As a fellow Uruguayan, I want to add that citizenship comes without too many obligations; no military service or anything like that. The only one I can think of is that voting is compulsory.
On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend living in Uruguay; I had very good reasons to leave and I don't see myself returning anytime soon. And I'd argue any European passport is better than an Uruguay one - you can freely live and work in Europe, and you can visit the US without any visa.
Totally agreed on the European passports being overall superior (although some do come with obligations like military service for an Austrian passport for example), but they're much harder to obtain (I've been denied German citizenship).
I've read about your reasons for leaving (security), and sadly, I have to agree that they're still an issue (and I'd love living in Switzerland).
I think the risk can be minimized though. Ideally I'd want to live in Punta del Este or Maldonado rather than Montevideo, and the countryside is still pretty safe (though a computer nerd might die of boredom there :P ).
If its not too personal can you share some general information what nationality you have or had while applying to the German citizenship and what were the main reasons it didn't work out.
My grandfather was born to Prussian parents which came to Uruguay and then back to Prussia, but he was born in Uruguay, and lived in Uruguay from his teens onward.
When he went to obtain a German citizenship, he was asked to bring in a lot of additional paperwork (a church birth certificate being one I think). One of my uncles went to Germany to try to obtain it, but it was in vain.
I wasn't going to be granted German citizenship unless my grandfather, and then my father, were granted German citizenship.
My grandfather was as German as they come, but due to those quirks he wasn't granted citizenship, and so I wasn't able to.
Insecurity, basically. At some point during the last decade society kind of broke down, and the respect for human life was lost. I'm talking 12 year olds killing a store clerk in cold blood for 2 or 3 dollars, or worse [1]. This didn't happen just once; at some point there was a murder per day, in a country of three million people. The government, who are former terrorists [2] and based their campaigns on condemning the "repression" of the police, are ideologically incapable of being firm against all this (in fact, they're ideologically stuck in the 60s)
They have also given too much power to the unions, to the point that they can legally steal a factory from their owners, for example (in a nutshell, occupying it until it goes bankrupt, and then assuming control "to save jobs") Also, just before their first term in power, Uruguay had just came out of a terrible economic crisis that affected the whole region; basically, Argentina fell, and Uruguay is too small and dependent to have avoided it (and the old government was blamed). During the last decade the whole region has improved, so the economic situation in Uruguay is quite good right now (and the new government takes credit). But the worst thing is the way they're squandering this money in sort-of-well-meaning but very badly implemented "social" policies, so when the "up" economic cycle turns into a "down" economic cycle and the easy money runs out, there will be no reserves, a disfunctional and violent society, truly pathetic education level [3],... it's a ticking bomb.
On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend living in Uruguay; I had very good reasons to leave and I don't see myself returning anytime soon. And I'd argue any European passport is better than an Uruguay one - you can freely live and work in Europe, and you can visit the US without any visa.