The case of the Mennonite families in Florida is not a picturesque anecdote nor a whim of a rural sect. It is the clearest X-ray of the Uruguayan state instinct: when a family dares to educate without asking permission from the official mold, the system does not discuss. It denounces. It judicializes. It seeks to supervise. And if necessary, it turns parents into suspects simply for not handing their children over to the building, the plan, and the official on duty. The State did not ask if they were learning. It asked if they passed through its window.
This is the classic trap. Educating is confused with schooling. The child's right to be educated is confused with the agency's privilege to capture them. Education is a process. The state school is merely a provider, and moreover, one that does not compete, does not go bankrupt, and does not bear the cost of making mistakes. When that provider becomes a judge, the conflict of interest is brutal: the same apparatus that loses the "student" is the one that decides if the family is violating a right. It is not protection. It is defense of the monopoly.
In July 2024, the Central Directive Council of ANEP decided to initiate legal actions against the parents of a Mennonite community established in Florida. About eleven children were not attending public or private centers authorized in Uruguay. They received classes in the colony, with their own teachers, subjects ranging from mathematics and language to mechanics, carpentry, and cooking, periodic evaluations, and remote curricular support from a U.S. institution. There was no abandonment. There was no illiteracy. There were no broken children. There was another school. A school that did not belong to the bureaucratic catechism. Primary education detected it in 2023, offered the usual package — public school or an "authorized" school — and, upon refusal, elevated the case. Codicen did not hesitate: to the courts. The usual in public logic: if it does not enter the circuit, the demand must be forced.
Voting in favor were Virginia Cáceres Batalla, president of ANEP and a member of the Colorado party; Dora Graziano, councilor of Cabildo Abierto; and the two councilors elected by the teachers' union, Julián Mazzoni and Daysi Iglesias. The only vote against was from the nationalist Juan Gabito. Gabito then stated what common sense already knew and Justice later confirmed: that the children were not abandoned and that, after the LUC, there was no obligation to institutionalize them in the state corral. He lost four to one. The majority preferred the old reflex: if it does not enter the system, it must be forced. No one at that table risked their assets, their child, or their prestige if the file was an abuse. The cost was borne by the family. The rent of control remained with the agency.
In March 2025, Judge Noelia Gutiérrez Aguinaga dismissed the complaint. The right to education, she wrote, was not violated. The children were receiving education. INAU described them as content, happy, and able to express themselves. Education was part of their faith and way of life. And a legal fact crossed the ruling like barbed wire against the agency's arrogance: Article 127 of the LUC had eliminated the obligation of registration in an educational center and replaced it with the obligation of parents to ensure their children are educated. Article 68 of the Constitution reserves to parents the right to choose institutions or teachers. Educating is mandatory. Handing over offspring to the State is not. Children are not a resource of ANEP. They are not raw material for a five-year educational plan. They belong to their parents, who are the ones responsible if the child does not learn, does not work, and does not sustain themselves.
The Family Appeals Court of the 2nd Turn confirmed in July 2025. The majority understood that it had not been proven that the minors were not receiving education. The scheme was atypical — homeschooling under the direction of an international school — but atypical is not a crime. Atypical is not abandonment. Atypical, in this country, sometimes means just this: not passing through the ideological customs of the system. One minister dissented. That discord allowed ANEP to appeal to the Supreme Court. The agency did so in August 2025, already with a different composition, unanimously. The file remains alive. The principle does not: they did not manage to prove that those children were unprotected. They only demonstrated that it bothered them not to control them. When an entity cannot show harm and still insists, it is no longer defending the minor. It is defending its jurisdiction.
What ANEP defended was not a curriculum. It was a monopoly. The pedagogical superstition that "plurality" only exists if it passes through the official classroom, the official plan, and the official narrative. That a Christian, hardworking, and quiet family, teaching at home and remotely, is mutilating the child because they do not hand them over to the State's citizenship factory. The argument disguises itself as protection. In practice, it is guardianship. "Socialization" is invoked as if the only way to become a person were through administered recess, the classmate assigned by the district, and the teacher appointed by competition. It is a collectivist thesis disguised as psychology: the child is not formed in the family, the trade, and the community; they are formed in the institution. Those who do not pass through it are, according to that doctrine, incomplete. That is, available to be corrected.
There is another fallacy, more economic and more sordid. It is presumed that the State educates because it spends. That the official title certifies knowledge. That the authorization creates quality. The reality is the opposite: quality is proven in the result, not in the seal. If a child reads, calculates, works with their hands, takes exams, and speaks clearly, the end of education has been achieved. The means are secondary. Turning the means into an end is the mark of the protected producer: they do not want you to compare products; they want the law to force you to buy theirs.
The reports did not show illiterates or abused children. They showed children who studied, performed, and lived within a community with rules, work, and faith. Anyone who wants to discuss whether that model works for everyone can do so. Anyone who wants to turn it into abandonment must prove it. They did not prove it. Cáceres said it with almost clinical honesty: if they did not enroll voluntarily, it was appropriate to judicialize. The goal was not merely to "protect a right." It was to put the children into institutionalization. That is, into the system. Into the corral. Into the statistics. An unregistered student is, for the bureaucracy, an unformed child. It is a desertion. A threat to the narrative. A reduction of power.
The decision did not come from a technical limbo. It came from a Codicen that governed under the administration of Luis Lacalle Pou. ANEP is an autonomous entity: the president of the Republic does not have a button to annul a vote on a specific case. That is the form. Politics is another matter. Virginia Cáceres did not appear alone in the presidency of the agency. The Executive sent its approval; the coalition voted for her in the Senate. Graziano was the vote from Cabildo Abierto. Gabito, from the same party as the president, voted against and anticipated what Justice would later say. A president who wants to stop a case like this does not reform the Constitution. They call those they appointed and set priorities. In this case, there is no public trace that they did so. Silence also governs. And when the State puts a family in court for educating, silence is not neutrality. It is acquiescence. The autonomy of the entity serves, in these cases, as a pretext: power is exercised, but responsibility is diluted.
The irony is crueler. The same government that changed the law to remove the mandatory registration allowed its own ANEP to use the courts to demand, in fact, that registration. The LUC served the judge to dismiss the case. It did not serve, in July 2024, for the ruling party to stop its agency. They reformed the text. They preserved the reflex. The paper said freedom for parents; the apparatus continued to act as the owner of the children. It is the usual fate of half-hearted reforms: the norm is liberalized and the caste that lives by applying it in reverse remains intact.
This ruling does not canonize the Mennonites nor transform every ANEP official into a commissioner. It marks a boundary. On one side, the progressive and bureaucratic claim that the child is, ultimately, a subject of the national plan: they must be schooled, socialized, pluralized, and, if necessary, denounced. On the other, the older, more Christian, and more liberal assertion: first the family, then the State. Paternal authority is not an anthropological residue. It is the only arrangement in which the one who decides also bears the consequences. The official does not. That is why the official tends to standardize. And that is why the family, when possible, steps aside.
Justice, so far, has chosen the latter. If the Court confirms it, it will not have been a whim of a foreign colony. It will have been a brutal reminder for a country addicted to guardianship: educating is not a favor granted by Leviathan. It is an obligation of the parents and a limit to power. In Uruguay, it is still possible to teach without asking the monopoly for permission to exist.
