San José is the department of passage west of Montevideo: Route 1 towards Colonia, Route 3 towards the coast and Route 11 towards Canelones cross at San José de Mayo and Libertad, with logistics parks on Route 1, the country’s densest dairy basin and Ciudad del Plata next to the capital. A good share of the traffic is fleets registered in Montevideo. Urban fines are issued by the Intendencia and collected through SUCIVE; those on national routes, by the Policía Caminera.

Context and authorities

Traffic fines are administrative sanctions set out in Law 18.191 and in the departmental codes, expressed in adjustable units and applied by the intendencia of the department where the infraction occurs; the Policía Caminera issues those on national routes. Since the creation of SUCIVE the fine debt is checked and paid in any department together with the vehicle tax, and an unpaid fine blocks the transfer of the vehicle.

The Intendencia’s Transit Directorate issues fines in San José de Mayo, Libertad and Ciudad del Plata, with checks on the urban stretches of the routes; a defence is filed with the Intendencia and payment is made through SUCIVE or at its offices. Fines on Routes 1, 3 and 11 outside the towns are issued by the Policía Caminera and are also collected through SUCIVE.

What the API returns for this jurisdiction

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

  • Intendencia or authority and fine number exactly as the source publishes them.
  • Date, location when reported and article infringed.
  • Amount in adjustable units and pesos, with the status current at the source.
  • Coverage per source and a partial-result flag when any failed to answer.

How to check a plate in San José

Manual verification starts at SUCIVE, which unifies tax and fine debts of the nineteen departments, and continues at the San José Intendencia portal for the detail of each fine and the defence. That round, repeated for every unit, is what the API replaces: one lookup per plate across the integrated sources, with the result per source.

What to watch if you run a fleet in San José

A distribution fleet with a warehouse on Route 1 leaving for Colonia, the coast and Montevideo every day piles up Caminera fines and those of three 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.

For a dairy company with collection trucks covering the basin before dawn, the plate lookup before paying the vehicle tax prevents an urban-stretch fine from blocking the procedure.

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-SJ"
  ]
}

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