Robberies, suspicious movements, fights, someone who comes to ask for coins, dirty sidewalks. Around the drug mouths that plague downtown Montevideo, there are no divided positions regarding the need to take action on the matter, although the complex reality requires much less agile mechanisms than the neighbors would like.
The recent emptying and definitive closure of a building in Canelones y Convencion – in the Barrio Sur district – revealed the complicated logistics behind the dismantling of drug mouths, after several months of coexistence problems.
In this structure of four registers inhabited by five families, not only did the sale of drugs have to be dismantled, but some three families had to be rehoused through rent subsidies for two years. The director of Social Development of the Montevideo City Council (IM), Mercedes Clara, interceded in person in the case to find a solution, until the last occupants withdrew on October 20.
The approach to a much broader and more cumbersome reality has the Ministry of the Interior as its spearhead. “Many times the neighbors are upset because they believe that there was no action by the Police”, recognized the director of Coexistence of the portfolio, Santiago González.
“But to close a mouth if there is a complaint, you have to work with the Prosecutor’s Office, which asks you for a lot of data and evidence. You have to get a search warrant with a judge. You have to find it with the drug, take it to formalize it with everything whatever you have. In that place he opens his mouth again for an acquaintance. For the people that mouth was not closed, but the reality is that we have almost 2,000 neutralized “, he assured The Observer in a national measurement.
The problem led to several portfolios sitting at the same table in June, from González and Mario D’Elía, Montevideo Police Chief, to the then Court Deputy Prosecutor, Juan Gómez, the Minister of Housing, Irene Moreira and the Undersecretary Tabaré Hackenbruch. The security portfolio transmitted in that instance the Need for “oiled” mechanisms to find housing solutions for those specific cases in which the closure of a mouth requires rehousing families or occupants who live with this situation without being involved.
This dilemma is especially true of skeletons and abandoned buildings with occupations. At the beginning of this period there was a meeting between the Ministry of the Interior and the IM to “make clear the competences of each one,” he told The Observer the director of the Community Coexistence Service, Facundo Pérez.
The reference of the departmental inspectors pointed out that the commune can go to the place -with police escort- at the indication of the portfolio, and verify two possibilities: that the occupied facilities have large debts (they are private property), which makes it possible to consider an expropriation –a mechanism that can take a long time–, or the collapse or uninhabitable risk assessment of the place before giving way to Firefighters for an eventual walling.
In July, on the other hand, the Executive Power signed a decree to “immediately” block off the accesses to buildings for which the portfolio has already declared “danger of loss or risk of collapse.”
Santiago González pointed out that Interior can ask the commune to track down the owner of the construction, either to find another destination for the abandoned farm or to be able to wall it up. Asked why houses tend to be neglected after having closed a mouth, he replied: “Because there is no complaint (from an owner). There is no one who says: ‘Yes, cover it'”He stated, and added that many cases consist of properties for rent whose owners are not aware of the situation of their facilities. “The issue is to get the owner to file a complaint”, he raised.
However, the participation of the IM for these purposes “is not common,” and they take place “every two or three months,” said the director of the commune. For his part, the head of the Ministry of the Interior estimated that in the period they have been around eight farms “100% walled up” in the jurisdiction of Operational Zone I, which brings together downtown neighborhoods of the capital. From the portfolio they recognize the Old City as one of the hottest spots.
“When the mouth opens, it generates a series of crimes around it that we want to combat”, assured the hierarch. The current administration calls for the creation of departmental anti-drug brigades in Montevideo and Canelones, to decentralize a task that previously fell to the General Directorate for the Repression of Illicit Drug Trafficking and to deal with micro-trafficking.
In another order, González highlights the constitutional prohibition of conducting night raids as “the most important of all limitations” to confront drug mouths that “work mostly at night.” It is one of the postulates of the late minister Jorge Larrañaga when promoting the reform ‘Living without fear’, an idea taken up – although without major advances – by the current leader Luis Alberto Heber.
