Living in Punta del Diablo, Uruguay: A lesbian couple’s first year
Shelley and Chas moved from Georgia to Punta del Diablo, Uruguay. Real monthly costs, LGBTQ community, bringing cats, residency + advice.
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Once again Uruguay positions itself as the most stable democracy in a tumultuous region. “Global levels of corruption remain extremely high and efforts to mitigate them are faltering,” says the NGO Transparency International (TI) in its latest Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) published this Tuesday.
In a bleak global landscape, Uruguay continues to stand out as the least corrupt country in the Americas.
As Transparency International defines it, the CPI is the leading global indicator of public sector corruption, scoring 180 countries around the world.
Uruguay has a score of 76 this year, up three places from last year, meaning it ranks 13th out of 180 countries. In fact, Uruguay ranks number one least corrupt country the continent: above Canada (ranked 15th with 75 points) and Barbados (ranked 23rd with 68 points). The USA ranks 28th with a score of 65 points.
Meanwhile neighbours Argentina and Brazil score poorly, 99th place with 37 points and and 107th with 34 points respectively.
Despite tensions arising in President Luis Lacalle Pou’s inner circle due to the imprisonment of his head of security and personal bodyguard* and the investigation of a number of his close aides due to the approval of a passport for a known drug trafficker*, Uruguay’s ranking remains generally unscathed thanks to solid institutions. In addition, by integrating different measurements and two years into a single estimate, TI’s methodology prevents a single event or corruption scandal from altering a country’s rating, and measures the trend and not specific cases.
TI points out that the advanced economies of the world dominate the top positions of the 2024 CPI as they are countries that have “long benefited from a strong rule of law, functioning government institutions, and political stability”. Uruguay, as usual, bucks expectations. Despite being a developing economy, it has a long tradition of transparency, democracy and reliability.
*Guru’Guay normally tries to include links in English. However in this case, the links are to Wikipedia and in Spanish. Why? Because there is no single comprehensive source in English summarising these cases. And today, Wikipedia has become one of the most fact-checked collaborative sources available with a community of contributors dedicated to accuracy and neutrality, and it claims it cannot be bought nor influenced by AI.
Living in Punta del Diablo, Uruguay: A lesbian couple’s first year
Shelley and Chas moved from Georgia to Punta del Diablo, Uruguay. Real monthly costs, LGBTQ community, bringing cats, residency + advice.
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