President José Mujica of the center-left Broad Front coalition developed a conciliatory tone toward the opposition during his first year in office, fostering support among the main opposition parties. However, leftist elements from within his coalition complicated the reform agenda. Separately, former president Juan María Bordaberry received a 30-year prison sentence in February for the 1976 kidnapping and murder of two parliamentary leaders during Uruguay’s dirty war.
After gaining independence from Spain, the Republic of Uruguay was established in 1830. The ensuing decades brought a series of revolts, civil conflicts, and incursions by neighboring states, followed by a period of relative stability in the first half of the 20th century. The rival Colorado and Blanco parties vied for political power in the 1950s and 1960s, but economic troubles and an insurgency by the leftist Tupamaros National Liberation Front led to a military takeover in 1973. For the next 22 years, the country remained under the control of a military regime whose reputation for incarcerating the largest proportion of political prisoners per capita in the world earned Uruguaythe nickname “the torture chamber of Latin America.”
The military era came to an end after the 1984 elections, in which Julio María Sanguinetti of the Colorado Party won the presidency. Sanguinetti, the military’s favored candidate, promoted a 1986 amnesty law which granted members of the armed forces immunity for human rights violations committed during the years of dictatorship. The military extracted the concession as its price for allowing the democratic transition the year before.
In the 1989 general election, Luis Lacalle of the Blanco Party was elected president. The 1990s were marked by relative economic stability and prosperity. Dr. Jorge Batlle of the Colorado party was elected president in 1999. He immediately sought an honest accounting of the human rights situation under the former military regime, while showing equally firm determination to reduce spending and privatize state monopolies. In 2001, crises in the rural economy and an increase in violent crime, as well as growing labor unrest, set off alarms in what was still one of Latin America’s safest countries.
A currency devaluation and default in Argentina at the end of 2001 caused a dramatic drop in foreign exchange reserves and unprecedented economic insecurity. By mid-2002, the government was forced to impose a weeklong bank holiday, Uruguay’s first in 70 years, to stanch a run on the country’s banks.
In October 2004, Tabaré Vázquez of the Broad Front (FA) coalition was elected president in the first round of voting, dealing a crushing blow to the Colorado Party. Vázquez’s coalition also captured a majority of seats in both houses of parliament, marking the first time in nearly 40 years that the president’s party enjoyed a parliamentary majority. Faced with the challenge of creating a stable macroeconomic framework and attracting foreign capital, Vázquez began his term by implementing a floating exchange rate, fiscal discipline, and an inflation-targeted monetary policy in a growing economy.
Uruguay fully repaid its International Monetary Fund (IMF) obligations in November 2006. Nevertheless, the Vázquez administration continued its commitment to economic orthodoxy, including the introduction of a personal income tax and a simplified the tax system in 2007. Aided by increased commodity prices, President Vázquez tripled foreign investment, maintained steady inflation, reduced poverty from 37 to 26 percent of the population, and cut unemployment in half.
Vázquez was willing to reopen the issue of the disappearance of some 200 Uruguayans during the military’s political dominance in the 1970s, known as Uruguay’s dirty war. Under its reinterpretation of the 1986 amnesty law, which allowed for higher-level officers to be tried, the administration arrested several police chiefs and army leaders in 2006 and 2007 for human rights violations committed during the dirty war. Former military dictator Gregorio Álvarez was convicted in October 2009 of abducting political opponents during the period of military rule and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Also in October, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the amnesty law as it applied to the case of a young activist who was tortured and killed in the 1970s; just days later, a public referendum on overturning the amnesty law failed. In February 2010, former president Juan María Bordaberry received a 30-year prison sentence for the 1976 kidnapping and murder of two parliamentary leaders.
In October 2009 parliamentary elections, the FA coalition won slim majorities in both houses, securing 16 of 30 seats in the Senate and 50 of 99 seats in the Chamber of Representatives. Aided by the ongoing popularity of President Vázquez, José Mujica of the FA coalition was elected president in November 2009, capturing 53 percent in a run-off vote. Mujica, a socialist senator who spent 14 years in prison for waging a guerilla movement against the military regime, focused his first year on national reconciliation and maintaining moderate policies. The left wing of Mujica’s diverse FA coalition stepped up criticism of his agenda after the election, specifically public sector reform and elements of the five-year budget law. In contrast to his predecessor, Mujica supports the amnesty law. In October 2010, the Chamber of Representatives adopteda bill that would nullify the amnesty law by establishing a constitutional right to investigate crimes against humanity, though the Senate did not pass the bill by year’s end.