The modern history of Uruguay began in 1904 with the inauguration of Jose Batlle y Ord6fiez as president. A towering figure who was one of the most progressive national leaders of his era, Batlle mobilized immigrant workers and shopkeepers into a radical political coalition that transformed Uruguay into the continent's model democracy. Under "Don Pepe" and his successors, Uruguay became a prosperous, egalitarian nation of some three million people, in which the state played a. leading economic role. Literacy was universal, urban poverty rare, and a largely middle-class population could retire at 55 or 60 with confidence that their welfare was secure. At the same time, Batlle's polit- ical reforms consolidated the control of Uruguay's two traditional parties, the Blancos and Colorados, which have dominated the country since the 1830s, forming one of the longest-lived two-party systems in the world. But the economic prosperity and social welfare of this era of las vacas gordas-"the fat cows"-was based on a ranching economy dependent on its exports of meat and wool to Europe. When Uruguay's overseas markets shrank after the Korean War, its economy went into a decline that deepened in the 1960s, with rising inflation and stagnant "employment eroding living standards and detonat- ing a social conflict with political ramifications. When the traditional parties, led by an unresponsive elite unwilling to make needed reforms or redistrib- utd a shrinking economic pie, proved incapable of "resolving the deepening crisis, many Uruguayans began to look to the left for solutions. Although Batlle's enlightened commitment to proportional representation had preserved a spec- trum of leftist parties, his advanced social policies had deprived them of a mass political base. As a result, the Socialists had remained cafe radicals, with greater support among professionals than among workers, while the Communist strength in Uruguay's labor unions was not reflected at the polls. But dur- ing the 1960s, under the impact of national eco- nomic crisis and the Cuban revolution, radicalized Socialists formed the Tupamaro urban guerrillas, and the Communist Party made an electoral break- through. By 1971, the Tupamaros had outwitted the police, discredited the traditional political system, and were challenging the corrupt and ineffective state. By then, too, the Communists and Socialists had joined with progressive Christian Democrats and dissident Colorados and Blancos to form the Frente Amplio electoral alliance, inspired by Allende's Popular Unity victory in Chile the year before. The Frente Amplio failed to win the disputed balloting of 1971, but received an impressive one-fifth of the vote and nearly won Montevideo. It was this leftist political success, together with the rising militancy of the country's unions and the inability of the police to meet the Tupamaro threat, that led rightist Colorados and Blancos to call in the armed forces, which had not intervened in politics during this cen- tury. The Uruguayan military that took power in 1973 proved as brutal as their Argentine and Chilean comrades-in-arms in the Southern Cone's "dirty wars," but less deadly. Although they jailed and tor- tured leftist political and labor leaders on a record scale, they rarely killed them. As a result, Frente Amplio and Tupamaro leaders, such as Liber Seregni and Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro, survived the mil- itary dictatorship to provide experienced political leadership when it came to an end in 1985. The Frente Amplio played a key role in the military's negotiated return to the barracks, shoring up the left's democratic credentials. At the same time, the left won support from a younger generation of, Uruguayans because of its leading role in the clan- destine struggle against the dictatorship. As a result, when the first elections in 13 years were held in 1984, despite the military ban on Seregni's presidential candidacy, the Frente Amplio won roughly the same fifth of the vote it had received in 1971, and did even better in the 1989 elections. By then, the Frente had also benefited from the failure of Uruguay's traditional parties to solve the country's economic and social problems. The Colorados, led by Julio Sanguinetti, won the 1984 election, but their economic failures produced a Blanco government in 1989 under Luis Alberto Lacalle, whose efforts at neoliberal reform were no more successful in produc- ing either growth or equity. Although policy and leadership failures played roles in this disillusionment with the traditional par- ties after the restoration of democracy, at bottom it reflects a crisis of the political system. The emer- gence of the Frente Amplio destroyed the two-party system and made minority governments all but inevitable. The result has been a crisis of govern- ability. Uruguayans increasingly see their govern- ment as ineffective and irrelevant. A related trend has been a rise in the anti-politics and anti-party sentiments seen elsewhere in the region. This mood benefited the Frente Amplio, which had not been tainted by the exercise of failed political power, and projected an image of a fresh new start. The result was a leftist electoral advance that won 22% of the national vote in 1989 and 31% in 1994, and captured control of Montevideo, the capital city, in 1989.
