South American Uruguay has entered a governance crisis due to a scandal surrounding a passport issued to an internationally wanted drug criminal. On Saturday, the Minister of the Interior, a senior official from his department and an adviser to President Luis Lacalle Pou resigned. Their departure follows the resignation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs last Wednesday, Reuters news agency reported on Sunday.
The issue centers on the young Uruguayan Sebastián Marset, nicknamed the ‘Narco Millennial’, who is suspected of smuggling tons of cocaine from South America to Europe. Marset managed to obtain a Uruguayan passport while in custody in the Arab Emirates in 2021 for forging documents.
The thorny issue became a full-fledged scandal when a telephone conversation between Foreign Minister Francisco Bustillo and his secretary of state was leaked last week. In it he seemed to propose that he should keep evidence out of the investigation into the passport issue. The State Secretary had previously been warned that Marset was “dangerous”. Bustillo defended himself in a press conference by saying that no one knew where Marset was when he applied for a passport and that nothing illegal happened.
Marset is wanted in Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and the United States for large-scale drug smuggling and money laundering and is on Interpol’s arrest list. He is also accused of being behind the murder of a Paraguay prosecutor. In July this year, Marset managed to escape the hands of more than 2,200 investigators and police officers in Bolivia, who had opened an international manhunt for him.