Left in Uruguay: will the ballot box be the Global South's new resistance to the North?

The neighborhood of Lavalleja in Uruguay has hope. Although there is no indoor plumbing or sewage system, thousands of families have claimed land and built homes from scavenged materials. Among them is Norma Morroni, whose son was murdered by police 11 years ago as he protested the extradition to Spain of political prisoners. Morroni is helping raise a new generation, running the local child care center her neighbors built and bestowing kind words on the children.

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Now, Morroni and the neighborhood of Lavalleja have another reason to be hopeful. For it was in communities like this one that a coalition party of leftist groups began 23 years ago during the brutal days of the dictatorships in Uruguay and throughout Latin America. The political party was aptly called Frente Amplio, or Broad Front, and last year, while the gringos up north were reelecting George W. Bush, Uruguayans were ushering Tabare Vazquez, their first leftist president, into office.

Uruguayans on the left, however, are as cautious as they are hopeful about the man brought into office by popular social movements. Will Vazquez deliver? And if so, to whom? He has announced a national plan to spend on social programs but remains opposed to legalizing abortion and suspending payments on foreign debt. What does this win really mean for Uruguayans, one in three of whom lives below the poverty line?

Now, with the exception of Colombia, most of South America is run by left-leaning presidents who came into office in the last six years, including Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. For the left in the U.S., the victory in Uruguay and the larger regional movement is an opportunity to look at how the rest of the world resists imperialism and to figure out whether electoral politics can be about more than electing whichever Democrat wins the primaries.

How a Leftist Got into Office

Uruguay's reputation as "muy europeo" is accurate. It is one of the whitest countries in the Americas with only six percent of its population claiming African heritage and a near genocide of indigenous peoples that occurred when Spain and Portugal battled for colonial dominance in the nineteenth century. Like Europe, Uruguay is a rapidly aging country; its population growth was less than .01 percent in the last census. As part of the global South facing economic crisis and falling currencies, Uruguay has been hit hard by emigration too--approximately 15 percent of its population, particularly those in the "productive" age group, have left the country to send dollars or euros home to buy food.

The country, once known as the "Switzerland of South America" for its majority white population, stable economy and generous welfare state, was hit in 2002 by the recessions that shook Brazil and Argentina. For many Uruguayans who voted for the Frente Amplio, the deciding factor may have been the cost of mate, their beloved national tea. "When people could no longer buy mate, that's what made the difference," observes Ricardo DaCosta, an auto-body tradesman who returned home after two years in the United States.

Former president Jorge Batlle failed in responding to the crisis, further opening the door for Frente Amplio. Batlle supported privatization measures, including selling off public services to private companies. The effects of the economic downturn on daily life were crushing. Famed Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano lamented that "the eight-hour workday became law in Uruguay one year before the United States and four years before France; but today, to find a job is a miracle." A third of the country's 3.4 million people are now living in poverty, and unemployment is almost 15 percent.

Opposition to global capitalism was strong leading up to the election, and that translated into a defeat of Uruguay's two traditional parties, the Colorados and Blancos. In a nation filled with anti-U.S. sentiment, it didn't help Batlle's Colorado party that he was a strong ally of the United States. Batlle had cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2002, following an attack on the island's human rights record. Voters sent a clear message with this last election. Not only did they put Vazquez in office, but 62 percent of the electorate also voted for a constitutional amendment to keep water as a state-owned resource rather than selling it to private companies.

To some observers, Frente Amplio's presidential win runs deeper than hating Washington and the cost of a national drink. The party was formed in 1971 by socialists, communists and former Tupamaru guerrillas, who worked out their differences enough to oppose the dictatorship. According to Gustavo Lopez, an organizer with SUATT, Uruguay's union of taxi drivers and dispatchers, the political traditions of Spanish and Italian anarchists who immigrated in the 1890s and the socialists and communists who followed all contributed to the militancy of the country's labor movement. In the late 1960s, the tradition of working across multiple political interests led to the formation of the National Workers' Congress (CNT), a decentralized entity that, together with social organizations, solidified the popular movement. At the same time, the government signed its first pact with the International Monetary Fund, and the structural adjustment that followed generated conflict with the CNT.

Uruguay's elites turned to the military in the '70s, using the logic of the National Security Doctrine, a U.S. ideological frame-work for creating military dictatorships throughout South America. With this doctrine, the United States orchestrated the dictatorships and drew heavily on graduates from the School of the Americas for Plan Condor, the CIA's coordinated assault on democracy in South America in the 1970s. A military junta ran Uruguay between 1973 and 1985, imprisoning and murdering hundreds of people at a rate higher than any other country in Latin America's Southern Cone.

Frente Amplio got its start in Uruguay's popular resistance movements, including the Tupamaru armed movement, which began in 1970. "Some are in the Frente Amplio because they feel it's their last alternative," says Miriam Morales, a longtime organizer in Uruguay, who harbors some hope that the election signals a change in the country. "Others [are in it] because they think they can change it from within and others because we believe in the process, and we believe that you can deepen the degree of consciousness and struggle."

By 1985, the military junta that had run the country for more than a decade was ready to negotiate, and elections were held. Many in the military received amnesty for their past actions, sparking an outcry among leftists that continues to be heard today. Still, the end of the official dictatorship was "a beautiful time when so many political prisoners returned," says Federico Gomensoro, president of AFCASMU, one of the largest private-sector health care unions in the country.

Frente Amplio took to the ballot box. For the last 16 years, it won seats at the state, departmental and city levels. With this last election, the party now controls 16 of the 31 senate seats and 52 of the 99 seats in the chamber of deputies, which gives Vazquez the majority he needs to pass legislation.

Reaction Is Divided

Months after Uruguay's October 2004 election, the rooftops of homes in Lavalleja were still emblazoned with the new president's name. In his third bid for the presidency, the 64-year-old Vazquez won 51 percent of the vote. Thousands of people thronged the streets for the inauguration in March, with flags of Frente Amplio and its member parties waving and faces painted in the coalition's colors of red, blue and white.

Within hours of taking office, Vazquez restored official ties with Cuba and delivered a rousing inauguration speech. He laid out a $100 million Emergency Plan to address poverty because assistance "is not an act of charity, it is an obligation of society. Because the poor are not an object of charity, they are rightful subjects." Some Uruguayans, though, were left to wonder if it was more than just rhetoric. The very first item of Vazquez's plan was to renegotiate the foreign debt. Uruguay owes $12.9 billion, or about 106 percent of its Gross Domestic Product, and many leftists would like to follow in the steps of Argentina and stop paying altogether.

Twenty-one-year-old Marco Cantieri was an infant when the dictatorship ended. Now studying to become a teacher, he works as a taxi dispatcher and is a leader of SUATT. He is part of a new militant generation of leaders and holds out little hope for the Frente Amplio.

"For the people, there won't be any change; this isn't touching the interests of the most powerful," he says, citing the appointment of Danilo Astori as Minister of the Economy. In 1984, as a senator, Astori wrote a book urging no payment of the external debt, which currently stands at over $13 billion. But somewhere along the way, Astori took a right turn and has just finished negotiations with the IMF to continue payment while accepting new demands for structural adjustment.

Not satisfied with what he sees as a lack of real change, Cantieri thinks that "we have to keep fighting to take down the capitalist system." But other Uruguayans want to savor the moment and avoid criticizing the Frente Amplio too soon. "We have to give them a chance, to see what they can do," says DaCosta.

A Regional Bloc?

Ultimatcly, the Frente Amplio might do more abroad than at home. Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay are all now run by leftists, and most political observers see this "pink tide" as a reaction to the harsh neo-liberal economic policies enacted in the 1990s that left the poor in Latin America even worse off. Bill Fletcher, executive director of TransAfrica, explains that the government failure to respond to these IMF-type policies potentially goes beyond Latin America.

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"It seems to represent an interest in the development of a regional bloc against U.S. bullying," says Fletcher, "and as such serves as an example to other parts of the global south, including Africa."

The potential for working together is greater than ever, but it may not be enough to make substantial changes. Led by Venezuela, the governments of Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay are joining forces and pooling resources to start up Televisora del Sur (Telesur), a 24-hour news network for the hemisphere. According to USA Today, Chavez has explained that, "The idea is to combat the conspiracy by foreign networks to ignore or distort information about Latin America." Telesur is a promising development, but it remains to be seen whether the network will feature Black or indigenous reporters. There is less possibility of these countries forming a bloc to stop debt repayment, according to observers.

Frente Amplio, however, has already inspired a group by the same name in the Dominican Republic, and Simon Peralta, an organizer with the organization there, believes Uruguay's victory is one for the whole region. Now, he says, "a group of countries can say to the U.S.: 'Hold up. We're not going to raise our hands for whatever you want anymore.'"

That is what they seemed to have done this May when the Organization of American States refused for the first time in its 60-year history to approve the Washington-backed candidate for secretary general. The organization, which represents the Western Hemisphere countries, chose Jose Miguel Insulza, a Chilean socialist. The final decision, though, wasn't Washington-free. South American leaders met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was reportedly concerned about how the organization would monitor the close connection between communist Cuba and Venezuela's Chavez. The new secretary general publicly said that countries had to be democratically elected or be held accountable, which many political observers saw as a reference to Venezuela.

Irma Leites, who spent nine years as a political prisoner in Uruguay, sees more hope in popular movements than in electoral successes like that of Vazquez. Leites, who is now a member of Plenaria Memoria y Justicia, which organizes massive direct actions on former torturers at their homes, adds that "to govern is not the same as having power." The Frente Amplio will have to struggle to establish credibility with the more militant sectors of the left who are concerned with the U.S.-orchestrated occupation of Haiti, for which the former Uruguayan government provided troops. The Frente Amplio will also have to respond to calls for dropping the impunity that the military has received and suspending the payment of debt to the IMF.

"There is no anti-imperialist bloc among the governments of the [Global] South," says Leites. But, she adds, "there is anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle among the people."

Shannah Kurland works with Las Avejas, a women's network, her husband and three beautiful children on community projects in Rhode Island and is in the American Studies program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.