While awaiting official data from a prison census announced by the Ministry of the Interior for March 2025, non-governmental organizations state that one in four inmates identifies as Afro-descendant.

Developing better statistics on the inequalities experienced by the Black population in Uruguay has long been a demand of Afro-Uruguayan groups.

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has criticized the Uruguayan State for its lack of information on this matter.

“We realized that investigating the prison situation is essential to highlighting the deeper structural problems we face,” Orlando Rivero, coordinator of the social organization Salvador, told weekly Busqueda.

“The judicial system’s racial bias is attacking in a very aggressive, very violent manner, and the only explanation for this is the impact of racism on that structure—but fundamentally on the judicial system itself,” Rivero stated before the Senate Education and Culture Commission last July.

“We can say that more than four thousand people currently in the prison system—representing 27% of the inmate population—are predominantly Black men under the age of 35,” he noted.

The latest national census, conducted in 2023, revealed that 10,6% of the Uruguayan population identifies as being of African descent.

In its report to the CERD that same year, the NGO Salvador estimated the incarceration rate for Afro-descendants in Uruguay at 720 per 100,000 inhabitants, equal to 210 per 100,000 for the non-Afro population.

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