Between January 1 and October 10, 2022, 300 homicides were registered throughout the country, according to the survey carried out by The Observer. Which means that in just over ten months the same number has already been reached as in all of 2021. So far in October, there have been 18 deaths from this cause.
The most violent quarter was the first, which accumulated 99 deaths. It is followed by July, August and September, which reported 94 (according to the survey of The Observer). In any case, the most violent month was May, when 43 homicides were registered.
On May 11, in the midst of a wave that left 16 dead in 10 days, the first alarm lights went off in the government and the president, Luis Lacalle Pou, summoned the Minister of the Interior, Luis Alberto Heber, to a meeting. At that time, the minister claimed to have a “plan to contain the homicides” of which he did not give details, but assured that patrolling in complex areas would be reinforced and that the effort would be “redoubled.” At the same time, attributed the increase in homicides to the shortage of drug supply due to the closure of mouths.
In the midst of the wave of homicides that occurred in August (the month in which 35 were registered), “small operational adjustments” were announced in the plan announced in May. This time it was not through the mouth of the politicians, but of the police commanders. The authorities emphasized the need to improve coordination between units and with the prosecution service. The diagnosis of the problem remained.
This October 10, with the homicide of a 23-year-old in the Lavalleja neighborhood, the 300 homicides carried out throughout 2021 were matched. In that year, October had been the month with the most deaths: there had been 35. Until this Tuesday 18 were recorded.
If the homicide data is taken into account until September of the last five years – since October of this year has not yet ended – the total accumulated figure for 2022 is only surpassed in 2018, the year with the most homicides since there are records. . Between January and September 2022, 282 homicides were registered. In the same parameter of 2019, 275 murders had been reported, but in 2018 there were 321.
Heber’s arguments
On one of the last occasions that the Minister of the Interior spoke about the increase in homicides compared to 2020 and 2021, he stated that the ministry does not have the “necessary prior information” to prevent deaths as a result of drug disputes.
“Us we cannot predict because we do not have enough prior information to prevent such murders. When there is debts between them and territorial disputes it is very difficult to foresee and that is what is happening to us today“, said the minister on September 13. He also called for coordinating actions with other ministries.
At the press conference, a journalist asked Heber if there was “lack” of intelligence in the Police, to which the minister replied: “There is so much intelligence that we have identified 45 organizations that were previously unknown.”
The latest report from the National Observatory of Violence and Crime of the Ministry of the Interior – which dealt with homicide figures up to and including June – warns that settling accounts is the reason for 50% of violent deaths. the other 50% it is distributed among those that have an unknown motive, spontaneous altercations, domestic violence, femicides, those derived from robberies and hijackings, and those that have other motives.
In this sense, in the program Así nos va (radio Carve), Undersecretary Guillermo Maciel stated that it is also difficult to prevent those homicides that are the product of domestic violence. “It is very difficult to foresee that a father is going to get up and kill his two children,” he said, referring to a case that occurred in April this year, when a father who everyone described as a good man and caring for his children 8 and 9 years old, he got up and instead of taking them to school, he killed them. He was found guilty and is awaiting trial.
