MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Motion to impeach Mayor of Montevideo filed

“They want to distract and confuse the citizenry,” she further argued. “They are not going to succeed,” Cosse insisted

Montevideo Councilors from the National (White) and Colorado parties have filed for the impeachment of Broad Front (Frente Amplio - FA) Mayor Carolina Cosse over her allegedly repeated failure to submit a series of reports requested from her office.

The session calling for her impeachment Friday went ahead without her presence. “This is a practice of the Cosse administration that has become customary, unlike previous administrations, which always answered requests for reports,” Councilman Javier Barrios Bove said. “This attitude leads us to understand that the current administration has established a systematic policy of hindering one of the most important mechanisms of control that the departmental legislators have, such as the request for reports,” the White legislator added.

Cosse replied in a video distributed through social media that the move was a “republican outrage” that bore “political animosity” against her and insisted an impeachment trial was reserved for “cases of crimes or violation of the Constitution” and “neither of those two things happened,” stressed one of the opposition's likely candidates to run for president in the next elections.

“The Mayor's Office answered all the requests for reports,” she added, also noting 234 report requests had been filed during 2021, and of those received in 2022 “only 9” of them are still pending, but Cosse argued her administration had not overstepped the deadline. She also pointed out that “98% of the requests for access to public information” had been answered and that “the remaining 2% were not answered because they correspond to other State agencies.”

“They want to distract and confuse the citizenry,” she further argued. “They are not going to succeed,” she continued, referring to the recently discovered criminal network of passport forgery in which the head of security of President Luis Lacalle Pou, Alejandro Astesiano, was involved and operated directly from the president's offices.