After midnight, four criminals arrived at a house located on Camino Alianza and Camino Cibils, near the La Paloma neighborhood in the Cerro of Montevideo. Inside were a woman and her four children. According to police information, the men began to put the family's belongings into bags to take them out of their own home.
When the police arrived, the criminals escaped on two motorcycles. A chase ensued that ended in an exchange of gunfire, and the suspects managed to flee towards the Cotravi neighborhood.
This was not the first time
The most serious part is what happened before. According to the police, the criminals had already gone to that house several times to demand that the family leave. During those visits, they would have taken belongings and even animals.
In other words, a mother with four children was living under threat in her own home, and the criminals returned time and again until they attempted to forcibly remove them. So far, there have been no arrests. The police are analyzing surveillance cameras to identify them.
A repeating pattern
This is not an isolated case. In September, in the El Tobogán neighborhood, four people pulled a woman out of her house at gunpoint, just a few meters from the Headquarters of Operational Zone IV. All four were arrested and had criminal records. According to sources from the investigation cited by Telemundo, the police were investigating whether they intended to set up a drug dealing point there.
In the Cerro case, it is still unknown who they are or what they were looking for. But the mechanism is the same: armed groups deciding who lives and who leaves a neighborhood. When a working family has to defend their home from gangs that move on motorcycles and shoot at the police, the state has already lost control of the territory.
