Tension and stones: serious incidents in Borro after the death of a 16-year-old teenager

By Arturo Mondragón

The usual calm of the morning in the north of Montevideo was suddenly broken in a passage in the Borro neighborhood. A strong contingent of the Republican Guard entered a home as part of a judicial raid, but the procedure ended in the worst way: a 16-year-old teenager was killed by the troops. Within a few hours, the accumulated social discontent transformed into a shower of stones that forced the deployment of less lethal ammunition to contain the neighborhood fury.

The episode caused a strong confrontation in the inner streets of the neighborhood, where dozens of young people and neighboring residents gathered to condemn the actions of the uniformed officers. The police response consisted of the use of shotguns with rubber pellets to disperse the crowd, while the stones hit the shields and mobile units. Around one thirty in the afternoon, the security forces began a strategic withdrawal from the place, amid a climate of collective hostility that even reached the press teams present, who received verbal threats from some protesters.

The core of the crisis lies in the abyss that separates the two reconstructions of the event. According to the official report issued by the Ministry of the Interior, police personnel entered the home under a legal order and came across the armed minor. According to this report, the young man raised the weapon and pointed it directly at the agents who were leading the entry. Presuming an imminent threat, one of the uniformed officers opened fire. The projectile hit the body of the teenager, who was urgently loaded into a patrol car and taken to the Capitán Tula Polyclinic, where the medical staff confirmed his death shortly after entering the guard.

The family's story: “I was sleeping”

On the opposite side, the victim's family completely dismantled the ministerial story in a press conference marked by shock and tears. The parents assure that the fatal outcome was due to institutional excess and that the minor did not represent any danger at the time of the arrival of the security forces.

"The Police came in the morning. He came out from the back and they killed him like a dog, he was sleeping. He wasn't even stealing," said the young man's father before the television cameras, which recorded the precise moment in which the mother decompensated due to the emotional impact and had to be assisted on the ground by her own relatives.

The man described that the officials acted extremely aggressively from the first second. He said he heard five explosions in a row and then his son's screams of agony. When he demanded explanations in the midst of the chaos in the yard, the officers assured him that the injured man was a police officer who was a colleague of theirs. “When I look out the window I see how they grab him by the legs and throw him up from the truck,” he continued, detailing the last moments of the teenager's life.

When asked about the reason for the raid and the presence of weapons at the scene of the incidents in Borro, the interviewee acknowledged that there were two firearms on the property, although he clarified the contexts of each one. He specified that one of them corresponded to an old hunting shotgun that belonged to his own father. Regarding the other, a short pistol, he admitted the probability that it was the property of the deceased minor, justifying the situation due to the daily criminal dynamics that affect that area of ​​Casavalle. "The gun would be his. In this neighborhood you have to wear shoes because they are alive," the father pointed out to close a day that keeps the neighborhood under tense neighborhood tension.