Irene Moreira announced in the last hours that she will leave her position as Minister of Housing of Uruguay after the president, Luis Lacalle Pou, asked her to resign for awarding a property directly to a Cabildo Abierto militant, in a situation that puts the continuity of the government coalition is at risk.
In a public statement from the ministry’s headquarters, Moreira, a member of the far-right force and wife of the party’s leader, former Army chief Guido Manini Ríos, announced that she was leaving office and that on Monday she will resume her seat in the Senate.
“From next Monday, I will return to work tirelessly, side by side from Parliament, as I have done for the most fragile in our society all my life,” he announced after reviewing his management.
The announcement came hours after the request for resignation made by Lacalle Pou, after an email was leaked in which the minister’s secretary requested the direct award of a home to a woman who is a member of the Open Cabildo.
The case for which Moreira is accused began at the end of 2021, when the portfolio she directs opened the call to carry out a raffle for homes located near the downtown area of Montevideo.
Despite this call, the Cabildo Abierto militant received a two-room apartment by direct award.
“It is in the interest of Minister Dr. Irene Moreira that the reserved space in the complex be awarded to the family made up of MM and her daughter,” wrote the secretary of the official in an email sent to the national director of Housing, Jorge Ceretta Gomez, and leaked to the media.
Sources from the Ministry of Housing indicated that the procedure carried out is not illegal or in breach of any norm, since there is a reserve of apartments to be granted to people in cases of vulnerability and they highlighted that this case met all the requirements.
Moreira denied yesterday that he had acted incorrectly and pointed to a “smear operation” by his partners in the Government.
“We have not acted throughout these three years outside of current regulations,” he emphasized, quoted by the Uruguayan website Underlined.
“No law has been violated here, we have not acted under any political conditioning, nor have we benefited any citizen in particular. We have always acted in good faith, protected by a framework that has been used throughout the history of this Ministry, which It is also public knowledge of all the current authorities,” he added.
“This same procedure was used by authorities in the 15 years that preceded this administration on more than 70 occasions,” he said.
On the specific case of the awarding of a house to the Cabildo Abierto militant, Moreira said: “If they ask me today, I would make the same decision again, protected by the regulatory framework by which a housing solution was provided in a modality rent-to-own under the bidding program.
“Nobody gave anything away. The citizen will have to pay for it for 30 years. She is the head of the family, a mother with a dependent minor on that date, with a very low income and vulnerability. She would do it again,” she said.
Last Wednesday, Moreira had acknowledged that the award was given due to the reserve quota that exists for specific cases.
Manini Ríos, for his part, assured yesterday at a press conference that the award of the property was adjusted to the law and also considered that the situation “leads one to think that this decision of the President of the Republic cannot be based on this specific fact.” .
And he left two other sentences that seemed like threats of rupture: “We are going to go deep” and “There are other things that they want to charge the Cabildo Abierto for.”
The party will meet on Monday to decide the next steps.
Cabildo Abierto achieved in the October 2019 elections, with Manini Ríos as presidential candidate, just over 11% of the votes, reaching 3 senator seats and 10 deputy seats.
For the second round, it allied itself with the National, Colorado, People’s, and Independent parties in the coalition that is now the government.
Its eventual break would leave the ruling party with a very tight majority in the Senate (14 seats, against 13 from the Broad Front and 3 from CA) and somewhat more aired in Deputies (46 from the alliance, 42 from the front, 10 from the Cabildo and 1 from the ecologists).
Source: Ambito
