While our adventure continues towards the city of Colonia or Colonia del Sacramento, we first stopped by One of the most important locations in Uruguay’s Montevideo. The port of Montevideo or Puerto De Montevideo is a necessity to the economy of Uruguay. This is the primary location of all exports and imports to the countries goods and services. While there are other ports in the country, a great majority of the nations goods go through the port of Montevideo, this is partly because it is the entrance to the rio de Plato; which roughly translates as the road to riches, as it was one of the first places European countries were able to annex in South America while on their way to precious minerals in other South American countries. While Uruguay may not have the gold and silver that the Europeans were looking for, it was an easy entrance through the rio de Plato to rest of South America. Upon entering the port we were greeted with our tour guide, Mannuel who unfortunately was only able to give our tour through our translator Juan; who had been an immense help with us through South America, if Juan was reading this, we’d like to say thank you once again this trip would have been incredibly difficult without you.
The port today sees about 4000 crates of goods entering the country each day. It is mainly operated by ANP or the Administration National de Puertos which alone has about 700 workers that oversee the ports operations. In total there are about 3000 Uruguayans that work the at the same location. the ones who don’t work for ANP are hired by private corporations to operate facilities within the port. These can include refrigerated storage buildings for certain goods, in addition to the silos built to handle agricultural goods such as the soy products that make up a good amount of Uruguay’s exports.
As the Puerto De Montevideo is the most regulated port in the country they have strict standards. The port is notified of goods and crates 3-4 months in advance before their arrival, and each will be classified into a certain color based on the standing of the seller or company that owns each crate.To put simply there are three classes;
- Green-goods are in good standing and don’t need to be checked
- Yellow- paperwork is checked
- Red- paperwork and cargo is checked
As a student studying global supply chain management and analytics, it was an amazing opportunity to see exactly where goods and services enter and leave a country up close and personal. Each day the port experiences tons of information from each ship coming into Uruguay and keeping all the information accountable and in order is necessary so that crates are not misplaced on one of the many storage areas of the port. The port itself is one of the irreplaceable parts of many supply chains from different corporations and governments that depend on the income from their goods. Without the port, these corporations would not be able to complete their distribution networks.
While the port was one of our more quick visits, we are grateful for the chance from Manuel and Juan to share with us such an important part of the nations economy and for the history of the port as a whole. Hopefully, if we see them again we won’t have to deal with the rain. Till next time,
Randall Davis
SIE 2020, Latin America 