By Dario Montero
MONTEVIDEO, Mar 2 2005 (IPS)

More sceptical and pragmatic today, survivors of years of prison, torture, exile, emigration and the fall of cherished ideologies have made it to the government in Uruguay, just as they did not so long ago in neighbouring Argentina and Brazil.

Tuesday’s inauguration of the leader of the leftist Broad Front, socialist Tabaré Vázquez, as president of this South American country completes a trio of Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) governments largely led by former activists who fell afoul of the military dictatorships of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Some political analysts have been striving to predict just how similar the Vázquez administration will be to the left-leaning governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil or Néstor Kirchner in Argentina. (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay are the four full MERCOSUR members).

Some have even attempted to compare the new administration with centre-left or left-wing governments with which it will undoubtedly have little in common, like those of Ricardo Lagos in Chile or Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and even the single-party socialist state of Cuba, led by Fidel Castro.

But others, more accurately, have focused on the unique aspects of Uruguay, which has a particularly strong democratic tradition and social welfare state, and of its political left.

Local political scientists Adolfo Garcés and Jaime Yaffé refer to the start of the "progressive era".

Back in the 1960s, some movements took up the armed struggle, inspired by Cuba’s 1959 revolution, while others sought to change the system through the ballot box, like Chile’s Popular Unity government (1971-1973) led by socialist president Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The Workers’ Party, which has governed Brazil since January 2003, also emerged from the ranks of political and labour activism against the dictatorship that ruled that country from 1964 to 1985.

The party was led by Marxists and Trotskyists, including former guerrillas, as well as activists involved in the Catholic base communities created by the followers of Liberation Theology (the preferential option for the poor).

In Argentina, the branch of the Justicialista (Peronist) Party led by Kirchner, who took office in May 2003, encompasses a number of survivors of the Peronist Youth.

Active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the members of the Peronist Youth were influenced by Marxism, "Third World" priests, and the social justice aims of the populist nationalist movement spawned in the late 1940s by Juan Domingo Perón.

These former activists, some of whom were Montoneros (urban guerrillas), survived exile, betrayal by some of their leaders, internal ostracism, the 1976-1983 dictatorship’s "dirty war" in which some 30,000 leftists and other opponents were "disappeared", and the neo-liberal wave led by another Peronist, Carlos Menem, who governed from 1989 to 1999.

Today they govern Argentina along lines similar to those of the Lula administration in Brazil.

In Uruguay, a country of 3.2 million set between Brazil and Argentina, a peculiar alliance emerged in 1971.

The Broad Front was made up of the Communist and Socialist parties, the Christian Democracy Party, political leaders who had left the traditional Colorado and Nacional (or Blanco) parties, a varied range of small left-wing factions, and even the political arm of the then-urban guerrilla Tupamaros National Liberation Movement.

Historians and analysts say the coalition’s broad, multifaceted ideological base gave it the strength to survive several internal disputes and splits, as well as the 1973-1985 dictatorship that took power with the support of the most right-wing sectors of the two traditional parties, and cracked down hard on the left.

"Never Again", a report by the Peace and Justice Service (SERPAJ), a human rights group, explains that the modus operandi of the Uruguayan dictatorship was to throw activists and opponents into prison for years.

That stood in contrast to the Argentine de facto government, which "disappeared" tens of thousands of people, and the 1973-1990 Pinochet regime in Chile, which killed and disappeared several thousand of its opponents.

Starting in 1972, a year before the coup d’etat, a total of 5,000 people were imprisoned in Uruguay, including 3,700 who never even underwent the parody of a trial, according to SERPAJ. All of the political prisoners were tortured and many were repeatedly raped. Seventy-five percent were under the age of 34.

With 31 detainees per 10,000 inhabitants, in the late 1970s Uruguay had the highest per capita ratio of political prisoners in Latin America, according to historians Gerardo Caetano and José Rilla.

In addition, nearly 200 people were "disappeared", most of them in Argentina, while tens of thousands of Uruguayans were forced into exile, or emigrated due to economic reasons.

But the fierce crackdown on real or suspected leftists failed to squash what many analysts described at its creation in 1971 as the "fragile" Broad Front coalition, which was dismissed by members of the traditional Colorado and Nacional parties as a "patchwork quilt".

On the contrary, after the restoration of democracy in March 1985, the Broad Front grew steadily.

In the late 1984 elections in which the Colorado Party’s Julio María Sanguinetti was elected president, the share of votes taken by the Broad Front rose to 21 percent, from 18 percent in the 1971 polls, even though its historical leader, Líber Seregni, was still banned from political activity, after spending nine years in prison. (He passed away in 2004).

Nor did the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the east European socialist bloc, and the subsequent impact on leftist movements around the world, undermine the Broad Front’s strength.

Despite the withdrawal of the Christian Democracy Party (PDC) and the Movement for the People’s Government – two of the founding groups – from the alliance in 1989, voter support for the Broad Front remained stable in the elections that year, and the coalition won the city government of Montevideo, the capital, which is home to nearly half of the population.

But the big leap occurred after reunification with the PDC, when Vázquez took 31 percent of the vote in the 1994 elections, and the electorate was split into three nearly equal parts.

Prior to the 1999 elections, a constitutional amendment created a system by which a run-off election was to be held if no candidate won 50 percent of the vote. Vázquez garnered 40 percent in the first round and 45 percent in the second, and the Broad Front lost the presidency to Colorado party candidate Jorge Batlle.

After that, and especially since the country’s 2002 economic collapse, few doubted that the left would win the October 2004 elections.

The hopes shared by those who voted for Vázquez are running high, and not only because this is the first time that the left will govern the country, which has been ruled since independence in the early 19th century mainly by the Colorado Party, with a few Nacional Party administrations interspersed.

The Broad Front, which won the elections outright in October without the need for a run-off, also has an absolute majority in parliament – something that no governing party has enjoyed since the mid-1960s.

That means that if the government fails to live up to its campaign pledges, Vázquez will not have the excuse that he has been blocked by the opposition in Congress, as Lula, and to some extent Kirchner, can allege.

The new president faces the challenge of dealing with the effects of the 2002 crisis in a country that saw the poverty rate rise nearly twofold, to 37 percent of the population, and wages fall by 17 percent, while more than 100,000 people, mainly the young and well-educated, left the country to seek better opportunities abroad.

Another immediate challenge is the pending investigation of the fate of those who fell victim to forced disappearance during the dictatorship, which Vázquez (who was not himself a political prisoner) already pledged Tuesday to continue.

How he deals with these and other questions will determine his ability to shore up the damaged credibility of Uruguay’s political leadership.

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