Chronicle of a Charrúa Delusion

When the wet dream collides with reality (or with the lack of it)

CHRONICLE OF A CHARRÚA DELUSION

When the wet dream collides with reality (or with the lack of it)

By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

One has to admit that the average Uruguayan’s imagination knows no limits, especially when it meets that endearing national habit of believing that complex problems can be solved by moving an office around or by the arrival of a foreign messiah.

Let us enter, for a moment, the scene of our citizen on the analyst’s couch, a thermos under his arm, half asleep from exhaustion after an overdose of newscasts, sweating as he explains the definitive epiphany to the psychologist.

The resignation that would shake the “Mujica” leadership-production center, the Executive Tower and the carnival troupes:

It all begins with the climax of the patient’s reverie: the Minister of the Interior resigns.

And this is not a ceremonial resignation, one of those submitted in order to take over at an autonomous agency, become a substitute ambassador to Palestine, or run for the presidency of Peñarol. No. He resigns, cornered by a landscape worthy of a dystopian film:

A prison system that no longer merely houses inmates but competes directly with the national census, brushing against 17,000 prisoners.

An epidemic of specialized contract killings that is terrifying (almost ten a day, according to the feverish hyperbole of the dreaming patient).

Entire neighborhoods where the State enters only in an armored helicopter, afraid of drones and narco-pigeons.

And the cherry on top: Uruguayan football suspended indefinitely, because not even the classics in the “C”, involving Messi and Suárez’s team, can be played with spectators anymore, since the barras bravas have turned into rival drug-trafficking franchises fighting over territory.

Faced with this biblical collapse, where social security and public security seem to merge into a single abyss of neglect, the minister politically sacrifices himself and, defeated, leaves the portfolio vacant.

The Salvadoran lifebuoy: “Bring in Bukele’s VP”

But this is where the wet dream enters its purest psychedelic phase. Desperate in the face of public clamor – the kind expressed mainly through indignant WhatsApp chains and tweets or X posts at three in the morning – the President of the Republic makes a bold decision: to call El Salvador.

For what?

To offer the ministry to none other than Nayib Bukele’s vice president, Félix Ulloa – assuming, within this delusion, that the respected constitutional lawyer and vice president, known for the legal engineering of the Salvadoran regime and formerly of the left, moves to the land of candombe to put on the overalls of an executive minister).

The idea is simple, brilliant and completely absurd, as interpreted by journalists who have not yet landed public-sector jobs: import Central American hard-line policy into the homeland of institutional legality, parliamentary privileges and useless investigative commissions.

Imagine the scene, doctor, in the imposing glass corridors of the Executive Tower: the presidential envoy waiting at the entrance with a sign saying “Bukele’s VP, my friend, at least I’m with you”, while police unions, public-sector unions, constitutional scholars of every school and age, and half the political spectrum prepare to call a general strike before the plane even touches the runway.

Mr. Ulloa’s “optimal” measures and the collapse in the neighborhoods

The moment he takes office, the brand-new foreign minister rolls out his manual of corrective measures with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker and the subtlety of a crawler tractor:

Permanent State of Exception and No Whining: Constitutional guarantees under Article 31 are suspended in half a dozen settlements. The classic “night raid” becomes a routine three-in-the-morning procedure, carried out by armored vehicles that smash through footbridges and shacks.

The express mega-prison in the north: Faced with 17,000 overcrowded prisoners, construction is decreed, within sixty days, of a “Charrúa CECOT” in the middle of nowhere in Tacuarembó, where inmates wear identical sky-blue jumpsuits, black trousers and white socks, sleep on concrete bunks with a self-identified mattress, and the concept of a “conjugal visit” becomes an urban legend.

Forced and productive labor: The dogma that “he who does not work, does not eat” (or rest) is implemented. All prisoners are organized into compulsory intensive-production brigades: from making paving stones and building public works to massive textile workshops, with the aim of fully self-financing the cost of their confinement and providing earnings and food supplies to their own families outside the prison, wiping out state costs and the criminal side jobs linked to authorizations to visit the dentist.

Tactical military cordons: Neighborhoods taken over by drug trafficking – those where buses cut their routes short and ambulances enter under heavily armed escort – are surrounded by barbed wire and Army rings. Nobody enters or leaves without a QR code, a body search and 37 compulsory push-ups in the rain.

The effect in the neighborhoods?

The impact is immediate and produces two whole libraries of opinion in the Uruguayan’s feverish dream: on the one hand, serious street crime and contract-killer shootouts fall to zero in the besieged zones, because local drug traffickers – accustomed to negotiating with guarantee-minded prosecutors and evaporating criminal codes – are thrown off balance by squads that do not ask for ID before acting and forcing them face-down on the ground.

On the other hand, the social reaction reaches atomic proportions: honest residents who wanted security suddenly find tanks blocking their way to the street market, the neighborhood corner shop turned into a military checkpoint, and human-rights organizations entering a coma with continuous convulsions. Everyone shouts euphorically: “Long live the gorillas.”

The crack-paste dealing spots close down and put up a sign: This is not fair.

The “comrade” protest roadblocks of the formal narco economy bring the Interbalnearia highway to a standstill in the middle of January, while prisoners’ families split between thanking them for the food parcels sent from prison and denouncing the Fordist slavery regime (just in case it does not last). Many take the opportunity to farm aura.

Waking from the fantastic coma

Of course, the dream ends abruptly when the phone alarm goes off warning that “Toto”, the family’s absurdly expensive albino Chihuahua, has been stolen, and the phone-listeners stick their tongues out at him through the phone camera.

Uruguayan reality reappears in all its splendor: nobody is going to resign over something like that, least of all a stubborn Afro-descendant who hates hearings at the Prosecutor’s Office.

The prisons will keep accumulating stories with no magical solution, and football matches will keep being postponed, now because of the Pope’s arrival, amid talks that drag on for months in multiparty committees.

Because dreaming of tropical, Oriental-style Bukele solutions is fine for passing the time, but deep down we all know that here, before bringing in Bukele’s vice president, we would first fight over who was going to pour the mate at the endless multiparty and union negotiating meeting preparing the presidential speech.

Security and exceptional powers
Imported political models
Institutions and reality

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