This Friday, June 10, Sanguinetti published an opinion note in the Friday Mail entitled: “Surrealism and post-truth”, in which he refers to crimes in Uruguay.
The former president mentions the recent session of the Senate in which, at the request of the Broad Front, the Minister of the Interior, Luis Alberto Heber, appeared to refer to the security policy. He said that this is “a finished expression of a management, normally quite effective, of what is usually called ‘post-truth’, because without saying something clearly false, everything annoying is hidden and persistently installed in a fictional territory to build a ‘ imaginary story”.
Sanguinetti recalled that during the parliamentary session, the FA requested a plan for the fight against drug trafficking and “was informed in the session, publicly and even secretly, of the lines of police action, even in its greatest details.” He questioned that the FA “also left the session repeating that there was no plan.”
“Anyone would believe that, good or bad, they had a great plan and it turns out that former Prosecutor Jorge Díaz, in 2019 (Diario El País, August 22), emphatically stated that there had been no plan for a decade,” he quoted the former head of state.
He said: “They handed over the country in the midst of a security crisis never seen before, with 15 years in which the number of crimes invariably grew, in each period. We have said it and we repeat it: they started with 7,000 robberies and ended with 30,000. Now there are 24 thousand. There are many, but unquestionably less”.
“We have been down for two years in a row, after 15 in constant growth. The same occurs with theft (19.9% less), cattle rustling (36.4%) and even homicides, which are naturally unpredictable and respond to complex realities. Even there, too, the facts are clear: 393 in 2019, 300 last year, that is, 23% less,” he detailed.
He acknowledged: “Unfortunately homicides increased: 92, when in 2019 there had been 72. But if we go back, the first quarter of 2020, the last of the front government before handing over, the same figure was recorded.” Sanguinetti questioned that in the month of May, “invoked with a dramatic hollow voice, there were 37, a bad result without a doubt but the same as in May 2019. Where is the escalation then? Post-truth thus appeals to emotion, ‘we are at a critical moment’”.
He said that when it is explained that the homicides “are related to the world of crime, that of those 101 only 4 were people without criminal records, then the retrospective reproach is skipped: ‘it is the same explanation given by the previous government and now used by the current ‘. Nothing to see: today an unquestionable reality is being described, no one takes refuge in the idea that the deaths of drug traffickers are second-rate deaths, as was the case then, and of course they are fighting against a scourge that they allowed to grow for not confronting it rigorously when It was an incipient phenomenon.
“They handed the country over to drug traffickers and with Uruguay marked on the world map of organized crime,” Sanguinetti said in his opinion column.
special brigades
On the other hand, he said that during the parliamentary debate, the opposition legislators could not explain why they suppressed the special brigades to combat drug trafficking in Montevideo and Canelones, where most of the homicides are centered.
“That is conclusive proof that they misfocused the issue, because their theory was that you shouldn’t go after the small mouths, but the big distributors and in the end it turned out that they couldn’t with one or the other,” he criticized.
For Sanguinetti, “the failures of the previous regime set up a theatrical stage to try to exorcise their disaster, appealing to surreal images.”
Hard
In any case, he acknowledged that reversing the situation is very difficult. “The population linked to crime is too many and the majority never knew the life of work. If at the end of this period of government, it was possible to stop the progress that crime showed year after year in the last 15, starting at least one reduction process; and if international drug trafficking has been limited internally and displaced internationally, we must recognize the merit achieved. That is the reasonable goal that would qualify as a success.”
