News
The Benefits of Exporting Stability
The inauguration in Montevideo’s Plaza Independencia offers a flashback to the 1960s: a sea of flags some displaying the hammer and sickle, banners with left-wing slogans uniting ‘anti-fascists’ in favour of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, throngs of mate sippers with wafts of dope upstairs and sandals underfoot.
It’s a reminder of Mark Twain’s observation that ‘When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always 20 years behind the times.’
The literary giant might well have been visiting the small South American nation, an oasis of stability between volatile giants Argentina and Brazil, sometimes described as the ‘Switzerland of Latin America’. The inauguration of the left-wing Yamandú Orsi as president attracted those tripping the light fantastic, blowing their hooters, yelling slogans, and singing their inspirational songs, less mostly the Grateful Dead than assisted living. Orsi joined the Popular Participation Movement (MPP), founded by former guerrillas of the National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros, as a student. The MPP is part of the Broad Front – Frente Amplio – created in 1971, and today is made up of a broad spectrum from communists to social democrats.
Image: Victory rally in Montevideo
Image: Supporters on their way to the rally
Hasta la Victoria Siempre then. But Uruguay is fraught with contradiction.
Orsi replaced Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou, who had narrowly defeated the Broad Front candidate in 2020, the first time the centre-right Partido Nacional – National Party – had won the presidency since Lacalle’s father did so in 1989. The inauguration took place under the shadow of the historical symbol of capitalism, the Salvo Tower, built at the impulse of businessman brothers Ángel, José, and Lorenzo Salvo.
When completed in 1928 it was the tallest building in Latin America, its quirky Gothic façade distinct from the standard fare of shabby neo-classical and art deco. As if to remind attendees that political transitions were part and parcel of democracy, the grandstand for dignitaries was assembled in front of the statue and mausoleum of José Gervasio Artigas, the soldier, statesman and politician considered the founder of modern Uruguay, an early advocate for secularism and equality before the law.
Today Uruguay’s $18,300 average per capita income is twice that of Brazil’s, and greater than that of Argentina ($12,900), and Chile ($14,200). Uruguay is a monument to macro-economic stability and conservatism, the benefits of a high standard of education, one of the region’s lowest levels of inequality, and a relatively homogeneous (and small) population stretched over, by European standards at least, a vast area. The Netherlands, for instance, contains a population of nearly 18 million within an area less than one-quarter the size of Uruguay, which has five times fewer people.
“The main cause of our success is that we have gone through eight governments since 1985 with different parties,” says Alvaro Delgado, who narrowly lost the 2024 contest to Orsi. “Each of these presidencies have fulfilled their five-year term, and there has been a smooth transition of power. There is a strong democratic culture, a culture of accepting results.”
It can afford then to dabble with the left – or can it? It doesn’t seem to matter who becomes president – or does it?
A Great Ex-President
The day after the president’s inauguration on 1 March, it is appropriate that a Frente Amplio flag is flying at the turn-off Camino O’Higgins. The sign at the end of the dirt road alongside the triangular brown-brick building reads Centro Educativo Agrario – the ‘Agricultural Educational Centre’. This is the school of José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, which he opened in 2015 just days after his five-year term as Uruguay’s president ended. Just along from the school opposite a checkpoint manned by a solitary guard is his small cabin where he and his partner of 65 years Lucía Topolansky have run a chrysanthemum farm.
Image: Jose Mujica’s school
Flower power still flourishes more than half a century after the summer of love, at least in Mujica’s village of Rincón del Cerro.
Former president Mujica’s charca, or ranch, lies 20 kilometres west of the centre of Montevideo along the road to the city of Colonia del Sacramento, Ruta 1-Brigadier General Manuel Oribe, the motorway named after the Latin American country’s second president, a hint at the regional military habit of dabbling in politics.
Image: Road to Mujica’s farm
The country’s last military junta, which seized power in 1973, and ran the country for 12 years, nearly ended El Pepe’s political career before it had properly started. He first came to public prominence as a leader of the Tupamaros, the Marxist militant group inspired by the likes of Che Guevarra and the Cuban revolution, its formation in the 1960s drawing the military back into the chaotic and increasingly violent politics of the time.
Image: T-shirts showing Mujica’s image
Shot six times while resisting arrest in March 1970, Mujica was imprisoned for the duration of the junta, despite numerous escape attempts. Returning to politics in the Frente Amplio left-wing coalition, he was elected a Senator and became Minister of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries from 2005 to 2008. He won the 2009 presidential election and took office as president on 1 March 2010.
Image: Mujica on the line
Off the Ruta 1 highway, you are immediately surrounded by football fields, a hint at the country’s national sporting pastime, random skinny stray dogs, farms and their shops, and barns. Beef, wool and soya remain among Uruguay’s top exports, but today services and software dominate the economy and employment.
Many wealthy Argentinians prefer its personal and fiscal stability over their own country’s hyper-inflationary and populist norm, working in Buenos Aires and travelling back over the Rio de la Plata for weekends. This has led to a construction boom, notably in upmarket Punta del Este, 120kms to Montevideo’s east.
Ten years after the end of Mujica’s term, Orsi represents a new era of left-wing politics. But no one has expected a radical diversion from the sensible policies followed by successive governments since the 1980s. “We have a long tradition of democracy. The Partido Nacional has been in existence for 189 years,” says its chair, Macarena Rubio. “Institutions are strong, checks and balances work, there are low levels of corruption, and citizens know that they have the power, one of the advantages of being a small country with a literate population.” There is also good communication between political parties, she adds, “with high levels of trust in the system.”
This explains why the president would invite the president-elect to travel to regional Mercosur summits, for instance. Many among the elite are also bound by an unseen (and largely unspoken) tradition of Freemasonry, whatever their political party allegiance.
Such sensibilities started a long time ago, another feature of a small country seeking to use diplomacy to its advantage, along with differentiating itself from its neighbourhood. ‘If Uruguay were a big country,’ says Mujica, ‘people would probably say that social democracy was invented in Uruguay. That defined our whole history and our national nature. That’s why until 1950 we were considered an anomaly in America.’ But as he admits, Uruguay was not entirely immune. ‘After 1950, reality proved that we were truly Latin Americans.’
Pragmatism
Uruguayan pragmatism was evident in the manner in which the foreign ministry adroitly handled the Graf Spee affair. Harried by three smaller British cruisers, HMS Ajax, HMNZS Achilles, and HMS Exeter, the German pocket-battleship docked on the River Plate in Montevideo in December 1939 to make repairs. Leveraging its neutrality and shielded by the Hague Convention, the authorities forced the German ship out of territorial waters where its captain, Hans Langsdorff, scuttled his ship, much to Hitler’s annoyance.
True to prudent form, Uruguay cut diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany in 1942, and only declared war on Germany in 1945, too late to participate in any fighting, but grew its economy fast from beef, wool, and leather exports to the Allied armies.
Julio María Sanguinetti watched the Graf Spee dock in Montevideo as a five-year-old. The first president elected twice (1984 and 1994) by universal suffrage, he was also the first president after the return of democracy in Uruguay in 1985. A lawyer by training and journalist by profession, he served three stints as secretary general of the Colorado Party, a coalition partner of the Partido Nacional, only retiring from politics in 2020 at the same time as Mujica.
Image: Julio María Sanguinetti
”Habits are the best laws” he maintains, and a combination of Uruguay’s distinct colonial history “which offers an explanation for everything in its differences”, the fortune of having certain leaders, including Artigas, and geography have produced an unusual regional formula for stability and prosperity. The diversity of immigrants helped, not least the origins of the bulk of a wave of Italian immigrants from pro-Republican Genoa, Lebanese, Germans and the British, the Anglo-German legacy including global fame for the meat extract of Fray Bentos, a port city. Their Oxo cubes and corned beef became a staple of working-class populations in Europe, the long expiration dates making it ideal for explorers including the likes of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton and for armies. In 1943 alone, 16 million cans of corned beef left Fray Bentos, most of it to feed the Allied side in the Second World War.
“Uruguay sells political stability,” says Pablo Cohen, echoing Delgado’s observation. Cohen, a journalist, has written a best-seller on Topolonsky and Mujica Los Indomables – “The Indomitable”. “There is no magic formula to the country’s success,” he notes. “It’s based on prudency and a strong attachment to a republican ethos.” In Mujica’s case, despite his hard-left background, “democracy changed him. He now sees national liberation not in terms of democracy alone but in terms of national development.”
Gaucho country, where Mujica lives, has prospered from political stability and policy prudency. But he defined his presidency by frugality, donating 90% of his $12,000 presidential salary, refusing to live in the official residence, and content to keep driving around in his 1987 blue VW Beetle, registration SAO-1653, the car which became an icon of his presidency and the left’s campaigning. Mujica’s focus during his term was on driving down poverty, which fell from 39% to 11%, building houses for the poor, and improving education. This drew some criticism.
Hernan Bonilla of the Centre for Economic Development in Montevideo says that “while Mujica had a very good image internationally, he was a poor president,” failing to offer the correct message for a country that needs higher rates of economic growth; that “if you work or don’t work, it’s the same; or if you save or don’t save, it’s the same. This is not true for a country that needs to grow at a faster rate.”
This translated instead into the growth of the public sector to around 300,000 employees (in a population of 3.4 million), heavier taxes, and continued protectionism and state ownership, more of the type of statism instigated by José Pablo Batlle who served two terms as President in the early 20th century. Batlle’s introduction of welfare reforms and state-owned industries at a time when Uruguayan wealth was on a par with Europe and the United States coined the term Batllism, Uruguay’s variant of Peronism. It’s proven, as in Argentina, hard to shake but with considerably more positive benefits.
While the jury is out on Mujica’s success as a president, most seem to agree that, like Jimmy Carter and George W Bush, he has made a much better ex-president.
A Revolution Transformed
There were several influences on Mujica’s thinking which shaped his journey from revolutionary to statesman.
First, “the influence of the years we spent behind bars. Imprisonment meant great loneliness. And in order to stay alive, we had to think and to think again a lot. We owe much to those years in solitude. Man learns much more from pain and suffering than from victories and easy things.”
He believes that he would not be who he became without this solitude. “I would be more futile, more frivolous, shallower, more success-driven, more short-sighted, more aggressive, probably more seduced by success … Sometimes what’s bad is good. And sometimes, in turn, what’s good is bad.”
Topolansky adds: “The years in jail were quite useful as you put your imagination to work.” Or as Pepe puts it, “You need to have suffered some defeats to start enjoying tango.”
The second aspect is to be self-critical, respecting when you are wrong, “since we haven’t always been right,” says the man who once kidnapped people and robbed banks in the name of revolution – “it’s wonderful to go into a bank with a .45”, he laughs. “Everybody respects you.’ Self-criticism includes understanding where power lies. “I am a republican, but you know what the defect is: That presidencies tend to act like monarchies. A red carpet. And republics have to be different. Because power lies in the majority, one has to try and live as the majority does, not like a minority.” This explains his preference for a life of simplicity – since “at this point, I don’t need money, at all. To live, I don’t need more than I have.”
This belies, Pablo Cohen says, certain qualities which have made Mujica a political phenomenon, and a success: his ideological flexibility which centres on the art of reinventing and recycling yourself and your views from one era to another. “The world and prison,” he says, and Mujica admits, “changed him.”
Or as former president Sanguinetti put it “a man who is the best known Uruguayan in the world alongside Luis Suárez, and he scores goals,” Mujica “the Tupamaro who fought a democracy, and who went to jail and emerged after a dictatorship; the man who is part of the political life after a return to democracy, and who develops a phenomenal skill as a communicator, to the extent that he gains the presidency and becomes a personality outside of politics”; and the “third Mujica, after the presidency, who develops a legacy of peace, of living together, the one I have collaborated with, and whom I decided to leave politics with together.”
Third, there is a need to think about what you leave behind. “Humanity needs gigantic investments in favour of life … instead of old men accumulating wealth or making one- or two-million-dollar cars.”
“The best rulers,” he put it to the 2015 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States conference in Costa Rica, “are the ones that, when they step down, they leave behind a group of people that are far better than themselves.”
And fourth, communication is key. Mujica might have appeared a “philosopher president” to some, “the humblest of leaders”, or a “potty old uncle” to others such as well-known critic Graziano Pascale, but he developed a brand – inadvertently or not – that distinguished him from his peers.
Communication
“He could communicate as easily with a housewife, an ordinary citizen, a field worker as with a businessman, an intellectual, a scientist,” says Lucía Topolansky, herself a renowned political figure who served as vice-president and social activist. “He had a wonderful ductility. And he used extremely simple words to explain complex and deep things. That set him apart from other comrades.” It was this combination “of language that was simple and correct and integrity which generated the formula which took him to a government that was different, to a presidency, unlike others.”
The wheel turns, and priorities change. Mujica was among the more than 100 Tupamaros who escaped Punta Carretas prison in September 1971 by digging a tunnel from inside the prison that led to the living room of a nearby home. He was captured but escaped again. Today Punta Carretas is the site of an upmarket shopping mall, a large fast food sign shading its entrance, creating heartburn in more ways than one.
“I belong to a generation who thought that socialism was around the corner,” reflects Mujica in Emir Kusturica’s documentary on his life, El Pepe.
“My youth belongs to a world of illusion, like that of so many others. History has taught us that it was so much more difficult.” In a world where the trappings are regarded as part of the reward, his success is defined differently. “My definition of poverty,” he says, “is the one we owe to Seneca: It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.” From his vantage, success in leadership is not defined by materialism, that much is obvious from his circumstances, the small cabin on his charca, his VW and donations to charity, but by their legacy.
That’s worth all revolutionaries thinking about.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Friend
