The modern history of Uruguay began in 1904
with the inauguration of Jose Batlle y Ord6fiez as
president. A towering figure who was one of the
most progressive national leaders of his era, Batlle
mobilized immigrant workers and shopkeepers into
a radical political coalition that transformed
Uruguay into the continent’s model democracy.
Under “Don Pepe” and his successors, Uruguay
became a prosperous, egalitarian nation of some
three million people, in which the state played a.
leading economic role. Literacy was universal, urban
poverty rare, and a largely middle-class population
could retire at 55 or 60 with confidence that their
welfare was secure. At the same time, Batlle’s polit-
ical reforms consolidated the control of Uruguay’s
two traditional parties, the Blancos and Colorados,
which have dominated the country since the 1830s,
forming one of the longest-lived two-party systems
in the world.
But the economic prosperity and social welfare of
this era of las vacas gordas-“the fat cows”-was
based on a ranching economy dependent on its
exports of meat and wool to Europe. When
Uruguay’s overseas markets shrank after the Korean
War, its economy went into a decline that deepened
in the 1960s, with rising inflation and stagnant
“employment eroding living standards and detonat-
ing a social conflict with political ramifications.
When the traditional parties, led by an unresponsive
elite unwilling to make needed reforms or redistrib-
utd a shrinking economic pie, proved incapable of
“resolving the deepening crisis, many Uruguayans
began to look to the left for solutions.
Although Batlle’s enlightened commitment to
proportional representation had preserved a spec-
trum of leftist parties, his advanced social policies
had deprived them of a mass political base. As a
result, the Socialists had remained cafe radicals, with
greater support among professionals than among
workers, while the Communist strength in Uruguay’s
labor unions was not reflected at the polls. But dur-
ing the 1960s, under the impact of national eco-
nomic crisis and the Cuban revolution, radicalized
Socialists formed the Tupamaro urban guerrillas,
and the Communist Party made an electoral break-
through.
By 1971, the Tupamaros had outwitted the police,
discredited the traditional political system, and were
challenging the corrupt and ineffective state. By
then, too, the Communists and Socialists had joined
with progressive Christian Democrats and dissident
Colorados and Blancos to form the Frente Amplio
electoral alliance, inspired by Allende’s Popular
Unity victory in Chile the year before. The Frente
Amplio failed to win the disputed balloting of 1971,
but received an impressive one-fifth of the vote and
nearly won Montevideo. It was this leftist political
success, together with the rising militancy of the
country’s unions and the inability of the police to
meet the Tupamaro threat, that led rightist
Colorados and Blancos to call in the armed forces,
which had not intervened in politics during this cen-
tury.
The Uruguayan military that took power in 1973
proved as brutal as their Argentine and Chilean
comrades-in-arms in the Southern Cone’s “dirty
wars,” but less deadly. Although they jailed and tor-
tured leftist political and labor leaders on a record
scale, they rarely killed them. As a result, Frente
Amplio and Tupamaro leaders, such as Liber Seregni
and Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro, survived the mil-
itary dictatorship to provide experienced political leadership when it came to an end in 1985. The
Frente Amplio played a key role in the military’s
negotiated return to the barracks, shoring up the
left’s democratic credentials. At the same time, the
left won support from a younger generation of,
Uruguayans because of its leading role in the clan-
destine struggle against the dictatorship. As a result, when the first elections in 13 years were
held in 1984, despite the military ban on Seregni’s
presidential candidacy, the Frente Amplio won
roughly the same fifth of the vote it had received in
1971, and did even better in the 1989 elections. By then, the Frente had also benefited from the failure
of Uruguay’s traditional parties to solve the country’s economic and social problems. The Colorados, led by
Julio Sanguinetti, won the 1984 election, but their
economic failures produced a Blanco government in
1989 under Luis Alberto Lacalle, whose efforts at
neoliberal reform were no more successful in produc-
ing either growth or equity.
Although policy and leadership failures played
roles in this disillusionment with the traditional par- ties after the restoration of democracy, at bottom it
reflects a crisis of the political system. The emer-
gence of the Frente Amplio destroyed the two-party
system and made minority governments all but
inevitable. The result has been a crisis of govern-
ability. Uruguayans increasingly see their govern- ment as ineffective and irrelevant.
A related trend has been a rise in the anti-politics
and anti-party sentiments seen elsewhere in the
region. This mood benefited the Frente Amplio,
which had not been tainted by the exercise of failed
political power, and projected an image of a fresh
new start. The result was a leftist electoral advance
that won 22% of the national vote in 1989 and 31%
in 1994, and captured control of Montevideo, the
capital city, in 1989.
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