The colony was founded by Erwin Annau and his wife Sylvia, both from Austria. As of early 2022 it counted roughly 250 residents, most of them German-speaking immigrants from Germany and Austria, with a scattering of Americans and Canadians. Its marketing was explicit about the kind of refuge it offered. The project pitched itself to people skeptical of the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine mandates that came with it, advertising a Paraguay free of pandemic restrictions. Annau had drawn attention earlier, in 2017, when he addressed members of Paraguay's government in a speech condemning Islam and its presence in Germany. The Spanish newspaper El País placed El Paraíso Verde among several closed South American colonies established by Europeans who felt threatened by Islam in Europe.

The world the colony promised did not always match the country it was built in. Marketing materials claimed Paraguay had no pandemic-related restrictions, but the government enacted them, and from January 2022 Paraguay required proof of vaccination from immigrants, leaving several German arrivals turned away at the border. In June 2021 the community circulated videos of large gatherings that broke Paraguay's COVID protocols. The colony advertised that it charged its residents no taxes, though Paraguayan authorities retained the power to impose them. The promise of an escape, it turned out, could not fully escape the laws of the nation that hosted it.

The project's troubles soon turned financial. El Paraíso Verde is managed by a company called Reljuv S.A., and in 2023 its president, Juan Joaquín Buker, was removed amid allegations of fraud and misappropriation of funds. By late October 2023, lawyers had filed ten civil complaints against Reljuv, claiming damages of some 21.68 billion Paraguayan guaraní, roughly 2.9 million US dollars. Reljuv's lawyer rejected the fraud claims and noted that the complainants were few against the more than 500 families said to have invested in the colony. In April 2024 the Annaus themselves sued Buker and six other employees over a 15-billion-guaraní gap in the company's books; Buker, who spent months under house arrest, called their lawsuit an attempt to shift the blame. The disputes remain a tangle of competing accusations, the green paradise now defined as much by its ledgers as by its land.

El Paraíso Verde is the latest chapter in a long story. Paraguay has drawn German-speaking settlers for well over a century, its cheap land and open spaces a blank page on which newcomers projected their hopes. The most infamous earlier attempt was Nueva Germania, founded in the 1880s by emigrants who dreamed of an idealized homeland in the wilderness, and which struggled almost from the start. The motives change with the era, from nineteenth-century notions of racial purity to twenty-first-century distrust of vaccines, governments, and modern life, but the impulse rhymes: the belief that a fresh community in a distant land can be sealed off from a world its founders have rejected. Whether El Paraíso Verde becomes a lasting town or a cautionary tale, it sits squarely within that tradition, a reminder that paradise, once built, still has to be governed.