The title of this study, Uruguay: The Politics of Failure, indicates an emphasis on recent events. But Martin Weinstein devotes all but thirteen pages to the period before 1960. He does furnish a readable and clear political history of Uruguay from 1904 to the 1960s in the first four of the book’s five chapters.
José Batlle y Ordóñez as the president during 1904—1907 and 1911-1915 indeed functioned as the father of modern Uruguay, probably from the 1890s until his death in 1929. His vigorous support of organized labor, stressed in the chapter on “batllismo,” does help explain the increasing commitment of successive reform governments to workers’ benefits and the most elaborate welfare state ever attempted by a democratic republic in Latin America.
Weinstein maintains a sharp accuracy in his recapitulation of the party political struggles between Colorados and Blancos. But he stops short of rounding out the picture of citizen participation. For example, in his chapter on “Coparticipation,” he footnotes the fact that women voted in a presidential election for the first time in 1938. But woman suffrage at the local level came to Uruguay with the 1919 Constitution, and women had valuable experience in the 1920s participating in local elections. By not including that aspect, he underplays the fullness of Uruguayan voting.
By using Uruguayan scholars who have studied their own nation’s class structure, from Grompone to Solari, Weinstein vividly shows the middle-class nature of Uruguayan society.
Internal migration to Montevideo from the rural areas has been less a factor of opportunities in the city and more a lack of opportunities in the countryside. As the author observes, the failure of import substitution and the subsequent stagnation of industry found larger and larger numbers working for governmental entities. While Uruguayans concentrated on giving the plural presidency, a nine-member executive, a second chance from 1952 to 1967, national leadership failed to stimulate growth of the economy. Neither public nor private corporations reinvested enough funds to yield increased productivity, so that Uruguay could regain solvency.
Against a backdrop of runaway inflation, from 1969 to 1972, the Marxist Tupamaros were able to disrupt public life with violence until the governments of President Jorge Pacheco (1967-1972) and President Juan Bordaberry (since 1972) step by step retrenched from Uruguay’s traditional constitutional open society. This study ends with the immediate aftermath of the military-backed presidential coup of June 1973, in which congress was suspended and mass media censored. The author succinctly describes the work stoppages and chaos with which congress could not cope, but he does not deal with the Communist Party leadership of organized labor which helped maneuver congress into a showdown with the president and the military.
This book will be very useful for anyone seeking a compact political history of Uruguay from the turn of the century on. It reminds us not to underestimate the political tragedy which follows inflation large enough to wipe out the middle class purchasing power of a nation.
