Investigation · Series
What the State buys when it buys words
The question comes up often: does the State spend on indoctrination? Procurement records do not hold intentions, they hold purchases — so we went to the catalogue. Across its 84,011 live articles there is no code for a curriculum, a school textbook, a teacher's guide or an educational programme. The State has no way to buy an idea. What it does buy, for 11,000 million pesos, is the vehicle that carries one.
The question
What this data can settle, and what it cannot
Indoctrination is an intention. A purchase record holds no intentions: it holds what was bought, from whom and for how much. No procurement database anywhere can prove that a purchase sought to shape an opinion, and this site will not pretend otherwise.
But a neighbouring question can be answered precisely: does the State buy content? That is, does it pay an outsider to write what gets taught or said? That leaves a mandatory trace, because every public purchase is charged against a code in the article catalogue. If content were bought, the code would exist.
The method
Why this was not done by searching words
The obvious way to build this piece would be to search contract text for "impresión" or "publicidad". We tried, and it returns a false number: the largest contracts containing the word "impresión" are Primary Education's purchases of PHOTOCOPY PAPER and EXERCISE BOOKS. Adding those up counts some 5,000 million pesos of school supplies as printing.
So the count runs over the catalogue instead, code by code, with amounts that already come apportioned per line and per supplier. Each code falls in exactly one layer, so the four sum to the total without double counting.
Tell it where you can be protected
We publish what is in the open data. What isn't — the file, the message, what was said in the meeting — goes to Uruguay Leaks, the anonymous inbox run by la diaria, PODER and DATA Uruguay. The message is written for you: copy it, add what you know and paste it into their form.
Do not send it from your work computer or work email. Uruguay Leaks protects the submission, not the machine you send it from.
Uruguay Leaks is a project by la diaria, PODER and DATA Uruguay. We are not affiliated with them and receive no copy of what you send.
How to read this investigation
Amounts come from State-procurement open data (OCDS), normalised to pesos and apportioned per line. They are what was actually charged to each catalogue code, not the total of the contracts containing it.
That no catalogue code exists for "curriculum" does not prove nobody influences what is taught. It proves something smaller and more useful: that such influence, if it exists, is not exercised by buying it, and therefore is not investigated with this data.
Buying advertising is not indoctrination. A State communicates vaccination, road-safety and paperwork campaigns. This page shows how much and to whom, and leaves the judgement to the reader.
The largest recipients include public bodies selling to other public bodies. They are shown uncorrected, because that is how the source records them.