THE FRENTE AMPLIO IN MONTEVIDEO
Uraguay’s socialist left is not only vigorously defending the country’s welfare-state legacy but is in the forefront of the movement to reinvent local government by decentralizing services and enhancing popular participation.
By Peter Winn
“You were never really a socialist,” Emilio Frugoni, the Uruguayan Socialist leader, accused José Batlle y Ordóñez, the president and reformer who transformed Uruguay during the first three decades of this century into the region’s first welfare state. “Yes,” retorted Batlle, “but you were never in government.” Batlle’s double-edged barb reflected both the inability of Uruguayan Socialists to win elections and the difficulty of implementing a socialist program when the left did take power.
Yet, in 1989, a Uruguayan Socialist, Tabaré Vázquez, was elected head of the government of Montevideo, the country’s capital and home to half its citizens, and in 1994, he came within 35,000 votes of becoming the nation’s president. Ironically, today it is Uruguay’s socialist left–united in a 18-party coalition called the Frente Amplio (Broad Front)–that is the chief defender of the legacy of Batlle’s welfare-state legacy. The Frente is also in the forefront of the movement to reinvent local government, stressing decentralized services and popular participation.
Key to this resurgence of the Uruguayan left and to its innovations in local governance has been Tabaré Vázquez, a respected oncologist and charismatic community leader. As a political novice, he was elected mayor of Montevideo in 1989, marking the left’s first ascent to the country’s second most important elected executive post. With Vázquez, the Frente Amplio has a candidate whose electoral appeal transcends its own ranks. If many Montevideans voted for him because of their identification with the Frente, and others because of their disillusionment with the traditional parties, many others voted for the Frente municipal slate because it was headed by “Tabaré.” Together these votes swept the left into power in the country’s capital, giving it the opportunity to experiment with new approaches to the problems of local government.
The Montevideo that the Frente Amplio took responsibility for in 1990 was a metropolis of 1.2 million people with a decaying downtown area, declining social services, and deteriorating public spaces. It was also being reshaped by a geography of increasing inequality, as the middle class deserted the city center for fashionable beachfront suburbs. Impoverished shantytowns mushroomed across the bay from those suburbs, and once proud working-class barrios eroded on the hillsides in between.
The combination of economic crisis, military dictatorship and neoliberal policies had led to a drop in living standards and social equality as well as a decrease in social spending and urban services. The social safety net that had once made Uruguay a model welfare state was badly frayed, and government, from garbage collection to mass transport, no longer worked well. Added to these traumas was the trial of dealing with a municipal bureaucracy notorious for its arrogance and inefficiency. Paying one’s taxes or filling out a forin could take hours; securing services from the centralized municipal government could take years.
The Frente Amplio promised to tackle these problems, creating a municipal government that was efficient, efficacious and responsive, services that were modern and affordable, and a city whose financial burdens and economic benefits were more equitably distributed. The political subtext was clear. If the Frente Amplio could turn Montevideo around in so dramatic a fashion, it would be in a position to mount a serious challenge for national power, and Vázquez would become a credible presidential candidate.
During his five years as mayor (intendente) of Montevideo, Tabaré Vázquez had to confront an array of problems inherited from the past, as well as implement the ambitious program of expanded social benefits and structural reforms that he had promised in his campaign. Moreover, although the Frente Amplio controlled the municipal council, its opponents controlled the national government, which in turn controlled the resources for housing, education and health programs. The Uruguayan left was experienced at being in opposition, but had no experience at all in government, Vásquez’ election was an opportunity to project and implement a new socialist vision, but also potential political quicksand in which the credibility of a leftist governmental alternative could disappear for a generation.
Some of the problems the Frente inherited–such as the contract negotiations with the municipal workers or the clogging of downtown Montevideo with unregulated street vendors–demanded immediate solutions. Tabaré averted a potential conflict with the municipal employees by reducing the work day from eight to six hours, and granting a significant wage increase, but incorporated citizen concerns by linking these concessions to productivity increases. With the Frente Amplio in power, dialogue replaced confrontation, negotiations were regularized and labor relations improved. These changes did not solve the problem of municipal services, but they were political successes.
The street-vendor problem was equally complex, but different in its politics. This problem too was an inheritance about which the Frente Amplio government of Montevideo could do little. It was a result of global trends and national policies that had lowered real wages and raised unemployment to the point where jobs were hard to find and often paid less well than selling consumer goods on the street. As a consequence, when Vázquez took office, the main street of downtown Montevideo, Avenida 18 de Julio, was clogged with vendors who jostled for position and customers, annoying pedestrians and outraging established merchants whose stores they were both blocking and underselling. The explosion of this informal economy reflected the social consequences of economic policies which the Frente Amplio had criticized, but it posed a political problem for them that could not be ignored.
Tabarés solution was to regulate the vendors, stressing the mediating role of the State while promoting the organization of civil society. The Frente Amplio municipal government encouraged the vendors to organize themselves and then–as with the unions–entered into a dialogue with them, while resisting their extreme demands. Out of these negotiations came an accord in which the vendors agreed to limit their stands to certain areas and to a certain density within those areas. On the other side, the government legitimated their activities and turned over certain downtown markets to the vendors, even building one for this purpose. It not only solved the vendor problem, it showed Vázquez’ government as willing and able to negotiate innovative solutions to seemingly intractable problems inherited from the past.
Scarce resources, however, limited Frente Amplio efforts to expand municipal services. Under Vázquez, a record number of new street lights were installed, but many areas of Montevideo are still dark and unsafe at night. Inadequate housing remains a serious problem in the city, with shantytowns expanding along with homelessness, but it is a national problem about which the municipality can do relatively little. Under the Frente administration, however, the municipality has promoted housing construction by giving municipal lands to communities for cooperative self-built residential housing, and by funding the rental of construction machinery and contributing materials at low prices which are repaid through long-term loans from the public Banco Hipotecario or foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It also gave more land titles to squatters than any previous administration, and created a construction-materials “bank” to help people improve their housing.
Health care was a similar story of good intentions frustrated by limited resources, despite the presence of a physician as mayor. Under Vázquez, public-vaccination plans were expanded and an eye-care and clinic plan was initiated, though not fully implemented. The distribution of subsidized milk tripled and free milk was provided for institutional daytime snacks, yet inadequate nutrition remains a problem for too many Montevideo families. Although starts were made and the promise of several programs was demonstrated, the limited resources available at the municipal level to fund ambitious social programs, together with the social costs of national neoliberal policies, made it impossible for the Frente to fulfill its campaign promises in these areas.
Where the Frente government did try to claim authority to redistribute resources, the result was political conflict and debatable success. In mass transit, Vázquez shifted the burden of subsidizing students and the elderly from other bus riders (through higher fares) to the municipality (through direct subsidies to the bus companies). Bus fares were reduced as a consequence–though they were later to rise again–and Tabaré reaped a political dividend at the outset of his administration. The financial cost, however, constrained his ability to fund other programs. For Vázquez it was a question of equity. “The wealthiest 10% of the Montevideo population don’t ride the bus,” be said, “but shouldn’t they pay a fair share of these bus subsidies?”[1]
A similar logic informed the controversial new property census, the redistributive bookend at the close of his administration. The debate revolved around the administration’s plans to undertake the first property census in three decades, as the first step to levying new tax assessments. The Frente had two goals in mind. One was redistributive: to make taxation more equitable in a city where the top 10% of the residences were worth as much as the remaining 90%. The second goal was to obtain the information to enable the administration to plan the development of Montevideo, where lack of regulation had produced “total disorder,” including factories built in areas not zoned for industrial uses, and unsafe construction in residential areas. The new census was blocked, however, by the Colorado and Blanco parties in the national assembly, and Tabaré’s efforts to hold a plebiscite on the issue–a political form that the Uruguayan left had invoked with great success during the 1992 anti-privatization campaign, and the earlier movement against an amnesty for human rights violators–never got off the ground.
Frente officials portrayed the conflict as one over the maintenance of such traditional Uruguayan values as solidarity and social justice, but in other areas Vázquez proved ready and willing to break with the Uruguayan tradition of state services and cut deals with the private sector over the objections of the radical wing of the Frente. Vázquez extended the privatization of street cleaning, begun under his Colorado predecessors, and sought to solve the problem of downtown decay by getting businesses to “adopt a square” and assume responsibility for its renovation and upkeep. He also showed his independence by visiting the United States, and by talking with International Monetary Fund officials, business leaders, and political opponents. Together, these steps projected him as a pragmatic leftist with an attractive program–but not necessarily with an answer to the neoliberal reform of the state.
If there was a part of his program as mayor of Montevideo that did point the way to an alternative leftist project, it was the decentralization plan. The phased process of decentralization of municipal government that the Frente introduced broke with the centralizing tradition of both socialism and batllismo. In many ways it is the most important initiative to emerge out of the process of leftist political renewal in Uruguay and its response to the neoliberal critique of the bloated and inefficient batllista welfare state.
Although the decentralization initiative eventually received broad political support, the thinking behind it emerged from the Socialist Party. Manuel Laguarda, one of the party’s leading theorists, stressed three factors in its development: the experience of dictatorship, whose brutality and intolerance convinced the left of the value of pluralistic democracy; the discrediting of state socialism in the Soviet Union, which led to a stress on establishing a “socialist civil society and a societal socialism”; and the discovery of social movements–from women’s groups to neighborhood associations–as a new “popular power” through which the new socialist society could be created and its values of social solidarity defended from the ideological assaults of neoliberal individualism. Decentralization was where an emergent civil society and a democratized state would intersect. It was envisioned “as a step toward a future socialist society in which democracy, pluralism and self-management would be central features.”[2]
There were two parts to the Frente Amplio decentralization project: “deconcentration” and “decentralization” proper. Deconcentration meant a geographic relocation of some of the state bureaucracy, shifted from the municipal offices in downtown Montevideo to local neighborhoods in order to increase their efficiency and responsiveness, as well as the control of citizens over their work. Decentralization itself referred to a ceding of some governmental powers to newly created local institutions, particularly the power to initiate projects. These new local institutions, which incorporated a mix of direct and representative democracy, would promote and facilitate popular participation of both individuals and organized groups.
Decentralization was a leftist response to neoliberalism in that it assured both liberty and equality. Its aim was not only to make government more responsive, but to transform the exercise of power and the management of daily life, creating a new democratic style of local government in which consultation from below replaced centralized authoritarian decision-making from above. Implicit was the political goal of turning passive citizens, whose political participation was limited to their obligatory vote every five years, into active protagonists with growing power over the decisions that affect their daily lives, from the location of services and the use of parks, to the planning of public investment and local development.
As a first step, Montevideo was divided into 18 administrative zones. A zone communal center (CCZ) headed by an appointed coordinator was established in each as the headquarters for services within that zone. The CCZs were staffed by municipal employees transferred from the downtown headquarters, who agreed to more flexible work rules in return for higher wages.
From the citizens’ perspective, this deconcentration meant more efficient local government, because they would not have to travel to the city center to file a paper, to secure services, or to obtain a decision. It held out the hope of a more responsive government as well. It meant a citizen would not have to wait in line for hours only to confront surly “service” from arrogant public employees for whom “the service window is a center of power” and who treat citizens as “enemies, not clients.”[3] To make the CCZ work, however, one coordinator confided “we had to submit” some employees to a “re-education.”[4]
Other changes promoted grassroots participation in local government–the “decentralization” proper part of the project. Under the CCZ framework, a committee structure was established through which local residents could participate. For example, in Carrasco, a suburban zone with both rich and poor residents, specialized neighborhood committees on public works and services met monthly with the coordinator and professional staff. Staff also met regularly with preexisting social organizations–like youth and women’s groups–and with unorganized residents. These groups generated proposals for the coordinator to implement, ranging from housing for shantytown dwellers and road building, to child-care centers and heal the education programs. But the key decisions on which proposals to implement and how to finance them remained in the hands of the coordinator and the municipality.
Inevitably, the new decentralization plan was a learning experience for citizens, employees and especially the coordinators, who emerged as the pivotal figures of the new system of local government. After three years of what one coordinator termed an “exhausting apprenticeship” and progress that varied from zone to zone, it was deemed a success. Physical centers had been established within each zone. Coordinators were assisted by professional staffs with training in architecture, civil engineering, gardening, vocational counselling, psychology and social work. Under these professionals were blue-collar work teams responsible for replacing burned-out streetlights, maintaining parks and cleaning out sewers and clogged drains. Few of the ambitious construction projects had been completed, but the fact that there were now 50 to 60 people in each zone who had the capacity to assess and modify the local development plan represented a big jump in participation.
By 1994, however, it was also apparent that the structure of participation needed to be improved. Too many of the committees formed at the local level had been composed of local notables–the doctor, the teacher, the notary, the merchant. This discouraged broad popular participation. To deal with these concerns, committee elections were established, and specialized subcommittees on everyday concerns such as roads or child care were created. Residents with expertise or interest in particular issues were urged to join the relevant subcommittees, even if they had no prior experience in local government or politics. The organized were encouraged to get their friends and relatives to participate.
Though problems still remained, the Frente Amplio was ready to move on to the next phase of the plan, which it hoped would solve these problems while extending and institutionalizing the project. The shape of this next phase emerged from the dialogue between the zone coordinators and Frente Amplio leaders and activists, who had different priorities and therefore different ideas about how to improve the decentralization process. On the one hand, the zone coordinators, who were Frente supporters but generally chosen for their professional experience and commitment, had concluded that decentralization would benefit from more democracy– especially direct election of the mayors of the newly created zones–more flexibility, and the creation of organizations that were more autonomous than the political and social movements of the past. They also saw a need to improve the coordination between zones, and to develop a neighborhood movement that was capable of thinking in terms of long-term development, not just immediate needs.
On the other hand, many Frente leaders and activists were disappointed in the non-partisan and non-ideological character of the new structures of grassroots participation. They had expected the unfamiliar CCZs to become the familiar mass fronts. When Frente activists arrived at a CCZ meeting and discovered there was no “struggle plan” and that it was difficult to shape the CCZs into party-led mass organizations, they concluded that these local committees were not political and they stopped participating in them. In one coordinator’s view, many in the Frente Amplio had difficulty accepting that the CCZ was “a place for participation, information and cooperation, and not a place for co-optation.”[5]
This refusal of some Frente leaders to embrace the new political modes implicit in the first phase of the decentralization plan led them to regard the CCZs’ success in securing greater citizen participation as a political failure. They rejected the coordinators’ proposal for the direct election of zone mayors, insisting instead that the parties should retake control of the process of decentralization. They had initially encouraged the CCZs because of the crisis of participation, but they had become afraid that the CCZs were emerging as a rival structure of participation that would deepen–not bridge–the growing divide between political parties and their mass base.
In the end, the differences between the zone coordinators and the party militants came down to a dispute over power, with the original vision of an empowering civil society contested by a more traditional notion of participation linked to the political parties. The next phase of decentralization, implemented in 1994, combined these visions in a complex system of local government that involved both Frente Amplio and opposition parties. This new system of local government included elected decision-making local boards and elected neighborhood councils in each zone, whose role was summed up by one Frente Amplio expert as forming two legs of a local-government tripod: “Together with the political ‘leg’ (the local boards) and the administrative ‘leg’ (the CCZs), the councils form the social ‘leg’ of the decentralization tripod.”[6]
The new neighborhood councils were deliberative bodies of 25 to 40 members elected by popular vote, whose main tasks were to plan and propose projects for the zone, advise the local board and the municipal government, help organize cultural, social and sports activities, and evaluate the actions of the municipal government. The local boards, in keeping with the Uruguayan tradition of power-sharing, each had five members, three from the Frente Ainplio and two from opposition parties. Within the Frente, the election of its local board members became intertwined with a national struggle over ideology, programs and power.
Ranging from the Guevarist Tupamaros oil the left to the social-democratic Socialists on the right, the Frente had been dominated by a hegemonic Uruguayan Communist Party (PCU), which had provided the multiparty alliance with 40% of its votes in 1989. But the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union was followed by the fragmentation of the PCU and the polarization of the Frente around “radicals” led by the Tupamaros and orthodox Communists, and “moderates” led by the Socialists. The Socialists had ridden the popularity of Tabaré Vázquez to rising party support in opinion polls, and they now wanted to convert that national support into increased power within a restructured Frente Amplio. They were pushing a moderate program that would promote the alliances which they felt were needed to win national elections. The radicals defended the existing Frente structure in which each of its parties had an equal say, and preferred an undiluted leftist politics, arguing that there was little point in winning national power if a Frente government could not carry out a leftist program of structural change.
In this context, the election for Frente Aniplio local board seats was viewed as an internal primary in which the moderates expected their growing popular support to bring victory. But, in the end, only 20,000 people voted in this unfamiliar election, making it a poll of cadres in which the orthodox Communists won 37% of the vote, with the Socialists a distant second, with only 20% of the ballots. With the PCU winning 20 board seats to the Socialists’ 11, the old Communist cadres may encourage a return to more traditional political participation along party lines, undermining the original goals of non-partisan popular participation in local government and community self-management. This risk may be compounded by a similar preference for a local politics of clientelism–with themselves as brokers–on the part of board members representing the Blancos and Colorados.
In addition to these political risks, the new decentralization scheme has to overcome structural tensions. The most obvious stem from the definition of roles–on paper overlapping–that each of these institutions will play. The functions of the neighborhood councils, for instance, need to be differentiated from the CCZ structure, which was created in the first phase of the decentralization process. Given the mix of parties, personalities and residents, each zone will have to develop a modus vivendi among all concerned. For the system to work, it will also be necessary to resolve the tensions between the municipal government and the new local governments.
In 1994, these processes of mutual adjustment were delayed and distorted by national and municipal elections. The 1994 presidential balloting narrowly returned former President Julio Sanguinetti and the Colorados to power, with the second-place Blanco candidate leading Tabaré Vázquez by only 12,000 votes. Less than 2% of the vote separated the three candidates. The Frente Amplio did far better than expected, taking 31 % of the vote, compared with 22% in 1989. In Montevideo itself the electoral result confirmed the Frente’s control over the capital with a decisive 43% of the vote–17% more than its nearest rival. This victory made clear that the alliance’s municipal dominance did not depend on its fielding a charismatic candidate like Tabaré Vázquez. His successor as mayor. Mariano Arana, an architect and urbanist, is better qualified than Vázquez to lead a metropolis like Montevideo, but he is a technocrat, without Tabarés political touch or enthusiasm for grassroots democracy.
What this all means for the decentralization program in its critical stage of implementation is still unclear. The Frente remains committed to decentralization, and its electoral victory in Montevideo means it will have the rest of the century to perfect it. Frente legislators have introduced bills that would strengthen the autonomy of the local governments, and Arana has reappointed Alberto Roselli, Vázquez’ director of decentralization. Yet, Arana’s own speeches give decentralization a lower priority than it had under Vázquez. He seems more likely to focus on improving the efficiency of the new system of local governance than on deepening popular participation. Under Arana, local governments may gain decision-making power over public-works contracts and the responsibility to monitor their execution, but they are unlikely to control their own budgets, a step that Roselli sees as necessary for the consolidation of the new system.[7]
Should the Frente Amplio succeed in resolving the structural and political tensions within its decentralization scheme and demonstrating that it can work in Montevideo, the problem of scaling up to the national level remains. Yet if that problem can be solved anywhere, it is in Uruguay, a small country often compared to a city-state, and long-known for its utopian political experiments. It is not difficult to envision a success ful model of decentralized local government spreading from Montevideo to the country’s other departments. Nor is it hard to imagine a national council composed of delegates from these new governmental organs providing a grassroot counter balance to the existing parliament. Less clear is whether the Frente Amplio’s experience of local government in Montevideo points to a democratic socialist alternative in the economic and social spheres.
For Tabaré Vázquez, post-Soviet socialism is about values such as “dignity” and “solidarity.” His Montevideo government tried to implement those values through its shift of budgetary priorities, construction of a new social safety net, and a more equitable sharing of the costs of neoliberal economic policies, while remaining a regulator of the private sector and the owner-manager of public utilities. He admits that lie has no ready alternative to neoliberal market economics, but argues that just as oncologists use the remedies they have at hand in the absence of a real cure for cancer, so leftists should implement their social and political strategies while developing alternative economic programs over the long term.
In the end, decentralization was Vázquez’ boldest new initiative and the one he considers his most important innovation. Recalling Batlle’s exchange with Frugoni more than half a century ago, Vázquez stressed: “Now the socialists are in government in Montevideo, and we can begin to realize our utopias.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Winn teaches Latin American history at Tufts University and is the author of Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean (University of California Press, 1995).
NOTES
1. Tabaré Vázquez, personal interview, September, 1993.
2. La República (Montevideo), September 24, 1993.
3. Arles Caruso, personal interview, August, 1993.
4. Lucia Torres, personal interview, August, 1993.
5. Isabel Ordóñez, personal interview, September, 1993.
6. Gabriel Kaplun, “Concejos vecinales, paces a muchos?” Brecha (Montevideo), December 3, 1993, p. 8.
7. Alberto Roselli, personal interview, March, 1995.
