After a weekend with 8 homicides, Uruguay reaches 171 murders so far this year
A greater deployment of the Uruguayan police has not been able to contain the increase in homicides
There were eight registered homicides in Uruguay over the weekend which, added to a ninth that occurred on Monday, brings the number of murders to 42 during the month of May and the total so far in 2022 to 171. At this juncture, different political actors expressed their opinions regarding the situation in the country and next week there will be an appearance at the Senate by the Minister of the Interior, Luis Alberto Heber.
“We are present, the operation has been running, but unfortunately we cannot foresee these homicides that sometimes happen on any street corner,” Heber said in an interview with Underlined. As he explained, several of the homicides “They have to do with drug bill collection situations.”
He also referred to the Peñarol neighborhood, the most affected by this type of crime during the month of May , and stated that they had established a very intense operation in the area and had six police mobiles. “The episode happened a few blocks from the cell phone, but we could not foresee that situation, nor was there a situation to prevent the store from being robbed, robbed and costing that worker his life”, he lamented .
Although the seriousness of the situation that Uruguay is going through was already public knowledge -the Ministry of the Interior reported in April that during January, February and March there was a 33% increase in the number of homicides-, last weekend it revealed that the country is facing an even more delicate situation: there were eight homicides in approximately 48 hours.
The senator for the Broad Front, Charles Carrera, expressed his concern about “the public security situation” and considered it “alarming”, in dialogue with La Diaria. “The minister talks about a plan, [but] there is no plan, what there are are reactions”, he added and pointed out that “if one analyzes the growth” of homicides “and We compare May of this year with May of last year, crime grew 160%.”
He also referred to the plan presented by the Minister of the Interior at the Executive Tower on May 11 with the aim of curbing the increase in homicides. Carrera said that when Heber announced the plan “15 homicides had been carried out” in the month, and after the announcement “unfortunately at least 27 homicides have been carried out, so the situation is really very serious, there is no management.” In addition, he reiterated that the Broad Front had warned “that with the increase in activity” after the health emergency there would be “an increase in violence.”
In this sense, the former director of the National Police, Mario Layera, said that it was evident that “when the measures that prevented mobility were removed” the increase in violence “was going to resurface again.” “The homicides are the upper end of what is happening, but there is much more violence that is happening and that is not being contained either”, he told the newspaper.
Layera was against reducing the problem to the actions of the Police because it is difficult for them to sustain “a policy of reducing violence” in the long term. For the former director of the National Police, “the biggest mistake” was using the issue “as a story that sought electoral gains.”
After two years (2018 and 2019) of very high homicide figures, in 2020 and 2021 Uruguay experienced a decrease in these values. The government attributed it to the new security policy and -after it was approved- to the Urgent Consideration Law (LUC), which proposed major changes in security matters. But the panorama in 2022 is less encouraging and the different political figures are beginning to suggest different views on the increase in crimes.
The president of Cabildo Abierto, Guillermo Domenech, attributed the growing number of homicides to the advance of drug trafficking. “Recreational marijuana has obviously failed,” which is “nothing more than a gateway” to other drugs, he added. From his perspective, the government has been “very permissive” with drug use, because “there is not even a warning, particularly to young people, of the harmful effects of consumption.”
The person who also linked drug trafficking to the situation was the National Party senator, Jorge Gandini, and said that the increase in homicides “may be a collateral effect of the greater repression of micro-trafficking.” The senator told la daily that, from his perspective, “the course is the right one” and the party supports Minister Heber’s management.