POLITICS-URUGUAY: New President to Inherit Thorny Rights Issue

By Dario Montero Reprint | | Print |

Darío Montero

MONTEVIDEO, Feb 29 2000 (IPS) - One of the touchiest issues to be faced by the new president of Uruguay are demands at home and abroad for the government to investigate the fate of victims of forced disappearance during the 1973-85 military dictatorship.

When President Julio Sanguinetti hands power over Wednesday to Jorge Batlle, also of the governing Colorado Party, he will leave behind a country with a stable economy but an 11.4 percent unemployment rate and a severe crisis in agriculture, on which the economy is dependent.

He also leaves pending the long-standing question of the fate of the disappeared.

Military and police accused of human rights violations committed during the de facto regime were let off the hook by an amnesty law enacted by Sanguinetti in 1986 and approved by voters in a 1989 plebiscite. But one clause of that law committed the Executive to investigating the fate of the victims of forced disappearance, without assigning blame.

According to the non-governmental Peace and Justice Service, 156 Uruguayans disappeared during the dictatorship, most of them in Argentina, where they were living in exile.

In late April 1999, Argentine writer and poet Juan Gelman asked the Uruguayan government to investigate the case of his daughter- in-law and grandchild.

Gelman said he had evidence that after her abduction under Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, his daughter-in-law María Irureta Goyena was taken to Montevideo in the second week of October 1976 from the illegal detention centre “Automotores Orletti” in Buenos Aires.

Her transfer to Uruguay allegedly took place in the framework of the Plan Condor, which coordinated the repression against real or supposed opponents of the dictatorships ruling the Southern Cone of the Americas in the 1970s and 1980s.

Irureta Goyena gave birth to a baby in Uruguay’s Military Hospital, and both were seen for the last time in late December of that year, Gelman told IPS from Mexico, where he has lived since going into exile in the 1970s.

Gelman’s request, stated in an open letter addressed to Sanguinetti in October, has drawn the support of around 150 international personalities, including Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and Nobel Literature Prize-winners José Saramago of Portugal and Günter Grass of Germany.

The United States, meanwhile, warned last Friday for the fourth time that the Uruguayan government continued to ignore a 1992 recommendation – reiterated in 1997 – by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission that the disappearances be investigated.

The latest US State Department report on the state of human rights in the world pointed out that despite the amnesty law clause that ordered an inquiry, none of the three administrations governing Uruguay since the restoration of democracy launched an official investigation.

That situation has tarnished Sanguinetti’s image abroad as a highly respected statesman of humanist tendencies.

Sanguinetti, however, says that since his first term in office (1985-90), Uruguay has made more efforts than any other country to redress the damages caused by dictatorships in the region.

“That gives us the moral authority with which we have faced this issue,” he told the Montevideo radio station ‘El Espectador’ last Friday. The president recognised, nonetheless, that “the truth about the disappearances has unfortunately not been discovered.”

But he blamed that failure on “many people who have been voicing demands,” including Gelman himself.

Sanguinetti said he ordered “an administrative, not legal, investigation, because the (amnesty) law does not permit otherwise.” Nevertheless, he said he was surprised by the writer’s public demand, which came “20 years after the fact.”

Gelman, however, told IPS that “the request was put to Sanguinetti after the confirmation of all of the clues arduously gathered over the years.

“Not until late 1998 did I obtain evidence of the presence of a pregnant woman, probably from Argentina, in the headquarters of the Uruguayan Defence Intelligence Service,” he explained.

“When I travelled to Buenos Aires and Montevideo in late April, what had been clues became certainties, and once there I requested an interview with Sanguinetti, who arranged for me to meet his chief of staff, Elías Bluth.

“I have not yet been officially notified of anything…and the president’s remarks Friday were the first official reaction on the issue.”

The leftist opposition parties have also criticised the treatment given the demands set forth by the families of disappeared victims, during Sanguinetti’s two terms and that of Luis Lacalle (1990-95), the leader of the National Party.

“Absolutely nothing has been done yet,” despite the amnesty law clause, said socialist Senator Reinaldo Gargano of the leftist Broad Front coalition.

Gargano, the first leftist ever to preside over the Uruguayan parliament, told IPS that “the performance of the military courts during the first government of Sanguinetti was a parody, a farce, because only those implicated in the offences were summoned to testify.”

Political analyst Oscar Botinelli considered the lack of response to the calls for an investigation of the fate of the disappeared one of the touchiest problems to be faced by president- elect Batlle.

Botinelli, the director of the polling firm Factum, commented to IPS that the question was whether Batlle, who promised to seek a solution to the problem, planned to “declare the issue closed, or reopen a debate that had been silenced.”

But the analyst pointed out that the issue was not the only problem Sanguinetti’s successor would inherit. He also pointed to the high level of unemployment and the crises plaguing industry and agriculture, which have given rise to loud social demands.

Uruguayan farmers are facing serious difficulties caused by the slump in commodity prices, the impact of the Asian economic crisis on the country’s main trading partners, Argentina and Brazil and, especially, the January 1999 crash of the Brazilian real.

The country is also suffering the effects of the current high price of oil and of European and US farm subsidies, given its dependence on agricultural exports – which have been hurt by a severe drought.

The new government will also have to deal with ongoing trade disputes within the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), while defining with its partners – Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay – the positions to be taken with respect to the future Free Trade Area of the Americas and talks with the European Union, he said.

Nevertheless, Botinelli pointed out that “Sanguinetti reduced inflation to between three and four percent a year, far below Uruguay’s historically high levels, and has left a relatively tame fiscal deficit.”

Uruguayans, meanwhile, are divided over the question of how well wealth is distributed. While according to official data and United Nations figures, Uruguay is one of the Latin American countries with the most equal distribution of wealth, the leftist opposition complains of the growing concentration of income.

But “more than a question of inequality, what people perceive is the growth of sectors that remain excluded from the patterns of consumption and access to certain services,” the analyst explained.

Sanguinetti downplays such criticism, saying the precautionary measures taken in periods of growth have helped Uruguay to ward off the effects of the international financial crisis better than most countries. One example, he said, is that “our unemployment rate stands at around 11 percent, compared to 15 percent in Sao Paulo (Brazil’s largest city) and 19 percent in Buenos Aires.”

Gargano, on the other hand, says the country is in a process of outright decline after 15 years of democracy, with “nearly 12 percent unemployment, a 3.5 percent fiscal deficit, a five percent drop in income in 1999 and poverty affecting 22 percent of Uruguayans.”

That situation, he said, will force Batlle “to resort to more drastic adjustment policies, which will hurt wages and pensions.”

Batlle, 72, lost the first round of voting in October to Broad Front candidate Tabaré Vázquez. But he won the November runoff thanks to an alliance between the Colorado and National parties, the two traditional parties that have alternated in power since the creation of the Uruguayan State in 1830, with the exception of the 12-year de facto military regime.

Leaders of the Colorado and National parties have admitted that they pushed through the two-round system of presidential elections, approved by plebiscite in 1996, to head off the left.

The Broad Front holds 40 of 99 seats in the lower house and 13 of 30 seats in the Senate. Pollsters and analysts say the leftist coalition, which has grown steadily since its founding in 1971, stands a solid chance of winning the presidency without going to a runoff in the 2004 elections.