"Uruguay's 'Politics of Failure' May Point the Way for Argentina," Dayton Daily News (April 25, 1976)

[Review of  Martin Weinstein Uruguay: The Politics of Failure (Greenwood Press, 1975), $13.50.]

by Gordon Welty
Wright State University
Dayton, OH 45435

The fall of Isabel Peron overshadows the accomplished elimination of the last vestiges of democracy in neighboring Uruguay. Yet that collapse portends the direction Argentina may take. Weinstein, a specialist on Latin America who teaches at William Paterson College in New Jersey, has written a brief book on Uruguay, emphasizing the emergence there of corporativism or fascism. How, you ask, could this happen in the 'Switzerland of South America'? Uruguay is a buffer between the giants, Brazil and Argentina, created by their fiat. It is minuscule to the point that it is almost a city state, with more than half its population in Montevideo. In the countryside, a severe concentration of land ownership prevails. Over 80 percent of the farms and ranches represent only 14 percent of the arable land, while some 500 families control half the land. The development of the latifundia, the vast estates has its counterpart, the urban migration and the proliferation of the minifundia, the rural slums. It is in terms of the class dynamics implied by this process of concentration that we must understand contemporary Uruguay.

Uruguay's politics in this century was dominated by two parties. Batlle's Colorado Party was rooted in the city and its industry, with a petty bourgeois ideology of social change through land reform, citizenship and education for all, and equality at least of males. This party would not forthrightly join the structural problems of Uruguayan social life dominated by British imperialism and then Yankee neocolonialism. From its victories in the 1904 civil war, Batllismo as a populist political force was spent by the 1930's.

Herrera's Blanco Party was based in the countryside and the latifundia, with a rural fascist ideology of tradition, xenophobia, and hierarchy in all domains of life. Its motto was 'La armonia del capital y el trabajo', the false accord of capitalists and working people. under the leadership of Juan Gari, an identified CIA agent, the Blancos won the 1958 elections and conservatives moved into a dominant position in Uruguay's politics.

Weinstein notes that the collapse of the Batllista progressivism coincided with the Great Depression and the rise of the Fascisms of Italy, Spain and Portugal. The two-party 'co-participation' in Uruguay served as a powerful image of pluralism, however inappropriate was this characterization of its social and economic reality. Thus corporativism was not readily apparent in Uruguay because Fascism is presumed to be restricted to the one-party states advocated by Mussolini, Primo de Rivera or Salazar.

The granting of women's suffrage in 1938 only served to consolidate Uruguay's masked corporativism. After World War II, Batlle's nephew, Luis Batlle Berres, directed the rapid industrialization of the economy. Yet the public sector has grown even more rapidly, and the major employer of middle strata university graduates is the state. The end of the Korean War and the reinstatement of the Pax Americana of multinational corporations ended the boom, leading in turn to economic stagnation. A stagnant economy and a vast state payroll led to inflation; the cost of living was doubling annually by 1965. The real wage level declined steadily.

The famous Tupamaros were the product of this economic deterioration and the erosion of civil liberties, particularly under Jorge Pacheco's presidency. By 1970, Dan Mitrione, United States AID police agent had been assassinated, an event brilliantly portrayed in the motion picture by Franco Solinas, "State of Siege."

The Tupamaros, importantly influenced by Abraham Guillen, author of Philosophy of the Urban Guerilla and precursor of many clandestine political movements active today in Argentina and elsewhere, made several fatal errors. They supported an electoral coalition for the 1971 elections, allowing their tactical advantages to wane during the campaign period.  Juan Bordaberry, Pachecho's handpicked successor, was elected president with 24 percent of the vote, and the political repression continued unabated. A series of military coups in 1972 and 1973 followed to consolidate Bordaberry's power. The legislature was closed by presidential decree on June 27, 1973, then labor unions were outlawed. Since that time, Uruguay has not solved economic problems like inflation and has 'solved' the social problems by a fascist regime which tends to remake Uruguay as a client state of Brazil.

In sum, Weinstein shows strikingly that the mere existence of two political `parties' is no assurance against fascism.  There are contending class interests which are not reflected in 'parties', nor represented by populist heroes.  Without resolute leadership and a correct analysis of the political and social forces confronting the working people, economic crises can be the occasion of reaction rather than the springboard of radical social change.

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