URUGUAY: Former Guerrillas Preside Over Both Houses of Parliament

By Dario Montero Reprint | | Print |

Darío Montero

MONTEVIDEO, Feb 15 2005 (IPS) - Former guerrillas now preside over both houses of Uruguay’s new Congress, which took office Tuesday, and the left holds an absolute majority for the first time in the history of this South American country.

As president of the Senate, former rebel leader José Mújica swore in Senator Julio María Sanguinetti, who served as president of Uruguay from 1985 to 1990 and from 1995 to 2000.

Another novel aspect is the fact that the ruling party – in this case the left-wing Broad Front coalition – will dominate both chambers of parliament for the first time in decades.

This will provide socialist president-elect Tabaré Vázquez with some breathing room after he takes office on Mar. 1, but will also give him less excuses if his government fails to live up to its campaign pledges, political scientist Jorge Lanzaro told IPS.

The new head of Uruguay’s 30-member Senate, Mújica, is one of the leaders of the Broad Front faction that took the most votes in the October elections: the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement (MLN-T), which is now a political party but was active as an urban guerrilla movement in the 1960s.

Mújica spent part of his 15 years in prison in a dried-out well, as one of the 1973-1985 military dictatorship’s nine so-called “hostages” who received especially rough treatment.

In the first session held by the new 99-member Chamber of Deputies, the legislators unanimously elected MLN-T Deputy Nora Castro, a school-teacher and former guerrilla who was also imprisoned during the dictatorship, as president of the lower house.

However, there are only 13 women lawmakers out of a total of 129.

As the heads of the two chambers of parliament, Mújica and Castro presided over the parade of honour of the army’s Florida Battalion – the same battalion that held Mújica prisoner during the regime.

“Life brings these little twists, and I don’t think that even the most creative novelist could have thought this one up,” said Mújica.

The lawmaker, who is affectionately known by his many followers and admirers as Pepe, raises flowers on a plot of land on the outskirts of Montevideo, served in the last two legislatures, and is the minister-designate of livestock, agriculture and fisheries.

The Broad Front’s triumph in the Oct. 31 elections, in which it took nearly 51 percent of the vote, not only awarded the presidency to Vázquez without the need for a runoff, but made it easier for him to govern over the next five years.

The leftist alliance was founded in 1971 by socialists, social democrats, communists, left-leaning Christian democrats and politicians who left the Colorado and Nacional parties, which have dominated the political life of this country of 3.2 million since it declared independence in 1825.

The Broad Front now holds 52 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, while the Nacional (or Blanco) party holds 36, and the Independent Party one. The still-ruling Colorado Party, which governed Uruguay during nearly all of its life as an independent nation, only has 10 deputies now.

The Senate is made up of 16 Broad Front legislators – who will be joined by Rodolfo Nin Novoa when he becomes the country’s vice-president, and thus the president of the Senate, two weeks from now – 11 Nacional Party lawmakers and just three senators from the Colorado Party.

“It was a long process of building and growing by the left which, although it has some things in common with its counterparts in Chile and Brazil, is apparently more cohesive, without the need for external alliances,” said Lanzaro, the founder and former director of the political science institute of Uruguay’s public university.

He noted that Chile’s ruling coalition, led by moderate socialist Ricardo Lagos, is a centre-left alliance, while the administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of Brazil’s leftist Workers Party, has had to forge alliances, in some cases with parties near the other end of the ideological spectrum.

Unlike Lagos and Lula, Vázquez will be able to count on a leftist majority in parliament.

To compete with the traditional parties in the elections, the Uruguayan left was forced to move towards the centre, said Lanzaro. That would apparently protect Vázquez from internal criticism, even from the most radical factions in the Broad Front, while permitting an orderly transition, he added.

The outgoing government of Colorado President Jorge Batlle has helped ensure a climate of stability, with conciliatory gestures and words, said the analyst, who noted that the present atmosphere is a far cry from the confrontations of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Broad Front was first emerging.

The inauguration of the new parliament culminated Tuesday night with a festive crowd gathering outside the legislature to celebrate and listen to performances by the Montevideo Philharmonic Orchestra as well as a number of rock bands.