Uruguay is often admired as Latin America’s model republic—a beacon of stability, legalism, and democratic civility. Yet behind its polished institutions and diplomatic restraint lies a deeper truth: the country is approaching the limit of a long-standing political masquerade. This masquerade, rooted in elite consensus, legal performance, and fiscal inertia, has sustained an image of coherence even as its material base deteriorates.

The state now faces a decisive crisis. There is no more money. The public debt grows, energy prices remain high, and the capacity to distribute benefits—jobs, subsidies, favors—is shrinking. Yet despite this scarcity, the landed elite remains untouched. Since the 1990s, landlords have quietly accumulated wealth through passive investment, land speculation, and agricultural export—while remaining politically insulated. All major governments, including those of the Frente Amplio and the Movimiento de Participación Popular (MPP), have preserved this pact of silence. The state performs legality; the elite withholds challenge.

What makes the current moment more dangerous is that informal power has moved in to fill the vacuum. Drug cartels now operate in port zones, border towns, and logistics corridors. They do not seek to revolutionize the system—they seek to stabilize their profits. As the state retracts and formal governance weakens, criminal actors increasingly substitute public goods: security, employment, negotiation. Their entry does not dismantle the masquerade—it sustains it, by allowing appearances to continue while the core rots.

President Orsi inherits the aesthetics of respectability but none of the means to sustain it. His ministers, like Oddone, are more administrators of decline than architects of renewal. Uruguay continues to perform civility, but with fewer and fewer resources behind the curtain.

This is not collapse, but exhaustion. The masquerade still functions, but only because no one dares to break it. In Uruguay today, governance is a choreography of appearances—and everyone knows the music is about to stop.