Cerro Largo looks towards Brazil: Melo, the capital, sits on Route 8 coming from Montevideo and Route 26 crossing towards Tacuarembó, and Río Branco joins Jaguarão by the Barón de Mauá international bridge, with duty-free shops and border trade. Rice and cattle move trucks all year and Brazilian plates are part of the landscape. Urban fines are issued by the Intendencia and collected through SUCIVE; those on the routes, by the Policía Caminera.

Context and authorities

The framework is Law 18.191 on Traffic and Road Safety, which defines the infractions and expresses fines in adjustable units, and each intendencia applies them in its department through its transit office; on national routes the Policía Caminera acts. Fine debts are collected together with the vehicle tax through SUCIVE, the single system that unified collection across the nineteen departments, and they block the transfer and the renewal of the vehicle booklet.

The Intendencia’s Transit Directorate issues fines in Melo, Río Branco and Fraile Muerto, with checks at the accesses and in the duty-free 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 Route 8 outside the cities are issued by the Policía Caminera.

What the API returns for this jurisdiction

In Cerro Largo 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 Cerro Largo

A plate is checked by hand at SUCIVE and, for the detail and the defence, at the Cerro Largo Intendencia portal. The API does the same round at scale and returns each fine with the authority that applied it, so verification becomes part of the fleet process rather than a spreadsheet.

What to watch if you run a fleet in Cerro Largo

A rice fleet descending Route 8 towards the mills and the port piles up Caminera fines and those of several eastern intendencias on trucks rotating between drivers; looking up each plate at month end, with the result stored per authority, lets you assign them to the trip’s driver while the delivery note exists.

For a Río Branco company with units crossing the bridge daily, the plate lookup before paying the vehicle tax separates Uruguayan debts from Brazilian infractions, which follow another circuit.

How to integrate

The integration starts with one POST per vehicle, with the jurisdiction as an optional filter. Since sources answer at their own pace, the API accepts the job and delivers the result by status or webhook; store the idempotency key before sending, as the asynchronous APIs guide describes. The API page details limits and fields.

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

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