El Correo Uruguayo, which has a deficit of 40 million each year, is going to create its own ecommerce platform

Regrettable: the Uruguayan State decides to "undertake" with other people's money

The announcement was not surprising for its boldness, but for its perfect coherence with the interventionist logic that has caused so many ills in Uruguay and around the world. The Uruguayan Post, a state agency that closed 2025 with a deficit of 36.4 million dollars (equivalent to 1,480.6 million Uruguayan pesos), thus completing six consecutive years of losses, decided to launch Ahíva Tienda, its own e-commerce platform. A marketplace that promises 0% commission, "free" shipping, and the promotion of products "with local identity".

The hard numbers are relentless. Between 2020 and 2025, the annual losses were: 1,412.9 million pesos (2020), 1,395.9 (2021), 1,221.5 (2022), 1,423.6 (2023), 1,546.7 (2024), and 1,480.6 million in 2025. In dollars, over 210 million dollars accumulated over six years. Each year, the Ministry of Economy and Finance provided subsidies practically identical to the operational deficit. In 2025, the agency had 1,468 employees. All this in a country whose Gross Domestic Product hovers around 85,000-96,000 million dollars according to estimates from the IMF and local sources for 2025-2026.

Meanwhile, private e-commerce in Uruguay is growing at rates that any bureaucrat would envy: online sales surpassed 4,000 million dollars in 2024 and are projected to be close to 7,000 million by 2027, with a 34% growth in transactions reaching 80 million in 2025. The main player is Mercado Libre, a company of Uruguayan origin (based in Montevideo) that operates without state subsidies, generates real value, and has built a complete ecosystem of marketplace, payments, and logistics. The Post itself already maintains an alliance with Mercado Envíos for the logistics of that private platform. Now, with one hand it extends that alliance and with the other it launches its own competing marketplace.

Without private ownership of the means of production and without freely formed market prices, it is impossible to rationally allocate scarce resources. The Uruguayan Post does not operate with real prices: its postal rates have monopolistic or regulated components, its losses are covered by the taxpayer, and its "investment" in Ahíva Tienda does not respond to a signal of expected profit calculated in terms of opportunity cost. How much does it really cost to maintain that platform? What resources (trucks, personnel, computer systems, real estate) are diverted from the basic postal function that no longer generates profits? The bureaucrat does not know because he lacks the proof of the market: the sovereign consumer voting with his money day by day.

What is visible is a state platform that "supports local entrepreneurs" with 0% commission and "free" shipping. What is not visible is that those costs are paid by the Uruguayan taxpayer (directly or indirectly via a higher fiscal deficit, which in 2025 hovered around 4.4-4.9% of GDP). Every peso that the Post spends on Ahíva Tienda is a peso that is not invested in the private sector, that is not used to reduce taxes, that does not generate the innovation that only arises when those risking their own capital must answer for real losses.

The effect is twofold: on one hand, it distorts competition in a market that is already functioning (Mercado Libre and other private platforms grow without asking anything from the State); on the other, it perpetuates the inefficiency of the Post itself. Instead of reducing staff, closing redundant branches, or privatizing non-essential services, it expands into a sector where there is already fierce competition and where the State has no comparative advantage whatsoever.

Ahíva Tienda is presented as a tool to "boost local production". But true successful local production —software, services, quality food, design— grows precisely where there is freedom of enterprise, not where the State competes with cross-subsidies. Mercado Libre, born in the region and with a strong Uruguayan presence, has shown that it is possible to scale globally without the treasury financing losses. The Post, on the other hand, has been demonstrating the opposite for six years.

The data is stubborn. Uruguayan e-commerce does not need state rescue; it needs fewer obstacles, more competition, and for the State to step back from where it does not add value. The chronic deficit of the Post is not a technical accident: it is the inevitable consequence of managing resources without the discipline of profit and loss. Launching an e-commerce platform with that track record is not modernization; it is the continuation of the same logic: using the coercive power of the State to displace or distort the voluntary action of millions of individuals who, acting in their own interest, are already building the digital future of the country.

What is regrettable is not only the deficit of 36.4 million dollars in 2025. What is truly regrettable is the stubbornness of believing that the remedy for state inefficiency is more state intervention. The market has already demonstrated —with numbers, with innovation, and without subsidies— that it can do better. The Uruguayan Post, once again, demonstrates the contrary.