The Ministry of Social Development (MIDES) alerted the popular pots that, if they are not providing statistics on the people who eat in them on Friday, the financial aid offered by the portfolio will be cut off.
“We know that not all the people who attend a pot depend 100% on it, even going through them and talking with users, they have told us that they go to take advantage of that dinner and prefer to use the Mides features they have to cover other things” said the departmental director for Montevideo, Carolina Murphy.
The hierarch assures that, eating in the pots, it is becoming more and more “the hard and structural core” of poverty in the popular pots, and that the people who fell into poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic are moving away. However, the Popular Solidarity Coordinator, which brings together dozens of popular pots, demands the absence of the State to curb hunger and, according to its spokesman, Esteban Corrales, MIDES throws “smoke bombs to cover up the problem, because despite the economic growth, the magnitude of the phenomenon continues to be important”.
Questions about Uruguay Adelante
Since 2021, some doubts and accusations have arisen around the NGO Uruguay Adelante, to which MIDES has given more than 65 million pesos (more than US$8.1 million).
For example, in that year photographs went viral in which you could see food such as whole raw chickens with rotten tissues and suppurations, or bags of carrots that were overripe and not fit for human consumption. so what denounced on social networks Brigitte Fernández, from the Piedras Blancas popular pot and picnic area.
More recently, on September 21 of this year, the Intendancy of Canelones opened an administrative investigation after the director of the Comptroller of the commune, Luis Garrido, saw that in Cuchilla Alta a municipal truck was loading food to take it to the neighborhood of vacation of the National Union of Metal Workers and Related Branches (UNTMRA), located in the resort.
According to publications of The countrythere is an investigative commission of the Departmental Board on the management of the mayor of La Floresta, Néstor Erramouspe, and the National Party bench, Nirsa Álvarez, is in charge of transporting food for the organization Uruguay Adelante to popular pots in the area to the UNTMRA vacation camp.
Although MIDES demands the statistics from the soup kitchens, Uruguay Adelante does claim to have the desired data: on September 16, Santiago Pérez, a member of this non-governmental organization, said that “The numbers are very clear” and that the number of people who attend them “dropped from 100,000 to 60,000.”
But Pérez also sees political intentions in the position of the CPS, a movement that claims the absence of state policies to attack hunger. “The Popular and Solidarity Coordinator has a purely political approach and does politics with the pots (…) I was part of the coordinator of Villa Española and when I proposed to get the data, that’s when they fired me.”
According to the CPS, there are 268 pots or picnic areas currently active. Since the contract with Uruguay Adelante ended on September 15, MIDES began to request data to assess how long the term of said contract should be extended and how much funds to continue transferring. “What is happening here is a false argument, the ministry already has the data,” says Esteban Corrales, and understands that it is “unacceptable that MIDES expects from a neighborhood organization that there is data that they should have themselves.”
And I add: “Accepting that in this country, which exports food to the whole world, there are tens of thousands of people going to eat in popular pots, and that they serve more than 1.2 million portions per month, questions all the authorities about the way in which things are done”.
“The social organizations that are working in the territory are alone, absolutely alone,” another member of the CPS, Pedro Rodríguez, told M24, denouncing that “it cannot be that the Ministry of Social Development is only doing this through transfers, There is not a single social policy regarding this. There is no one in the territory from the Ministry of Development.”
MIDES set September 30 as the deadline for the Popular and Solidarity Coordinator (CPS) to deliver the data they require, or they will stop receiving support from the State.
“When the data is not there, the support is interrupted, because what we manage is not our money, it is the money of the people, and we have to be sure that these resources actually go to places that require that support,” declared the minister. Minister Martin Lema.
What MIDES wants to know
The ministerial portfolio wants an individualized list of the pots that are in Montevideo and the entire metropolitan area, separating which are pots and which picnic areas. In addition, it is urgent to know the exact location of each one and the days they operate.
Lema’s ministry asks for a list with the number of people who use it, but without their private data.
It also seeks to know the number of portions that are served in each of the pots; this particular number is not related to the number of people, since some heads of household take several portions for all the members of the family.
