Deaths and cover-ups: Child care scandal in Uruguay reveals a deeper crisis
Revealed: Residents of only state-run home designed to support teen mothers fell victim to authorities’ incompetence
Uruguay’s only state-run care home for teenage mothers and their children has overseen a series of failures linked to the deaths of two babies and the murder of a teenager, openDemocracy can reveal. Our investigation has found that the tragic deaths, all of which took place in less than three years, were just the tip of the iceberg.
Other safeguarding failures we uncovered include one of the care home’s former directors being promoted to the head of the children’s programme in Montevideo, a post he holds to this day, despite having been removed from a previous role over his responsibility in two separate incidents involving the deaths of two children. Allegations of abuse had also been made against the official, whom psychologists have warned is unsuited to working with children.
The Amatista Centre is run by the Uruguayan Institute for Children and Adolescents (INAU), a government agency, to house up to 12 vulnerable teenagers and their children. The centre, a grey building in Parque Rodó, a central neighbourhood in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, should offer the girls and young women stability and care as they navigate new motherhood.
Yet a startling pattern of neglect, abuse and administrative failure has emerged from our investigation, which is based on studying dozens of INAU official documents, reports and administrative files, as well as reports from the National Human Rights Institution (an ombudsman that goes by the Spanish acronym INDDHH), and interviews with five current and former members of Amatista staff, educators and INAU authorities.
Between October 2020 and October 2024, the home saw three directors arrive and depart in quick succession. Between them, they have faced a wave of allegations, including abuse, mismanagement, mistreatment, negligence, harassment and violence hanging over them. Occupational assessments of two of these public servants’ skills later highlighted their ineptitude for the job. One of them would tell the teenage mothers: “You don’t have a pot to piss in” and “If your child dies, it’s your fault”.
In each case, INAU failed to act against the directors until the mounting evidence became undeniable. Under successive directorships, teenagers left the Amatista Centre and returned to live in environments with domestic violence, while other adolescents today remain in situations of sexual exploitation because the centre’s leadership did not offer the support necessary to help them leave these environments.
openDemocracy’s efforts to investigate these allegations about the conditions at the Amatista centre were often met with a wall of silence from the authorities. The three former directors rejected our requests for interviews, while our requests to visit Amatista were ignored by INAU’s director general, Dinorah Gallo, who is the senior-most state official ultimately responsible for the centre.
Our investigation also revealed serious flaws in the INAU hiring processes that led to the directors’ appointments, with their posts filled by direct designation and not supported by any merit-based selection or test. We found that the INDDHH pointed out the hiring problems, but that its recommendations were consistently disregarded by senior INAU staff, despite them being supported by the agency’s workers’ union. A UNICEF report submitted to INAU in September 2024 also warned that “discretionary” hiring processes “weaken the centres’ professional and technical action, exposing them to the ups and downs of partisan decisions of the successive boards”.
In Uruguay, it is hard not to see the crisis at Amatista as a broader indictment of the unravelling of child welfare and social care in a country that once epitomised Latin America’s so-called Pink Tide, when a wave of centre-left parties swept to power across the continent at the turn of the 21st century. Though disparities continued to persist, there was ultimately a dramatic reduction in poverty in the country and a steady decline in economic inequality between 2004 and 2014.
Progress stalled, however, during the last centre-left administration, between 2015 and 2019. And over the past five years, a centre-right coalition government presided over social stagnation, a slowing in economic growth and a crisis in living standards most keenly experienced by children. While only 9% of the population is considered poor, the rate is twice as high amongst children and adolescents (20%), according to official figures.
Today, as governments around the world continue to preach austerity politics as a means to paradoxically rebuild tattered safety nets, the crisis in one state-run centre in Montevideo reveals how the retreat of social care affects a society’s most vulnerable members.
When openDemocracy published a Spanish-language version of this report last month, it sent shockwaves across Uruguay and contributed to the calling of an emergency sitting of Parliament on 23 December.
Angelina de los Santos
It was not the first time Uruguayan politicians have reacted to openDemocracy’s findings on INAU failures. Last year, we published an investigation revealing that minors at the Himalaya Centre, a Montevideo care home for teenagers struggling with mental health issues, were subjected to neglect, violence and chaotic management. The same day, INAU ended its contract with the centre.
But our latest report shows that the neglect that many children experience in state care is systemic, and will not be solved with the closure of any one centre.
‘Deals and compromises’
The Amatista Centre, like other INAU residential protection homes, is intended to house children and adolescents who lack family care, decent living conditions or both, usually for reasons such as violence or extreme poverty.
Through its agency INAU, the Uruguayan state is supposed to provide these children and young people with a stable home environment and ensure they enjoy their rights to education, health and recreation and live free from violence. The agency should also work to improve their family life whenever possible, as the policy goal is not the permanent internment of these children.
Those who live in such homes are not in prison. Adolescents should go out to school and other activities, though some outings, especially visits or returns to their family homes, should be supervised because of the risk of violence or neglect.
Yet, allegations that Amatista has consistently failed in this fundamental aspect of child protection date back to at least October 2020, when an official named Sergio Rodriguez was made the centre’s director. He was the first Amatista director to be appointed under the current government, which took office in March 2020 and is led by President Luis Lacalle Pou and his National Party.
Rodríguez joined INAU as an educator in 2016, receiving a permanent contract for the role two years later. Contrary to the name, INAU’s educators are not typically teachers, with children and teenagers in state care in Uruguay usually attending lessons in regular schools. Rather, educators are there to supervise those who live in INAU centres and care homes, supporting their daily lives, helping them with their homework or any problems they may have, and offering guidance and ‘social education’.
According to his administrative file and the testimonies of several educators who worked with him at Amatista, who spoke to openDemocracy on the condition of anonymity, Rodríguez established inappropriate relationships with teenagers in the centre, offering them “deals and compromises” to leave the home unsupervised.
Rodríguez allegedly drove the girls in his private car, asked them to turn off their phones while talking to him, and promised not to report them to the police if they left the home without authorisation – a breach of INAU’s protocol on unauthorised departures.
He also allowed girls to visit or temporarily stay with their families – excursions known as “leaves” by INAU – according to official documents and the testimonies of four educators. This occurred even when the leaves were considered too risky and rejected by Amatista’s ‘team on the ground’, which was responsible for assessing the suitability of an adolescent’s external housing and living conditions for them to visit and eventually return to live with their families.
One educator told openDemocracy that Rodríguez warned the girls and their families that he would deny having made such deals if they told the team.
Rodríguez did not respond to our request for an interview and it is not known what, if anything, he hoped to gain in exchange for these ‘deals’. One educator suggested to openDemocracy that he made them in order to receive positive INAU reports, as allowing the girls to go out meant recording fewer unauthorised absences and having less paperwork to deal with. It also meant there were more free beds available for new teen mothers.
“He established a dynamic of allowing the girls to go in and out, with the argument that if the leaves were denied, they would flee anyway,” one educator said. “In this mismanagement of leaves and lack of protection, a sequence of events began to happen... until one drop split the straw,” the educator added.
On 28 September 2021, a one-month-old baby died of sudden infant death syndrome in his family’s home, according to official records. His 15-year-old mother, Agustina*, had joined Amatista in August, two weeks after giving birth, and was on leave at her mother’s home at the time of his death.
After visiting Agustina’s family home three times a week, the team on the ground decided to recommend against authorising the leave. Despite this, Rodríguez approved it, according to information provided to openDemocracy.
“The girl had a sister who was also in Amatista; we knew the family, we were working with them because they were not ready to host them,” said one educator, who was not a member of the team on the ground.
Geraldy Correa, the director of INAU in Montevideo, did not order an investigation into what had happened and there has not been a post-mortem into the baby’s death. The baby was also not registered as having been under INAU care until a month after his death, a process that should have been done at the time of his birth. After his death, Agustina moved out of Amatista and her and her baby’s files were shelved.
Five months after the death of Agustina’s baby, the dismembered body of Kiara Ahielén Casavieja, a 16-year-old girl who lived in Amatista, was found in a septic tank in northwest Montevideo. She had been reported missing to the police 20 days previously, though openDemocracy has not been able to establish who made this report.
At the time of her kidnap and murder, Kiara and her four-month-old baby had been on a leave approved by Rodríguez but discouraged by the team on the ground.
“There was a lot of talk about her case; it was a totally irresponsible leave,” an educator said. Kiara’s killer, a drug dealer who approached her at a bus stop, was last year sentenced to 12 years in prison for her murder. Kiara’s baby was with her grandmother at the time of her death and is now living with her full-time and is no longer under INAU protection, sources from INAU told openDemocracy.
Correa, who oversees the appointments of Amatista directors as part of her work managing the coordination of 24-hour protection homes, initially decided not to investigate the leave Kiara had been on when she died. She also did not bring the circumstances of her death to the attention of the board of directors, which was at the time chaired by Pablo Abdala, the then president of INAU. Both Correa and Abdala are members of Lacale Pou’s National Party (PN).
“[INAU] acted as if nothing had happened,” an educator told openDemocracy. They added that the girls living with Kiara at Amatista had not been offered any support to help them deal with the trauma of her murder. “They were upset, anxious and emotionally overwhelmed, but with no room to work through their grief,” she said.
Only after “a lot of insistence” from the staff at the centre did INAU hire professionals to support them with their grief, though it still failed to provide any help for the teenagers. “The team was broken because many people blamed Sergio [Rodríguez],” said the educator. “There was a lot of anger, a lot of sadness, a lot of pain and anguish”.
Related story: ID 55625
Almost a year after Kiara’s murder, in early February 2023, a 17-year-old mother who was living at Amatista accused Rodríguez of abuse. Writing in her WhatsApp status, Jéssica said: “Sergio, for the abuse of minors you are going to die” and “They abuse minors in INAU Amatista.”
Rodríguez reported the teenager, who had a baby and a toddler, to the police for defamation and slander and brought the case to the INAU authorities, according to an administrative file of this case seen by openDemocracy.
Meanwhile, a centre’s social worker berated Jéssica, warning her of ruining Rodríguez’s life. “The way to deal with the situation was quite [emotionally] violent, accusing the girl that she was going to break up [Rodríguez’s] family and insisting on the harm she was doing to the adult person,” a witness educator told openDemocracy.
On 10 February 2023, Jéssica left Amatista with her two children and did not return. INAU then removed Rodríguez from his post, moving him to an administrative role in an office. An investigation was launched into his behaviour, but this was shelved by Correa in April 2023, who claimed “no evidence of abuse emerged”.
This decision paved the way for Rodríguez to return to working with children and young people. Soon after, Correa appointed Rodríguez as director of the Magnolia Centre, a short-term-stay centre in Montevideo where adolescent girls are sent before being referred to different INAU homes in the city. Having left Amatista and been removed from its register, Jéssica knocked on Magnolia’s door seeking shelter in July, and it was decided to refer her to a home for teenage girls and place her children in a different INAU home.
A case file seen by openDemocracy shows that in July 2024, as part of a wider investigation into Amatista, INAU decided to investigate potential responsibility for Agustina’s baby’s death and the unrelated murder of Kiara. As part of this investigation, a lawyer for the agency reviewed the September 2023 investigation into Rodríguez and concluded that there had been “irregularities” in how it was carried out.
The lawyer requested the alleged abuse be reported to the prosecutor’s office and ordered Rodríguez undergo a psycho-occupational assessment by INAU psychologists. In December 2023, the results of that assessment found Rodríguez “does not fit the task of treating directly” with children and adolescents.
But a month later, Rodríguez was promoted to director of the children's programme by Ramona Capillera, the director of Montevideo's 24-hour protection homes. In the role, which he still holds today, he is tasked with implementing and supervising protection, prevention and assistance policies for Montevideo, where 17% of the children in care in Uruguay live.
Capillera did not return openDemocracy’s calls after initially telling us she was “waiting for the authorities’ guidance” about an interview. She is currently under investigation for her role in the “forced outgoing” of a boy from another INAU centre, which led him to become homeless in 2021.
openDemocracy spoke to Rodríguez on the phone to request an interview to discuss the allegations against him. At his request, we then sent our questions to his official email address, but he never responded. INAU’s investigations into the deaths of Agustina’s baby and Kiara are ongoing.
Omissions and violence
After Rodríguez was removed as head of Amatista, Mariana Oliveri took over as director. openDemocracy has been unable to confirm what role Oliveri held before this, but in any case, it was not long before educators at the centre reported her to INAU’s Labour Harassment Commission for allegedly mistreating members of the on-the-ground team.
When the commission receives complaints from workers, it looks into the case and decides whether to investigate formally. If it does so and ends up upholding the complaint, it makes recommendations to the complainant and INAU authorities. openDemocracy is aware that the commission did investigate the claims made against Oliveri. The outcome of this investigation is unknown, though Oliveri was removed from her position in July 2023 – just five months after taking office.
Like Rodríguez, Oliveri was then moved to the Magnolia Centre, where she worked as general coordinator. She went on leave, before resigning in 2024. The reasons for her leave and resignation are not known, and she did not respond to openDemocracy’s messages and phone calls.
Silvia Cedrés, who had joined INAU as a carer and was promoted to educator in 2010, was then appointed Amatista’s director in July 2023, with Desire Bell as her deputy.
Amatista staff members who spoke to openDemocracy on condition of anonymity said Cedrés would tell the teenage mothers: “You don’t have a pot to piss in” and “If your child dies, it's your fault”. These and similar phrases also appear in INAU files we have read on Cedrés, having been included in anonymous complaints from Amatista staff, and in an INDDHH document about the functioning of the home from February 2024.
Feeling the centre was still not being run properly, Amatista staff filed three complaints about Cedrés and Bell to the INDDHH, Capillera and the INAU board of directors between December 2023 and August 2024.
“We were going from bad to worse,” one educator told us of the transition from Oliveri to Cedrés. Referring to the complaints, another said: “It is not about finding a scapegoat or a guilty party, but about showing how responsibility is diluted and nothing happens, even in very serious situations.”
Some Amatista educators resigned from their posts due to authorities’ initial lack of response to their complaints. Others who continued working in the home told openDemocracy that Cedrés “finished the dismantling” of the on-the-ground team, a process that had been started by Rodríguez. These claims were backed up by the findings of an INDDHH report published in February 2024.
In July 2024, after receiving the three complaints, INAU launched an investigation into what had been happening at Amatista in recent years. As part of this, it found that Cedrés and Bell didn’t use the official IT system because they didn’t know how and that they had a “punitive approach” to dealing with the teens. “There is no professional approach, but shouting and the annulment of the adolescence of the youths who are mothers,” it said.
Cedrés remained as director until October 2024, when she was transferred to another care home and replaced by a colleague, Soledad Sequeira, previously an educator at the Amatista Centre. The new director is working on rebuilding the team on the ground, with home visits currently being made by educators, the director and their deputy.
Another baby dies
openDemocracy has reviewed one of the three complaints made about Cedrés and Bell, which describes 17 situations in which the pair allegedly acted improperly. We compared these allegations with official documents and interviewed educators to better understand the treatment of five adolescents at Amatista: Gabriela, Victoria, Josefina, Andrea and Micaela.
Fourteen-year-old Gabriela* arrived at Amatista in March 2024 with her newborn baby. She was fleeing domestic violence in her mother’s home. But less than two months later, Cedrés sent Gabriela and her baby back to live with her mother after she fought with another teenager at the centre. Cedrés took no measures to supervise the family environment to which Gabriela was returning.
On 9 June, Gabriela’s baby died of sudden infant death syndrome at her mother’s house.
“It could have happened at Amatista, but it happened outside, like the other [deaths],” said one educator openDemocracy spoke with.
At Gabriela’s baby’s wake, Cedrés told the teenager she could not return to Amatista. Two witnesses told openDemocracy that Cedrés had pointed out the centre was for young mothers and their children and told Gabriela: “You are no longer a mother.” Shortly after, Gabriela attempted to take her own life, before returning to Amatista asking to be readmitted. By this point, unable to live with her mother, she had become homeless and was using drugs, according to the educators openDemocracy spoke with and the complaints filed.
“Cedrés got desperate. Instead of calming her down, she told [Gabriela] that she couldn't be there and, in her presence, started calling authorities to ask what to do. It was terrifying,” one educator said. Gabriela spent that night in another INAU home, another educator told openDemocracy, before being referred to a third home where “she remains in an extremely high vulnerability”.
Another teenager who was living at Amatista with her baby, 18-year-old Victoria, decided to have an abortion last year and attended medical appointments to obtain the necessary drugs.
In Uruguay, abortions are legal and are performed at home with medical supervision before and afterwards. Yet Cedrés and Bell initially refused to allow Victoria to take the pills at the centre. Although she was eventually able to complete the procedure at the centre, she was not offered any support or guidance about the process from Cedrés.
“If she [Victoria] didn’t tell us, staff on the night shift would not have known what was happening or what to do in the event of bleeding or any other situation that could arise,” one educator told openDemocracy. “On top of that [Cedrés and Bell] asked her to be grateful for everything that was being done for her,” she added.
Rampant sexual exploitation
Josefina, 15, arrived back at Amatista in September 2023, months after leaving the centre with her toddler on an unauthorised leave. When she returned, Josefina was without her son, telling Amatista educators and girls at the centre that she had left him with his 30-year-old father as she had been unable to care for him.
That night, while Josefina was sleeping, other girls at Amatista beat her up. After the incident, she left again and never came back. Explaining Josefina’s vulnerability, an educator told openDemocracy that she “has a low cognitive level, she has been homeless and has zero awareness about the risks she is exposed to”.
They added: “She is possibly in a situation of sexual exploitation.” Josefina’s age means the father would be legally considered an abuser under Uruguayan sexual consent law, though he has not been arrested or investigated by the police.
Yet several educators said Amatista’s leadership team didn’t address Josefina’s vulnerabilities or work with the other adolescents who had assaulted her. Instead, they said senior staff “celebrated that her abuser, 15 years older than her, took charge of the child.” The educators told openDemocracy that the attitude of those in charge was: “Whatever had happened with her has nothing to do with how he reacts as a father.”
Josefina was not the only girl housed at Amatista in September 2023 who showed signs of being sexually exploited, according to three educators openDemocracy spoke with.
At that time, educators found Josefina and at least two other girls sneaking out of the home at any time, travelling by taxi even though they had no money to pay for it, video-chatting with adults on dating platforms, and sending intimate photos. They refused to tell staff where they had been, what they had been doing and who they had been with.
Educators told openDemocracy that they were not provided with any comprehensive guidance on how to address their concerns by Lourdes Falcón, INAU’s director of adolescents for Montevideo, or Capillera, the director of Montevideo's 24-hour protection homes. Falcón is currently under investigation for alleged “inappropriate treatment” of staff and was found “unfit” to carry out her role in an INAU psycho-occupational assessment in September 2024.
Instead, Falcón and Capillera offered only vague responses, which were not specific to each girl’s situation, in which they told workers to “problematise” the issue with each adolescent, without elaborating what they meant by “problematising”, one educator said.
Asked by openDemocracy how INAU deals with sexual exploitation, Correa, the director of INAU in Montevideo, said through “talking and listening” and reporting the suspected issue to the police or the prosecutor’s office. She didn’t mention Travesía, an INAU team that specialises in gender and sexual violence, exploitation and trafficking. Amatista educators said there have been no police reports made about potential sexual exploitation, only briefings to Capillera.
“Beyond the fact that one can talk, be present – which is not often the case – how do you put an end to this [exploitation] and say well, they stay inside [the home], they don't leave?”, Correa questioned. Falcón, who also assists in these situations in Montevideo, told openDemocracy that in “high-risk” cases, the victim can be moved to another department or city.
Related story: ID 55626
In August last year, 16-year-old Andrea returned to Amatista with strangle marks on her neck. “She had her whole neck marked; they looked like finger marks. She laughed at them and said they didn't matter. The next day she left and never came back,” an educator said.
“How much can you make young girls, who have normalised violence, understand the risks by talking?” she questioned.
Later, Amatista staff found out Andrea had also dropped out of school. In October, a family judge handling her case decided to separate her from her baby and INAU removed Andrea from the Amatista register.
Andrea and Josefina’s stories are not unusual.
In 2023, 36% of the 346 children and adolescents identified as victims of sexual exploitation in Uruguay were under INAU care, according to the National Committee for the Eradication of Commercial and Non-Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents (Conapees). The offences against them were committed during unauthorised outings. In the first six months of 2024, there were around 5,500 unauthorised outings from care homes by 750 kids and teens, according to INAU board member Natalia Argenzio.
In May last year, a 16-year-old girl who was 32 weeks pregnant and under INAU protection died in a hospital in northern Uruguay, the first maternal death of the year. At the time of her death, the teenager – who had fled the INAU care home where she lived 17 times – had been raped, was in poor health and was using drugs. She was one of nine girls at the home who showed signs of being sexually exploited. Another one of the girls, a 12-year-old, had had an abortion, while others had been missing for weeks.
In a report released in December, the INDDHH found INAU had committed “serious violations” of the rights of 11 girls at that home and found “failures to meet all the state obligations: prevention, detection, protection, and restitution of rights, as well as redress”. INDDHH’s reports have no legal consequences, and its recommendations are not legally binding.
In July, openDemocracy revealed that four teenage girls in the Himalaya centre, a private home in Montevideo contracted by INAU to assist kids with mental health issues, were being exploited at a drug dealing point. Despite knowing their situation and whereabouts, the authorities did nothing to rescue them.
Micaela called crying because she couldn't take it anymoreAmatista educator
During the investigation for this article, openDemocracy found that the Amatista Centre has authorised several teens to live with boyfriends or partners who had previously assaulted or abused them.
One such recent case is that of 17-year-old Micaela. In November 2023, she and her 18-month-old baby were authorised to move in with her mother. Soon after, Micaela called Amatista several times and said she couldn’t live with her mother as they weren’t getting on and needed to return to the centre. (Some educators suspected there may have been domestic violence in the home, though this is unconfirmed.) As her request was unanswered, Micaela decided to move in with the father of her child, a man who had repeatedly assaulted her in the past.
In July 2024, Micaela “called crying because she couldn't take it anymore”, an Amatista educator told openDemocracy. The staff on shift paid for her to get a taxi to the centre and managed to convince Cedrés to offer Micaela shelter. Then the educators learned that no member of the professional team had visited her to check how she was doing. Micaela only stayed for two days in Amatista before returning to her partner's home.
In November, a family judge decided Micaela should be discharged from INAU following the recommendation of Cedrés and her team. The judge granted Micaela’s and her baby’s custody to her mother. The team working with Cedrés cheered the decision as a success story. “They were happy. I welcomed them the first day they arrived. Today she is no longer at Amatista,” a member of the team wrote in the centre's WhatsApp group along with a photo of Micaela, her baby and her abusive partner.
However, one of the workers told openDemocracy: “There was a meeting of educators about this because we disagreed with the decision.”
INAU director general, Dinorah Gallo, refused to comment on the contents of the three complaints, telling openDemocracy: “These are issues under investigation” and the proceedings are “confidential”. Meanwhile, speaking about the state of the agency she helps to run, Correa, said: “INAU is a very difficult place to understand if you have not lived in it”.
*The names of the adolescents have been changed to preserve their privacy and integrity, except in the case of the murdered girl.
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