The title of this small book is misleading. Batlle y Ordónez. Apogeo y muerte de la democracta burguesa is not a study of the reforms enacted by José Batlle y Ordóñez during the first decades of the twentieth century, but a Marxist interpretation of Uruguay’s historical process.
The book is divided into five sections. Part One describes Spanish colonization the effects of independence and the penetration of British capital in Uruguay during the second half of the nineteenth century. Part Two is a study of Uruguay’s social structure at the time Batlle was first elected. Part Three analyzes Batlle’s economic and labor policies Part Four studies the influence that shaped Batlle’s thinking and gives a summary of his ideas. Part Five is a very short description of Batllismo without Batlle.
Julio A. Louis contends that Batlle and his legacy, bourgeois democracy, can only be understood within a broad context that originates in Spanish colonization. The purpose of his somewhat lengthy first section is to show that by the time Batlle initiated his reforms, Uruguay had already become a “semi-colonial” society. Louis then proceeds to explain how Batlle, instead of attacking Uruguay’s fundamental problems, i.e., economic dependency, monoculture and the latifundia, embarked on a series of political reforms that revealed his non-revolutionary ideology. The author admits that Batlle had “progressive” ideas and that his reforms widened the participation of the Uruguayan masses in the political process. However, since he was unable to go beyond his liberalism, he could not give Uruguay a political, economic and social structure that would solve its problems.
Louis’ interpretation does not offer any extraordinary insights. It is not a scholarly work, based on original research. His bibliography, which lists six titles by Karl Marx and four by Friedrich Engels, does not include two important works: Milton Vanger’s José Batlle y Ordóñez: The Creator of His Times, and J. p. Barrán and B. Nahúm’s Historia rural del Uruguay moderno. However, Julio A. Louis’ book is worth reading because it is a Marxist critique of the traditional interpretations of Uruguayan history accepted by the Communist Party and the Socialist Party. It is also an attack on the tactics pursued by these two parties and a justification of the tactics adopted by Uruguay’s urban guerrillas in recent years.
