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Uruguay’s missing women may have been trafficked. The state doesn’t care [1]
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Date: 2023-07
In the vacuum of proper police and prosecutorial work, mothers like Nancy Baladán are left to puzzle over their daughters’ fates – were they abducted, or ensnared in wider networks of sex or drug traffickers, or did they met a quieter, simple death?
“I keep going out. Today and always. I will keep looking, because, in short, if I don’t keep looking for her, they’re not going to look,” she said.
Absent persons department
Uruguay boasts a stable democracy and strong legal codes in a region where both are rare. The police are trusted by 73% of the population, and the country’s crime prevention programme, adopted in 2016, has been internationally recognised.
But this South American country is also home to a flourishing underworld of sex and drug trafficking – and young women, especially those from low-income or vulnerable backgrounds, are easily exploited by these criminal gangs.
And according to the families of missing women, lawyers and women’s rights and welfare advocates, the police routinely ignore these vulnerable people rather than proactively defending their safety – or spending time trying to discover their fate. And the government’s registry of absent persons does not add clarity or efficiency to such cases; rather, it obfuscates the scope of the problem in Uruguay.
The interior ministry did not respond to openDemocracy's repeated requests for information. Finally, after a six-month wait, in December 2022, we were allowed to interview Rodriguez. The police building where he works was once a site of espionage and torture during the Uruguayan dictatorship.
Rodríguez, a tidy, close-shaven man wearing cologne and a grey jacket and trousers, was the only high-ranking law enforcement official to agree to speak to openDemocracy about the issue of missing women.
He answered questions rapidly, occasionally cutting off our questions. He invited a second officer, María Noelia Ordeig from the absent persons department, to provide data on the magnitude of the problem.
But neither she nor anyone else could confirm how many of the cases on the absent persons registry were duplicate entries (“repeaters”, or people who go missing more than once in the department’s terminology) or how often and thoroughly the registry is updated.
Police guidelines established in 2020 standardised the procedure for reporting missing people. How and whether cases are followed up often stems from the way these standardised forms are filled in.
When a report is filed by someone who can provide the police with detailed information about the missing person’s appearance and habits, the report is categorised as that of an “absent person”, and automatically referred to the absent persons department for investigation.
But the bar is high, and when reported cases are less detailed, they are more likely to be classified by police as “runaways” or some other less serious category. Since being ‘absent’ is not itself a crime, a decision on whether an absence is potentially criminally linked is also key to whether it reaches the prosecutor’s office.
Between 2020 and 2022, the absent persons department received 14,402 reports of missing people, of whom 6,228 were classified as “absent persons”, according to data provided by the department to openDemocracy in June 2023. (In the region, the word ‘disappearance’ is more frequently used for political dissidents detained and disappeared during the country’s dictatorship from 1973 to 1985.)
The department said that 99.5% of all cases had been solved, and that none of the “absent persons” cases were linked to sex trafficking.
But women’s rights organisations and support groups for survivors of sex trafficking say these official numbers are inaccurate and wildly understate the dangers facing women, especially those who have been caught in the thriving criminal underworld. As openDemocracy’s investigation shows, a significant number of women officially listed as missing or absent did have connections to drug sellers, or to men suspected or convicted of sexually abusing them or other women.
A fundamental reason for the lack of clarity over the role sex or drug trafficking plays in the fate of Uruguay’s missing women is that neither prosecutors nor police are looking for the evidence.
“The state response to these cases is an absolute disaster,” said Andrea Tuana, director of the advocacy and outreach group El Paso, which delivers government-funded services for trafficking victims in Uruguay. “This is not a priority; it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t exist.”
According to the data provided to openDemocracy, the cases of 48 people who went missing more than a decade ago remain unsolved. Among them is Silvia Fregueiro, who vanished in 1994.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/uruguay-missing-women-sexual-trafficking-police-failure/
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