Carlos Piedra and the Dispute Over His Dismissal in Uruguay

Corporal Piedra
Union Protections, Discipline and Political Obedience in Uruguay’s Republican Guard
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

One must credit the governing left with enviable artistic creativity: it has managed to make the most enlightened progressivism revive, with a smile on its face and a human-rights pin on its lapel, the stalest, most vertical and most servile manual of blind discipline.
Picture the scene: a minister —whose only blackness lies in the fate he seems to promise the troops and in the subtle irony of his surname— takes office under the banner of renewed transparency, only to end up carrying out a purge worthy of a Soviet handbook against none other than the president of the Republican Guard’s union.
It is an absolute masterpiece of Uruguayan magical realism: a government that never tires of praising union freedom decides, with elegant bureaucratic cruelty, to administratively kick out a police officer for the appalling and unforgivable crime of wanting to return home alive —and wanting the same for his colleagues.
Because, of course, Corporal Carlos Piedra’s cardinal sin, as president of the Republican Guard Police Union, was not breaking the criminal code, but committing the worst imaginable heresy in public service: telling the truth out loud.
What monumental disrespect from this officer, who had the audacity to say that the minister has not the slightest idea about public security, and that trying to solve drug trafficking by parking armored vehicles as decoration in “hot zones” while weapons cross the border as if they owned the place is like trying to put out a forest fire with a carnival spray bottle.
What outrageous insolence!
How dare a mere subordinate place the physical safety of his colleagues above the fragile emotional aesthetics of senior officials sitting in air-conditioned offices?

Union protections, depending on who invokes them

Naturally, this is where the sacred theory of “union protections” becomes the comedy sketch of the year.
In the parallel universe of local progressivism, those protections are a mystical, sacred and indestructible shield… provided the beneficiary waves the party flag, blocks an avenue for ideologically approved reasons, or belongs to the select club of unions friendly to the Cuban regime.
But let the unionist wear a field uniform and dare to mutter against a left-wing official, and those protections evaporate faster than ice cream on a sidewalk at noon in January.
It becomes crystal clear that partisan obedience always —but always— weighs a thousand times more than any union protection: if you are one of “our” unionists, you have carte blanche to stage wild strikes, threaten the entire country, occupy public spaces and walk away untouched; but if you are a police officer defending the lives of your troops while criticizing incompetence above, the full weight of disciplinary proceedings comes down on you with the fury of an ideological inquisition.

The silence of the PIT-CNT

Meanwhile, the PIT-CNT watches this summary execution with the moving dignity of a pillar of salt, trapped in a mystical crisis of international proportions: should it defend the persecuted comrade, or stare fixedly at the horizon so as not to inconvenience the fellow minister?
The labor federation’s complicit silence is so loud it sounds like a symphony of hypocrisy.

The disciplinary lesson

At the end of the day, Carlos Piedra’s sudden dismissal, for the omission of his duty to keep his mouth shut and let the member be “cooked,” leaves an unbeatable pedagogical lesson for the rest of the force: at the ministry one may speak about absolutely everything, except the incompetence of the chiefs.
Even though every day the news broadcasts shamelessly expose that incompetence through the day’s latest “settling of scores.”
And if you are going to have the audacity to preside over a police union under a left-wing administration, remember that the sacred theory of union rights always comes with a biblical-sized asterisk reading: “Applicable exclusively to comrades with their ideological membership card duly stamped; police officers who dare to think, complain or survive are entitled to administrative ostracism with a strictly Negro future.”
The ILO cries out: “Savages, hands off the unionist!” And the labor minister hides behind the portrait of “Pepe” D’Elía.

Selective union freedom
Police hierarchy and discipline
Institutional political obedience

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