The routes that can no longer hold up

In the early hours of Monday, June 8, Route 3 woke up different. It was not the usual traffic of trucks that carry the life of the country. It was a river of stopped red lights, tractors with makeshift flags, and faces weathered by the sun and something worse: the fatigue of those who produce and see how the State robs them, time and again, of the fruits of their labor.

Hundreds of horticulturists from Salto, self-convened transporters, citrus producers, and truck drivers from all over the interior gathered there, in La Gaviota, and in twenty other points across the country: Nueva Palmira, Rivera, Tacuarembó, Rocha.

They were not shouting party slogans. They shouted with the silence of their stopped machines.

Because there is no margin left.

Diesel prices have risen again. No one in Montevideo seems to understand that this increase is not just a number on a ministry spreadsheet: it is the cost of every kilometer a truck loaded with tomatoes, onions, or oranges travels from the field to the Uruguayan table.

It is the price paid by the horticulturist who gets up before dawn to water, prune, and harvest, and who at the end of the month sees how the State takes away, through taxes disguised as “international prices,” an increasingly larger portion of what little they have left.

And on top of that comes the Electronic Load Guide, that new requirement from the MTOP that promises “transparency” and, in practice, delivers more paperwork, more costs, more possible fines, and more control over those who are already at their limit.

It is the classic trick of Leviathan: first, it suffocates you with taxes, then it forces you to fill out forms to prove that you are still breathing, and in the end, it accuses you of evasion if you do not comply.

The producers and transporters are not asking for subsidies. They are asking to be allowed to work. They want the State to stop treating them as habitual suspects and start remembering that they, not the bureaucrats, are the ones who generate the wealth that is later distributed in public salaries and plans.

Every time a truck stops, every time a horticultural warehouse closes its doors due to lack of profitability, the country loses something that is not reflected in the national accounts: private initiative, that silent force that drives the real economy.

Because the economy is not a game of addition and subtraction in an office in Montevideo. It is real people taking real risks with their own money.

And when the State raises fuel taxes, imposes regulations that no one asked for, and multiplies controls, what it does is exactly the opposite of what it promises: it destroys jobs, raises food prices, and punishes those who can least defend themselves.

The final consumer pays more for vegetables; the producer receives less; and in the middle, the truck is stranded while the bureaucrats celebrate “modernization.”

It is the same mechanism as always: you see the truck stopped on the road, you see the concentration in Nueva Palmira, you see the face of the horticulturist who explains in simple words that “it just doesn’t work anymore.”

What is not seen is the next venture that does not open, the investment that goes to another country, the young person who decides not to continue in agriculture because “there is no future.” That is the hidden cost of the giant tax burden and the persecutory State that believes that the solution to all problems is more paperwork, more fees, and more punishments.

The men and women who today block the roads are not enemies of the country. They are the country. They are the ones who produce the food we eat, the ones who move the goods we consume, the ones who sustain with their sweat the chain that makes it possible for Uruguay to continue existing as a producing nation.

And they are fed up with being treated as criminals by a state apparatus that spends more than it generates and then blames those who generate.

They do not ask for privileges. They ask for freedom. Freedom to work without every productive decision having to first pass through the approval of a bureaucrat.

Freedom to invest knowing that the fruits of that risk will not be taken away by a hidden tax in the price of diesel. Freedom to compete, to innovate, to fail and try again without the State putting its boot on them.

Because a country that persecutes its producers and transporters is not protecting anyone. It is only digging its own grave.

And today’s roads are saying it loud and clear, with still trucks and calloused hands: we have reached our limit. Now, let the State learn to live with less. Or let the country learn to live without them.