The senator from the front Charles Carrera (MPP) accused the Home Office of carrying out a “crude attempt” to “disguise reality” when making a “misleading analysis“of the evolution of the crime figures published this Monday.
“Again (Luis Alberto) Heber returns to make a presentation on the data in a whimsical way and mocking people”, said the legislator in an analysis that he released this Tuesday through social networks. “Reality has prevailed and it is now impossible for him to say that homicides are going down,” said Carrera, who questions that now, to “minimize” that reality, the ministry choose to compare only the third quarter of each year. In his vision, if the portfolio wanted to show a real trend in the behavior of crimes, it should show series of months or quarters. “He didn’t,” she lamented.
According to the analysis of Carrera – former Director General of the Interior between 2010 and 2017 – if the data had been presented in this way, it could have been seen that the quarters of 2020 and 2021, while the restrictions on activity were in force due to the health emergency, there was a drop in the number of homicides, which went from 101 in the first three months of 2020 to 63 crimes in the second quarter of last year. However, he points out, as of July 2021, with the gradual return to activities, the murders also increased, and “with a violence never seen before in the country.”
Thus, he assured, between July and September of last year, 81 homicides were registered, which were 86 in the last quarter of 2021 and reached 100 cases in the first quarter of this year. Between April and June there were 89 and between July and September 94 cases.
“Following Heber’s reasoning,” said Carrera, if a strict comparison is made with the same periods – the first nine months of each year – “it becomes clear” that 2022 has been “the worst year” in the country’s history if 2018 is excepted, the first to enter into force of the new Criminal Procedure Code (CPP).
Thus, between January and September of this year, 283 homicides were registered, 32.24% more than in the same period of 2021 and 11.6% below 2018. Carrera compares the years prior to the implementation of the CPP and points out that this year there was an increase of 40.8% compared to 2018, 37% compared to 2016 and 27.5% compared to 2015.
The Frente Amplio senator appeals to the Interior figures themselves to indicate that in the last rolling year –from October to October– there were 378 homicides. “This government has accustomed us to having more than one homicide per day,” questioned. Carrera recalled in turn that the Attorney General’s Office has had differences with the figures disclosed by the ministry. The legislator pointed to a recent request for reports, in which the Public Ministry reported four more cases in the first half of this year than the Interior Ministry.
Doubtful deaths and a “new class” of murdered
Carrera alluded in his report to the “worrying and significant increase” in deaths officially classified as “dubious” which, he pointed out, are not included in the official statistics of the Ministry. According to the senator, last year was a record at the official level: 171 unclarified cases.
According to the senator, the number of doubtful deaths maintained an average of 80 cases per year between 2014 and 2019, to reach 159 in 2020 and 171 last year. Today, he reaffirmed, there is a doubtful death for every confirmed homicide.
For Carrera, another fact that demonstrates the “lack of direction” in the Ministry of the Interior is the change in justifications for the homicides. “Before it was said that they increased because people with a criminal record were murdered,” he recalled. Now, she pointed out, it is said that they occur between people with a criminal record “and/or police notes.”
“Heber created a new class of murdered people”, questioned the senator. Something, he maintained, unspeakable for a minister of state. “The data sounds more like justifying an argument that saves the information provided by President Luis Lacalle Pou,” he said, when in a press conference the president affirmed that 75% of the homicides were due to confrontations.
In his analysis, Carrera stressed that the current authorities not only exceeded their own records, but that so far in 2022 they have already exceeded the homicides that occurred between January and October 2019 (322 vs. 325 vs. 314 cases).
The senator allowed himself to doubt the reliability of the data on other crimes presented this Monday. There he recalled that the Prosecutor’s Office is investigating a possible manipulation of complaints by the Durazno Police. “It is not clear that the complaints uploaded to the Public Security Management System (SGSP) reflect what is happening in Uruguay in terms of public security,” he concluded. “The official figures leave many doubts.”
