The senator for the National Party, Gustavo Penadés, described the year 2022 as “good” for the government of Luis Lacalle Pou, looking back at the LUC referendum, which he understands was a “great victory.” In this conversation with the newspaper The countrysaid that the security strategy was “successful”, looking in the opposite direction to reality: in 2022, there were 27.3% more homicides than in 2021, and on October 10, 2022, those of the previous year had already been reached .
“There, the most important thing of all is the intention of the Ministry of the Interior to seek a policy of dialogue, because here I believe that we have not taken due account of the fact that what we are facing in the war against drug trafficking far exceeds what a party or a administration can do,” he said.
About the drug trafficker cases Sebastian Marset (to whom the government of Luis Lacalle Pou granted him a passport that helped him escape from a jail in Dubai) and Alexander Astesiano (former head of presidential custody, who allegedly sold false passports from the Executive Tower), Penadés asserted: “The problem is that we are facing a very delicate communication situation. Because the Broad Front found in the issues of marset Y Asthesian two elements with which they can hit us generating sensationalism and that has made us lose time in attending to other government emergencies. Let’s recognize that this situation fell from above to the Broad Front and that it was the product of government actions on the Marset issue, and of having had the wrong person in the wrong place on the Astesiano issue.”
When the journalist Joaquín Silva asked him if he would request the resignation of the ministers, if he were in the opposition, he replied: “Without a doubt, yes. The issue is not in graduation. It’s in the category. In other words, they have the right to demand political responsibilities. The issue is how it is done, what arguments are used and what line should not be crossed. But we cannot demand less severity when we were very severe while in opposition. I think with another category, but just as severe.
