Disheveled and with a grown beard. It’s not a common look for an Army officer. But Lieutenant Nelson Duarte says he can afford it because he doesn’t have to show up for work: they pay his salary and ask him to stay at his house.
Duarte reports to the National Directorate of Border Crossings, but the operator does not know him. “No lieutenant Duarte works here,” she affirms emphatically.
The deputy director of Border Crossings, Colonel Néstor González, did not respond when asked about the officer’s functional situation. “I’m not dealing with that issue, it is in the ministerial sphere,” he said.
Minister Javier García did not respond to the queries that were made to him.
On his cell phone, Duarte keeps several audio and text messages in which his superiors tell him not to go to work. He has asked –unsuccessfully- that they explain or justify that decision, or that they allow him to return to his position. “The director is not going to make any order in writing, he simply goes and waits for order there at your house,” says an audio that a captain sent him.
The situation transcends the mere anecdote. Duarte has made complaints of serious irregularities within the Army. Some have already been proven true and others are the subject of a delayed administrative investigation that began in 2021 and of which the results are not yet known.
Officer Nelson Duarte
Meanwhile, the lieutenant has suffered one transfer after another and endless sanctions and humiliations, the latest of which is paying him to stay at home.
The Army, moreover, has been trying for months to transfer him to mandatory retirement, but has not been able to do so due to the officer’s appeals and the process that the legal department of the Ministry of National Defense has given them.
beer and whiskey
The origin of this situation dates back to 2014, when Duarte denounced a series of irregularities that occurred in the unit where he reviewed.
His accusation gave rise to a voluminous administrative investigation that only concluded in 2020 and The Observer made public in 2022. There it was confirmed that everything denounced was true. Soldiers had worked, at least between 2000 and 2016, installing swimming pools for a private companywithout the existence of any agreement that enabled it.
It was also confirmed that the military had brought contraband whiskey from Chuy in Army vehicles and that carpentry work was being done for a colonel’s company.
However, except for a couple of minor sanctions, those responsible for these “irregularities” were not punished. Nor was the case brought to justice.
Instead, Duarte’s professional life was forever changed. He never got a promotion anymore. He has been a lieutenant for twelve years.
In 2021 Duarte filed a second complaint, gathering various episodes that he had to witness and documented with videos and photos.
According to his account, it all began in February 2020. He was then serving in the Army Logistics Support Command. One morning he saw a military truck arrive and began unloading cases of beer and whiskey.
According to his account, the truck came from Chuy: “They collected the merchandise in the Santa Teresa park and then transported it to Montevideo. They unloaded it at the Logistics Support Command, at the door of the office of a general, the unit commander. The Army cannot tell me that it was unaware. Two colonels came in the same vehicle that came with that merchandise.
Over time, he documented the unloading of other shipments: soda sleeves, cases of alcoholic beverages. On occasions, packages were made that later other soldiers would go there to buy.
In September 2021 he filed a complaint. In November he was summoned to testify for the first time.
Photos and videos
Duarte runs a video on his computer. It’s a movie taken from Logistics Command’s own security system. It is one of the proofs of him.
“Here you can see how 65 boxes of Heineken beer and boxes of whiskey go down. Even if they say they bought it on the street, the military vehicle isn’t there to be transporting beer. I appear in the film because I left my office and asked them what they were doing, because I didn’t want there to be any doubt that I was going to denounce him, because that couldn’t be. And there you can see how the colonel who received the merchandise and the payment comes out ”.
According to Duarte, that shipment was later removed by an officer who said he was organizing a family party.
In another film, you can see cases of soft drinks and Glacier beer inside what, he says, is the Command.
Duarte also denounced other irregularities: the delivery of Army fuel to the owner of a service station, the distribution of gasoline vouchers among officers and the sale of unused tires from the force to individuals.
More than a dozen videos and photos were attached in support.
However, until now it is impossible to know if the accusations were proven true, as was the case with the previous file from 2014.
Neither Duarte nor his lawyer –who is his wife- have managed to be notified of the result of that investigation.
The Observer requested the file through access to public information, without having received it for the moment.
Minister García did not respond to messages sent with questions about the case.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Duarte’s functional career in the Army ended up in ruins.
“The instructor of the administrative investigation that the Ministry decided was General Marcelo Pose, who was the accused. After that, in fact I was separated from the public function”, maintains the officer, surrounded by huge piles of papers. They are his claims for promotion, the negative answers, his appeals, the authenticated photocopies of his file.
In another room, Natalia Martínez, his wife and lawyer, is also working on the case.
They are not optimistic.
In the last few hours, Martínez received an email from Colonel Gustavo Figueredo, General Director of Human Resources at the Ministry of National Defense, notifying her that Duarte will be subject to mandatory retirement.
This is what the General Command of the Army has been seeking for months, appealing to article 195 of the Organic Law of the Army, which establishes that this occurs with officers who, in the same grade, are qualified twice as “deficient.” In this case it would be the years 2017 and 2018.
Until now, the legal office of the Ministry of Defense had responded that this could not be done until the appeals that Duarte has made regarding his qualifications are substantiated, but Figueredo’s email seems to close the case.
The lieutenant accuses the Army of falsifying documents to force his retirement. He cites the case of an annual qualification in which the note of “good” corresponded, the superior stamped it “regular” and the Ministry of National Defense was raised “deficient”.
“I filed a complaint for falsifying my qualifications in 2017. As a result of my complaint, the Ministry of Defense sent a letter to the Army, which responded that everything is in accordance with the law. How can I defend myself? They justify themselves by saying that my behavior was ‘deplorable’, but a judgment of this type has to have some support. What were the facts that support that judgment? They do not exist”.
He also maintains that he has been notified of his qualifications after they have been sent to the Defense Ministry, taking away his legal right to notify himself in time and appeal.
In addition, Duarte affirms that his file has been adulterated in order to justify his low grades and his mandatory retirement.
“They have falsified documentation, they made a CD digitizing my file, my file, and they suppressed pages. When my promotion is being studied, the Ministry of Defense asks the Army for information on my file, the Command sends it adulterated. I can prove it with the authenticated copy of my file and with the digital copy that they sent. And sheet by sheet I can tell where it’s forged. I told the Ministry it’s fake. The Ministry sends a letter to the command and the command says no, in no way, that everything is adjusted to the law and that I am the one lying. It is a quixotic fight”.
“Don’t come anymore”
When one inquires about Duarte in the Army and the Ministry of National Defense, the first response is usually that he is a “problematic” officer.
An Army source said that Duarte was expelled from the Military School for misconduct and then readmitted, but the lieutenant produced an official document from that institution stating that the discharge was “at his request” and then he himself decided to re-enter.
When his first complaint, later verified as true, the first reaction of his superiors was to sanction him.
The commander of the 1st Infantry Brigade, Colonel Víctor Grande, to whom the complaint was directed, imposed a ten-day prison term for “taking totally improper powers when initiating investigations into alleged irregularities.”
In that file, all the previous offenses that Duarte had committed emerged: the lieutenant had been punished for taking a soldier to carry out a private pruning job and once he had borrowed a ladder and other tools, and when he returned them some were missing ( a plumb line and an extension, according to Duarte). He had also done repairs at his home while he was on medical leave.
Asked about Duarte’s current situation, the Army spokesman, Colonel Alejandro Alcántara, said that he could not report on it since Border Crossing does not depend on force. He denied that the move to mandatory retirement has been decided and pointed out that the process will surely take a long time.
Duarte decided to go out and speak to the press because he is desperate. “I no longer know what to say to my children when they ask me why I stay home from work.”
At times, he feels that he is facing a machine much more powerful than him, but he is not willing to give up.
“Within the institution, the message is that if you turn a blind eye, you ascend and go forward. If you deviate and denounce me, I will execute you. The entire weight of the institution falls on you and they cut you off. Unfortunately, in this institution, the sin is being honest.”
