The sabotage that cost 70 million: How SUPRA suffocated the port of Montevideo

For seven consecutive days, the Port of Montevideo—Uruguay's main artery for foreign trade—was completely paralyzed by a decision of the Sindicato Único Portuario y Ramas Afines (SUPRA).

The reason was not a wage demand or inhumane working conditions, but rather a categorical rejection of the implementation of the Navis N4 system, a port management software that already operates in more than three hundred terminals worldwide and that, far from eliminating jobs, allows for the optimization of operations and increases the country's competitiveness.

The union's response was immediate and devastating: total strike, violation of labor peace clauses, and an escalation that ignored even the mediation of the Ministry of Labor. The result was an unprecedented operational collapse at Terminal Cuenca del Plata (TCP), which handles more than 90% of the country's container flow.

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Nine deep-draft vessels—the Maersk San Marco, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Sunny Phoenix, the MSC Adele, the Maersk Laguna, the ZIM Baltimore, the MSC Aino, the CAP San Tainaro, and the Seaspan Empire—were diverted to other ports in the region. Each one represented not only thousands of containers, but also entire chains of production, export, and employment.

In total, eleven thousand container moves were lost, which is equivalent to paralyzing 70% of the commercial operations of Uruguay's main port.

Economic losses exceed seventy million dollars. According to the Unión de Exportadores del Uruguay, foreign trade suffered a direct impact of sixty million: soybeans, meat, dairy products, and manufactured goods that could not be shipped, supplies that did not reach factories, and international contracts broken due to noncompliance.

To this must be added ten and a half million dollars evaporated in logistics services, one million in lost revenue for the National Port Administration from fees and tariffs, eight thousand two hundred fifty workdays that the workers themselves stopped receiving, and six thousand one hundred truck shipments that never materialized, leaving transporters on the brink of bankruptcy.

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The damage was not limited to Montevideo. Paraguay, which depends on the Uruguayan port as its outlet to the ocean, saw its exports interrupted. Rural producers had goods accumulated in silos, industries stopped production lines due to lack of raw materials, and small transport companies faced unpayable debts. All of them, hostages of a union decision that prioritized union control over national progress.

The company TCP had guaranteed zero layoffs and offered job retraining programs to adapt workers to the new system. It was not enough. SUPRA demanded a six-hour workday with no reduction in salary as a condition for accepting modernization, a demand that doesn't correspond to economic logic or the global reality of competitive ports.

Instead of negotiating responsibly, they chose institutionalized blackmail: stop everything until the country kneels.

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This is not a labor dispute. This is an act of economic sabotage with clear victims: the workers who lost their daily wages, the transporters who could not pay for their trucks, the exporters who saw hard-won markets vanish, and a country that falls behind while Brazil and Argentina move forward with modern and efficient ports.

Uruguay can't continue to tolerate a union, no matter how powerful, having the ability to paralyze its main gateway to the world. It is time to enforce labor peace agreements, sanction systematic noncompliance, and move forward with modernization that includes training, not extortion.

Because the next strike will not be a warning. It will be confirmation that, while some defend privileges of the past, Uruguay's future sinks in the Río de la Plata.