The President of the Republic, Luis Lacalle Pou, announced that he will spend Christmas with the contingent of Uruguayan soldiers deployed in the Congo on a peace mission in this complex country in central Africa.
The news broke through the press on Wednesday, sparking a stir among those who celebrate and praise the trip and among those who criticize it as populism. Lacalle will be accompanied by the Minister of Defense, Javier García.
In the Congo there are 203 uniformed Army and Air Force, attached to the United Nations peacekeeping missions. Both the president and the minister and other members of the delegation are already being vaccinated against a series of diseases currently active in the area.
Questioned missions
The Uruguayan Armed Forces are in the midst of a series of questions for alleged sexual abuse in Haiti, committed by Uruguayan military personnel that have resulted in young pregnant women who were raped and who were left abandoned with children.
In 2019, the American newspaper Washington Post had published an extensive investigation in which it emerged that even teenagers had been abused in exchange for small amounts of money or food, and that many of them ended up pregnant. Although the Haitian Justice sentenced dozens of Uruguayan troops to pay maintenance, the DNA tests are not mandatory and, at the institutional level, the Ministry of National Defense itself did not accept the judicial decisions.
In interviews conducted, 265 people told horrifying stories of children sired by UN personnel, highlighting a trend of coercion and abuse of power that left girls as young as 11 in charge of babies they have to raise in extreme conditions. poverty.
Back in Africa, an investigation ordered in 2019 The UN itself found at least 83 alleged violations committed by members of the peacekeepers, many of them Congolese, but also of other nationalities. This is only an approximation, as survivors are often reluctant to come forward out of embarrassment or fear.
Many women were forced to have sex without a condom, several had children, and others were forced to have an abortion. The psychosocial impacts and stigmatization of affected women ruined families forever, several human rights organizations denounced.
The WHO has tried to prevent this from happening, tightening controls after the findings and criticisms, but it continues to be questioned for deploying troops and unskilled personnel and for spending resources on minimizing complaints or creating bureaucratic obstacles for victims to report. .
