far, far more reasons for us to be in a partnership than anything that would cause any kind of disagreement.

It’s I think an ideal opportunity for both countries. Senator, I’m going to give you the last word. What’s. Do you have a. You gave a great message but if you have something else, how can folks follow your work? How can they see what’s going on, what your interests are, what’s happening in Paraguay? What’s a good, a good either social media or website or is there anything. Don’t watch cnn? No, I think the social media nowadays is very powerful. I have very limited follow up of my minimum senatorial work. But if you today type on Wikipedia, Paraguay, there’s a lot of information and one thing that I think I should probably invite is that you visit Paraguay.

You know that Paraguay in the last 10 years got about 15,000 German that came and immigrated into Paraguay looking for freedom. Freedom. Freedom from their state, freedom from their taxes, freedom from. Paraguay is a free country. We are free in our minds. When the Jesuits came and wanted to get our indigenous people into reductions, we said no, no, no, we want our own piece of land. We don’t want communism. So Paraguay is essentially an anti communist, pro freedom, God loving, God fearing, hardworking, good people country. Thank you very much. I thank you the opportunity and I hope that many Americans come and see Paraguay and have a good time with us.

Beer is cold too. Good food, good heart people. Senator Gustavo Leyte, thank you so much for joining us on watch. I’m the one who thanks you. Thank you. I’m Chris Farrell on Sam.
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