Artigas is the department furthest from Montevideo and the only one with two borders: the city of Artigas joins Quaraí, in Brazil, by the Concordia bridge, and Bella Unión faces Argentina and Brazil on the Uruguay river, in the heart of sugarcane country. Route 30 and Route 3 connect it with Salto and the rest of the country. Urban fines are issued by the Intendencia and collected through SUCIVE; those on the routes, by the Policía Caminera.

Context and authorities

Each intendencia applies Law 18.191 and its own traffic code: fines are set in adjustable units, notified to the plate holder and paid at the intendencia or through SUCIVE, which centralises the collection of vehicle tax and fines for every department. A pending debt shows up when renewing the tax, transferring the vehicle or requesting the debt-free certificate.

The Intendencia’s Transit Directorate issues fines in Artigas and Bella Unión, with checks at the bridge approaches and in the border shopping area; a defence is filed with the Intendencia and payment is made through SUCIVE or at its offices. Fines on Brazilian vehicles are collected on the spot and those on Routes 30 and 3 outside the cities are issued by the Policía Caminera.

What the API returns for this jurisdiction

In Artigas a plate is sent to the Uruguay fines API, which walks its integrated sources and returns each fine with the authority that applied it:

  • The authority that applied the fine and its number, unnormalised.
  • The date and reason, with the location if the source reports it.
  • The amount and status current at the source.
  • Which sources answered and which did not, on every lookup.

How to check a plate in Artigas

To check a plate by hand there are two places: the SUCIVE debt lookup, which shows vehicle tax and fines from any department, and the Artigas Intendencia portal, where defences and debt-free certificates are handled. With ten units that is enough; with a hundred, the API walks the integrated sources by plate and returns the result split by authority.

What to watch if you run a fleet in Artigas

A Bella Unión sugarcane harvest fleet rotating trucks and pickups between the mills and the farms piles up Intendencia and Caminera fines on units that change driver every week; looking up each plate at month end, with the result stored per authority, lets you assign them while the harvest record exists.

For an Artigas company with units crossing daily into Quaraí, the plate lookup before paying the vehicle tax separates Uruguayan debts from Brazilian infractions, which follow another circuit.

How to integrate

A lookup is a POST with the identifier and, optionally, the jurisdictions to include; the initial response accepts the job and the result arrives by status lookup or webhook, because official sources answer in seconds or minutes. The asynchronous APIs guide explains how to retry without duplicating lookups, and the API page describes the full contract.

JSONIllustrative example, not a contract.
{
  "plate": "SBC1234",
  "jurisdictions": [
    "UY-AR"
  ]
}

Limits and considerations

  • Fines from the Policía Caminera on national routes are processed by the Ministry of the Interior and are also collected through SUCIVE.
  • Amounts in adjustable units are converted at the current value; the final amount is set by the intendencia at the time of payment.
  • A source that does not answer is reported as such, never as an absence of fines.
  • The API neither pays fines nor handles defences; it delivers information to decide.

Sources and further reading