Bus hijacking in Montevideo exposes serious failures in Uruguayan police
Supporters of Club Cerro forcibly took a bus for over 40 minutes without police response. The incident reopens debate over the operational crisis at the National Police.
Impunity in motion: the bus hijacking that police could not stop
On Sunday 9 August, supporters of Club Cerro from Montevideo hijacked at gunpoint a public transport bus on line 306, operated by UCOT, and drove it for over 40 minutes through the capital's main avenues without any authorities intervening. According to an article on elecodigital.com.uy by columnist Fernando Gil Díaz, the episode was not an isolated anomaly, but the most recent expression of a pattern of institutional absence that has accumulated over years.
The driver was forced to drive without stopping, running red lights, escorted by two motorcycles ahead and a car closing the procession behind. The convoy reached the Belloni interchange, where the supporters disembarked and made their way without obstruction to Danubio stadium.
Without police, without traffic control, without 911 response
The absence was not exclusive to the police. The Mobility Centre of the Montevideo Municipality, which has its own network of cameras, likewise failed to detect the accumulation of traffic violations being committed by the vehicle in real time. Municipal traffic inspectors did not act either.
The call to 911 produced no result either. The dispatcher for the company had been alerted to the irregular situation the driver was experiencing, but no operational deployment materialised. According to Gil Díaz, who says he spent a decade in the Interior Ministry and knows the procedures applicable to situations of that kind, the inaction is inexplicable: not only during the over 40 minutes that the journey lasted, but during the entire time of the football match that followed, a period more than sufficient to carry out some intervention.
A precedent that was no exception
The columnist draws a direct line between this episode and a previous incident at the Campeón del Siglo stadium, during a match between Peñarol and Cerro. On that occasion, some 200 supporters of the visiting team destroyed tribuna installations and threw fragments of tiles from the vandalised bathrooms. A woman was injured in the head with lesions that could have been fatal. The police response, as Gil Díaz describes it, not only did not merit recognition: the supporters were allowed to leave before the local fans, without being detained or made available to the Public Prosecutor.
In the case of the bus, those involved were far fewer—no more than 50, the author estimates—but they achieved the same result: total impunity. The passengers on the vehicle, unrelated to the conflict, were also victims of the episode.
The "liberated zone" as hypothesis
Gil Díaz does not rule out the existence of a hidden hand behind these facts. The repetition of patterns, the presence of recurring protagonists and football as a common denominator strike him as noteworthy, particularly in a context of changes in the leadership of the Montevideo Police Department, the largest jurisdiction of the National Police.
The broader picture drawn by the columnist includes cameras that are not monitored in real time, shortage of night-time patrols, homicides on an upward curve and inadequate attention to citizens' complaints. He attributes the origin of this situation to management decisions made by the administration preceding that of Eduardo Bonomi—which, according to his account, dismantled a police professionalisation process, made resources precarious and placed in leadership positions officials who had been displaced precisely during the Bonomi administration.
The legacy that cannot be consulted
Gil Díaz devotes part of his analysis to pointing out that today it is impossible to access the historical information portal that was built by the Bonomi administration in the Interior Ministry. That archive, which he describes as irrefutable proof of the work carried out, is not available. For the columnist, that is not a minor point: those who succeeded Bonomi built on those foundations, he argues, even if they do not acknowledge it.
The quote he attributes to former police chief Julio Guarteche sums up the paradox: the finest procedures and results can be negated by a single poor action.
Corruption as a variable
The text does not shy away from the word corruption. Gil Díaz acknowledges the existence of committed and professional police officers—many of whom he says he knows personally—but warns that corruption functions as a scourge that spreads and undermines organisations from within. He states there was an administration that fought that problem head on, and that today that struggle appears buried.
The columnist closes with a warning about the institutional climate: if for five years real-time camera monitoring was abandoned, recovering that operational capacity is not automatic. The gaps that leaves open, he concludes, are what allow impunity to take root in a society that still resists accepting the diagnosis of a failed state.
Source: Google News UY — Crime