Crime in Uruguay is more like New York than El Salvador
But “better than New York in 1980” is not exactly a vote of confidence
Uruguay is one of the most heavily policed countries in the Western Hemisphere. With 989 police per 100,000 inhabitants, the country has about twice as many cops per person as New York City, or four times the USA as a whole. You certainly see them everywhere around central Montevideo. Some units wear the same camouflage pattern that the U.S. Army wore back when I was in Afghanistan, which I found a bit intimidating:
Uruguay has so many police for a reason. Crime is high. The below figure compares Uruguay to two similar jurisdictions, in the sense that all three are dominated by a large commercial metropolis lording it over a hinterland of smaller cities and rural areas. Uruguay rose past Argentina in homicide in the early 2010s. Then in 2018 violence spiked again. With some variation the violence in Uruguay now rivals the bad old days of the 1980s in New York State.
Other crimes, particularly robbery (“rapiña,” in Uruguayan Spanish), have not seen a phase change but rather continued a steady increase since the 1990s. Some of that may be due to better reporting, as people become more likely to report crime the further memories of military rule recede into history, but most of it is real. Robberies (and burglaries, see page 26) have risen quite dramatically since the 1990s.
We should keep some perspective. Uruguay is experiencing a rise in violent and property crime, but there are no widespread extortion rings and crime remains far below the levels of other Latin American countries (albeit not Argentina). If Uruguay were an American state, it would rank ninth in homicide, tied with Georgia.1 So the political reaction has been relatively muted, because the crime increase has been relatively contained. Uruguay isn’t Ecuador.
The problem is that without a good idea of the cause of the country’s crime increase, we can’t be sure that Uruguay won’t become Ecuador.
What the reason is not
Rising inequality
Uruguay is a relatively equal country. The Gini coefficient is an overall measure of inequality. It ranges from zero—complete equality—to one, where a single household earns all the income and everyone else is about to die of starvation. It’s a relatively abstract measure, but it is useful for broad comparisons. Uruguay clocks in at 0.40, against 0.41 for the United States today and 0.35 when American inequality bottomed out in 1980.
Inequality in Uruguay fell substantially in 2009-12. The reason was strong income growth in the middle and bottom of the income distribution. The next chart shows average real incomes by income in Uruguay. Incomes at the bottom doubled between 2006 and 2017 (the red line). Middle-class incomes grew 80% (the green line). But incomes in the top 10% (not shown) grew by only a third.
And the share of Uruguayans living in extreme poverty fell from a massive 24% in 2006 to 5% by 2017 and has only edged up a little to 7% in the years since. So inequality has been getting better as crime as been getting worse.
Economic stagnation
Incomes grew very strongly between 2006 and 2017, as crime increased. Since then, incomes have stagnated for both the poor and the middle class. So perhaps the stagnation caused crime to explode?
The problem is that the timing doesn’t really work: like America in the 1960s, crime rose substantially in the decade before 2017 as incomes grew and inequality fell. There was a brief spike in robberies around the time that the economy started to stagnate, but that seems unlikely to be causal. Murders jumped again in 2018, too early for the effects of the stagnation to have really been felt.
So it’s not inequality and it’s probably not the economy—otherwise we’d expect crime to spike in places like the U.K. or Italy which have also fallen into stagnation, let alone Argentina, which has been a mess for years.
Gun ownership
Uruguayans like guns. Oh, not as much as Americans, but they do like their firearms. Uruguay’s level of civilian firearms per capita (including illegal weapons, as best as the Small Arms Survey can estimate) is around a third of the United States and rather higher than anywhere else in Latin America. Only 15% of Uruguayan households own firearms, but those that do tend to own several. Moreover, gun ownership is not just a rural thing: the share of households that own weapons is 14% in Montevideo, not much different from the nation as a whole.
Still, there are two problems with associating the high murder rate with Uruguay’s high rate of gun ownership. First, in 2007, the Small Arms Survey found roughly 1.1 million firearms in civilian possession, 46% of which were unregistered, and firearms were used in 57% of homicides (that last datapoint is from 2005). In 2017, the same survey found 1.2 million firearms, 49% unregistered, and firearms were used in 60% of homicides. That isn’t much of a change and the share of gun killings hasn’t budged — in 2022, firearms were used in 61% of murders.2 So gun ownership isn’t rising and the country isn’t being inundated with illegal weapons.
Second, Uruguay’s firearm ownership might be the highest in Latin America by some margin, but it is the same as … Canada. It is just hard to believe that a stable and Canadian level of gun ownership could suddenly produce a homicide spike on its own.
What it might be
Let’s dig into the numbers.
Narcotrafficking?
As European cocaine demand has risen, some product has started moving out through Uruguayan ports. So maybe drug gangs are battling it out to control smuggling routes, as in Ecuador and Mexico? Alternatively, retail gangs might be fighting it out to sell drugs in Montevideo’s poor neighborhoods?
Cocaine seizures went from 134 kilograms in 2015 to 148 in 2016, 144 in 2017, 586 in 2018, and 12,042 in 2019. That’s a big increase!
Further evidence consistent with that idea is that 59% of homicide victims are killed in public streets, which is not inconsistent with the image of drug gangs fighting it out for street corners and port access.
But. Montevideo certainly doesn’t look like gangs are fighting it out to control the ports, a la Ecuador or Michoacán. The Uruguayan state is pretty powerful; a gang that tried to brazenly muscle in on the ports by bullets rather than bribes would get rolled up pretty fast. And the port areas, well, they seem pretty safe:
Less anecdotally, the official share of homicides linked to drug trafficking (page 148) only rose from 5% in 2012 to 14% in 2022. In 2024, a team of researchers (Emiliano Rojido, Ignacio Cano, and Doriam Borges) annoyed by the fact that a third of homicides go unclassified, dug into the records for 2019 and reclassified them as best they could.3 Here is what they found:
The plurality of murders in Uruguay — 28% — are interpersonal disputes between people who know each other. Another 8% are basically barfights and brawls, including gang violence not related to drugs. Only nine percent are the kind that scare most people: a mugging or robbery gone bad.
And the researchers could only link 11% of murders to drugs. “Summary executions” sound drug related, but are basically homicides where a body was found after-the-fact and the murder hadn’t been solved by the end of the year. Some of those are probably related to organized crime, but by no means all, and the authors of the study concluded:
The first conclusion from this new classification is that deadly violence in Uruguay in 2019 cannot be considered a simple product of organized crime, much less battles between drug cartels. In fact, the drug traffic appears to be associated with barely 11% of murders.
I can’t say that it’s a dispositive study, but it casts doubt on the simple story of a country victimized by rising European demand for cocaine.
Extortion?
In New York City in the 1970s, large chunks of the city were crime-ridden, from both retail muggings and fear of shootouts over the control of drug corners. Extortion of small businesses by gang members was not quite commonplace, but it happened. That said, a combination of a capable government, the Mafia, and the Democratic political machine kept small-time extortion from growing out of control.4 Gangs were basically limited to petty crime and the drug trade.
This is very different from the kind of “criminal governance” that afflicted El Salvador before Bukele, or that afflicts other parts of Mexico and Central America today. In those areas, organized crime rings tax all economic activity within their territory, licit and illicit, and violence is pervasive.
Four political scientists, Lucia Tiscornia, Verónica Pérez Bentancur, Ines Fynn and Gustavo Díaz, examined Montevideo’s poor neighborhoods looking for signs of criminal governance.5 They used a combination of textual analysis of news reports, 66 in-depth interviews and a survey of 2,688 residents.
They found … according to them, nothing. The gangs limited themselves to drug markets and petty theft. “In our 66 interviews, we did not come across any evidence suggesting otherwise.” They also found that residents of those neighborhoods were highly unlikely to go to organized crime to resolve disputes; they generally called the police. The police had a presence in even the poorest areas. Moreover, they found that the gangs were generally broke — the retail drug trade is not that profitable — which limits their ability to become Salvadoran-style mafias.
I’m not so sure their evidence is really so unequivocal. “The proportion of neighborhood residents in our sample who have been exposed to criminal organizations ranges between 15 and 25 percent.” That seems high, no? That said, their results indicate that the presence of gangs is relatively limited, although I’d like to see a better survey.
Reasons for optimism
If these analyses are correct, then Uruguay’s problem is much more like El Salvador’s (or, perhaps more relevantly, New York’s in the 1980s) than it is like Mexico or Ecuador.
Uruguay is currently locking people up with alacrity. Its incarceration rate, at 465 per 100,000, rivals the United States (541). This is a near tripling on the 2000 level. Unless President Orsi reverses course — which I doubt — Uruguay’s incarceration rate will pass the United States in the next few years.
The prisons are overcrowded, but so far the government appears to be firmly in control. These aren’t Ecuadorean or Mexican prisons, where ringleaders can command their organizations and come-and-go almost as they please.
President Orsi seems to support expanding the police force even further and building more prisons, although it’s not entirely clear what his overall policy will be. If he sticks to expanding the police and prisons, with sufficient effort, it should bring violence back down again if the above analyses are correct.
But I have to admit that the “if” is a little large for my taste, given that we don’t have much of a handle on why crime started to increase in the first place …
Behind Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, New Mexico, Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Maryland.
During the 2018 murder spike, the share of firearm killings jumped to 71% before falling back to 62% the next year. See Emiliano Rojido, Ignacio Cano, and Doriam Borges, “Diagnóstico de los homicidios en Uruguay (2012-2022),” CIESU (June 2023), page 147 in particular.
Emiliano Rojido, Ignacio Cano, and Doriam Borges, “Tipología de los homicidios en Uruguay,” CIESU (January 2024).
Eventually the state and federal governments in New York would mostly eliminate extortion by the mafia and public officials, The Sopranos notwithstanding.
Lucia Tiscornia, Verónica Pérez Bentancur, Ines Fynn and Gustavo Díaz, “In the Crevices of the State: Criminal Governance in Unexpected Contexts,” Working Paper (March 28, 2024)