Mazda's Maps and Mwikiboxes

[Ares96]

We love a good bit of legislature packing.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

In 1919, the new Uruguayan Constitution came into force, providing for a two-headed Executive consisting of a nine-member ‘Colegiado’ looking after ‘administrative’ portfolios and a President with authority over the armed forces and the Police. It also instituted proportional representation in the lower house, the secret ballot, and the secular state.

Outgoing President Feliciano Viera was in favour of the Colegiado proposed by his predecessor, Jose Batlle y Ordonez, but the two Colorado Party leaders were drifting apart. Batlle wanted Viera to go a lot faster in implementing progressive legislation, while Viera had a more realistic view of the state’s financial situation. But Batlle had a major source of influence: the institutional structure of the Colorado Party as a mass-membership organisation with committees and conventions in almost constant session. His long-term goal was to use the loyal Batllista masses to draw up a forward-thinking programme which all Colorado office-holders would have to sign up to and comply with - this was part of the reason for his destruction of the power of the President and the imposition of frequent elections for the Colegiado, both of which would increase the relative power of the party members over their representatives.

The first step along this road was to create a parliamentary group including all Deputies and Senators, plus the Party Executive, whose communal decisions would be binding on all members. Of course, the anti-Colegialist ‘Riverista’ Colorados had already well and truly flown the nest, but the mainstream Colegialist Colorados would surely toe the line. It didn’t work out that way. Viera’s closest supporters relished their independence, and put forward an argument that the elected representatives of the people were the aristocrats of the mind, and were honour-bound to vote according to their personal consciences. Anything else was Bolshevism - the hot topic of 1919. Amid acrimonious debates, the Vieristas and the Batllistas parted company. But their parliamentary representatives voted together for a new President, Baltasar Brum, who took office in March.

Baltasar Brum had been brought to prominence by Viera, but was a neutral figure in this struggle. As such, he promptly started his own group, the ‘Colorado Union’, which presented itself as a nucleus around which the party could reunite. In actual fact, the Union was largely based on the police force, which was pretty much all the new President could control. Brum tried to convince existing police chiefs to organise his party, but the opposition press got hold of it and forced the Minister of the Interior to resign. Brum appointed the Riverista leader, Pedro Manini Rios, to the job, but had to dismiss him pretty quickly because Manini was sacking pro-Brum police officers and replacing them with members of his own party. Brum’s third Interior Minister was another Brumista, Gabriel Terra (who will come up later), and it will come as no surprise that after the Chamber of Deputies elections of later that year, there was a litany of complaints about police stations being used as bases for the Brumista polling day organisation.

But the lesson of 1919 was that the secret ballot made this kind of fraud much less productive: the Brumistas defended themselves by saying that they’d done very badly in the elections, so their fraud clearly hadn’t had much of an effect. Which is one defence you could go for, I guess. The other new feature of the elections was the system of proportional representation, which gave seats to the Catholic party and the Socialists, but also to all the factions of the Colorado Party. My sources are frustratingly vague about the spread of votes and seats within the Colorado ‘lema’ (within which the Batllistas, Riveristas, Vieristas and Brumistas acted as ‘sublemas’), so I have made no attempt to map this aspect.



Although most of the outgoing Colorado legislators had been Vieristas (they had a vested interest in continuing to vote freely in parliament, after all), the Batllistas were now clearly the most popular faction, with all the others being equally anaemic. This was important for the Colegiado elections scheduled for November 1920: as the Batllistas currently only had one seat out of nine (again, the bulk of the Colorado elites remained Vieristas) it was obvious that the Batllistas deserved at least one spot in the two seats up for election this year. And as the only prominent Batllistas were Domingo Arena (already on the Colegiado), Julio Maria Sosa (not trusted by Batlle) and Batlle himself, it was pretty obvious who would take that seat.

Three seats were available every two years for a six year term, with one going to the second-place party (the Nationalists selected a consensus choice in their top spot), and the other two to the winning party. Each party would also elect two substitutes to take over in the case of a vacancy or long-term absence during the two years until the next election. So four branches of the Colorado Party had to come together, with four jobs of unequal value to share between them. Ultimately, Batlle took the top spot (which would also make him chairman of the Council for the next two years), while the second went to Juan Campisteguy (a conservative Colorado now aligned with Manini’s Riverista party) and the ‘suplente’ positions were given to Sosa and to a Colorado Union man. Election expenses were spread equally between the factions: while the Batllistas had the largest membership, the Riveristas had a lot of landowner supporters, while the Brumistas and Vieristas were based heavily on civil servants with an eye to promotion.

The united Colorado cartel won by 8,000 votes. This was great for Sosa, as Batlle quickly lost interest in the reality of the Collegiate Executive he’d been pushing for a decade, and took long periods of leave.



Another reason for Batlle’s disillusionment with the Colegiado was the fact that the Vieristas were consistently keener to vote with the Nationalist opposition when making ministerial or civil service appointments, thus keeping the Vieristas (the ‘Partido Colorado Radical’, to give them their proper name - this wasn’t a claim to radicalism but to being loyal to the ‘roots’ of the Party, trust me, it makes sense in Spanish) over-supplied with well-paying jobs. The Colorado Radicals almost monopolised the Customs House, which became embarrassing when it burned down and it transpired that a Batllista subordinate (a relative of Councillor Domingo Arena) had made many complaints about the dangerously slack management of its head (a relative of Vierista Councillor Ricardo Areco). Anyway - the Vierista/Nationalist collaboration was anathema to Batlle, who was a strong believer in ‘Government by Party’, and a boon to the Nationalists, who claimed to believe in non-political ‘Co-participation’ of both parties in administrative matters.

Wealthy conservative Blancos, like Arturo Lussich and Martin C. Martinez (although Martinez was held in suspicion as a relatively late convert from the Constitutionalist Party), were in favour of this kind of co-participation, but the Nationalists were increasingly divided. A couple of young guns, led by Lorenzo Carnelli, were drifting towards Socialist policies, while another, Luis Alberto de Herrera, called for a populist crusade with openings towards both Right and Left - but no more chummy deals with Colorado elites. In an internal party struggle, Herrera got himself nominated as Presidential candidate for 1922 and a cousin of his was put in as the top Colegiado candidate.

Meanwhile, the Colorados did something predictably complicated. Sosa wanted to be President, but Batlle didn’t see the value in trading a Colegiado seat for the Presidency, so he barred Sosa, mollifying him with the top spot on the Colegiado ticket. Which was music to the ears of the Vieristas, as Sosa had used his substitute activity on the Colegiado to vote with the Vieristas and Nationalists at strategic points. For the other roles, ‘neutral’ Colorados were favoured: the formerly anti-colegialist Jose Serrato was chosen for the Presidency, while the second Colegiado position was first offered to someone so neutral that they didn’t even realise he wasn’t a Colorado until they made him the offer, and then to a random lawyer with no political background. Things were so byzantine at this point that the ‘Halty Formula’ came into play: depending on the outcome of the election, various members of the Colegiado would resign and hand over to substitutes in order to arrive at a ‘fair’ sharing out of the seats between the factions.

By this point, the Brumistas had died a death (most ended up as Batllistas, since they were obviously the largest ‘nucleus’ within the Colorado Party), while the Vieristas, who had held over 60 Chamber seats at the start of this post, now declined to five.



Name of the week: It’s a wonderful little period, but for my money, Oxilio Sichero (Nationalist deputy for Rivera, 1922) just beats out Guillermo Burmester of the Colorado Party in Salto.

 

[Alex Richards]

It's mad that we've reached a period where the electoral maps actually feel like there's democracy going on and everything leading up to the polls is an utter nonsense.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

It's mad that we've reached a period where the electoral maps actually feel like there's democracy going on and everything leading up to the polls is an utter nonsense.

The Colorado negotiations in the 1920s are some of the most complicated solutions to the problem of 'how do we pay lip service to democracy while still getting the outcome we planned' I've ever seen. At one stage the Batllistas suggested that they should run two presidential candidates against each other to create a sporting chance for the anti-Batllista to come through the middle.

Como el Uruguay no hay.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

President Serrato chose his Ministers from all factions of the Colorado Party, including the Batllistas - but the Batllista Colorados who had provided the bulk of Serrato’s votes decided to bring down every single one of his starting line-up, including one of their own. Various fights were picked over personal and policy issues: Pedro Manini Rios, the Riverista, was once again sacked. The most important of these was a dispute over compulsory military training. Serrato promoted it as a way of ‘nationalising’ the Army (i.e. incorporating the Nationalist supporters who tended to boycott it as a Colorado Party club), and other proponents argued that Batlle had suggested a similar policy a few years before - but the Batllistas came out strongly against it, heavily implying that the policy was actually about compulsory military service. In fact, in the elections of February 1925, they actually ran under the name ‘Contra el Servicio Militar Obligatorio’.

Meanwhile, the Batllistas were also stymied in the National Council of Administration, where despite being the largest of the Colorado parties, they were consistently outvoted by the Riveristas and Vieristas in collaboration with the Nationalist minority - Batlle called this combination ‘Rivieroribismo’, referring to Manuel Oribe, a Blanco leader from the first half of the 19th century. This would be comparable to calling a British Tory a Thatcherite. In 2050. Anyway - as the Colegiado only changed three of its nine members every two years, there was a question about whether the ministers it appointed should be regarded as automatically retaining the confidence of the Council after the arithmetic changed. In 1923, the Batllista members landed an agreement that Ministers should only serve for four years (their original bid of 2 years was rejected on account of the fear that the country would run out of suitable appointees), but failed to come to an agreement on who exactly the new ministers should be. At the outset of the Colegiado system, there were three Vierista ministers out of four; after the reshuffle, this proportion was unchanged.

The Vieristas were predicted to be about to die out as an electoral force, but they still controlled a lot of the ministerial positions and therefore a lot of the civil service. At the next National Council of Administration elections (due in February 1925 rather than November 1924 due to a delay in amending electoral laws and setting up an Electoral Court), they demanded that a Vierista be the second of the two Colorado candidates, as they would otherwise risk complete exclusion from the Executive. The Batllistas refused, arguing that they should be happy with a ‘neutral’ Colorado instead (of course, it was the Batllistas who decided what ‘neutral’ meant) and the Vieristas responded with a gamble. They ran outside of the Colorado lema in February, meaning that whatever votes they got would not be pooled towards the party’s other candidates, and that the Nationalists might have a sporting chance at winning.

But the Nationalists were also falling into internal dissension. Power in the party was finely balanced between the upper class fiscal conservatives and the populists headed by Luis Alberto de Herrera. In this election, there was a proposal to run two lists of candidates, headed by Herrera and Martin C. Martinez, with the other taking the second spot on each list. But the crisis was averted when Martinez volunteered to take the second place. However, a small group of ‘Blanco Radicals’, who thought that the true heritage of the Nationalist Party was to fight for radical, essentially social-democratic policies, tried to organise their own sublema in emulation of the Vieristas and Riveristas within the Colorado Party - but they were expelled altogether for their trouble, meaning that for the next decade, the Nationalists would deny themselves around 4,000 Radical votes in the name of organisational coherency. This time, though, Herrera picked a quasi-radical candidate for the second substitute position, making it difficult for the Blanco Radicals to run their own Council slate.

When the results came in, the Vieristas polled over 7,000 pointless votes, thus handing a national electoral victory to the Blancos for the first time in over 60 years. But it wasn’t all bad for the Vieristas, as they used their ‘Rivierioribista’ negotiating skills to persuade the electoral college for the Senator from Rivera to appoint Raul Jude, one of their leaders, as the Colorados’ only Senator from this intake. Another point to note is that the Riveristas and Vieristas proved very capable of voting strategically in the southeast, but not so much in the northwest, where they tended to do well in the same Departments - which would later limit their capacity to win seats there.



With his unprecedented electoral victory, Herrera became the true caudillo of the Partido Nacional, and looked like a shoe-in to win the Presidency in 1926. But until then, he had to serve as President of the Council - a role which, in opposition, the Blancos had always argued should be an administrative and apolitical one. Now he used it to score political points against the Colorado majority. One of his opponents was the outgoing President of the Council, Julio Maria Sosa, an unorthodox Batllista who had never quite received the full confidence of Batlle himself. He had announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic in 1923, and was incessantly touring the town halls of the country to raise his profile for the big election. But Batlle had other ideas.

Towards the end of 1925, an election for the Chamber and a third of the Senate was held. From now on, lower house elections would be held on a single national constituency, with seats being allocated to factions, parties and Departments according to an arcane mathematical formula. The result of this was to give a boost to minor groups, especially those voting within the lema of a large party - but the Blanco Radicals also benefited, taking home two seats where before they would have struggled to get one. Surprisingly, the Vieristas managed to increase their vote from February, demonstrating that there were no hard feelings about handing victory to the ancient enemy.

The ‘Union Colorada de Durazno’ was a local alliance of Radicals and Riveristas, who combined to elect a Sosa supporter to the Chamber of Deputies. Do keep up.



This proved that the Vieristas were absolutely integral to any Colorado pact which hoped to defeat the Nationalists in 1926 - and if the latter won, they would take not only the presidency, but also the majority on the Colegiado. Sosa hoped that he was sufficiently acceptable to the Radicals to lead the party to victory, but now, there was another Batllista candidate for President: Gabriel Terra. Terra was equally unorthodox, but that meant that he was equally appealing to the conservative Colorado sectors - and he had been a Brumista at the start of the decade, which meant that he had at least betrayed Batlle to his face. Batlle encouraged Terra to run for President against Sosa - but then he destroyed both of them in the press, accusing Sosa of cowardice in the 1904 civil war, and Terra of being a crypto-Catholic on account of the fact that he had attended his own daughter’s wedding ceremony.

The lack of any serious Batllista candidate for President transformed that role into a bargaining token with the minor factions, but there were two blockages in the way of an accord: firstly, Batlle wanted the top spot on the Council list for himself, and secondly, he wanted all Colorado Councillors to sign an agreement to vote as one rather than dealing with the Blancos. The Vieristas, of course, had split precisely because they rejected Batlle’s push for whipped votes. After much arguing and brinksmanship, the three parties came to an agreement barely a fortnight before the elections, leaving very little time to print the ballots. Batlle would go to the Council, but the second place would go to a Vierista, and the Presidential candidate would now be the conservative Riverista, Juan Campisteguy. There was also a second slate with pro-Sosa Batllistas voting for Sosa as President, and this was also supported by some Vieristas. This list, ‘For the Colorado Tradition’, got about a third of the Colorado votes, but its only achievement was to put Campisteguy over the line as the Colorado factions pooled their votes this time.

This time it was the Blancos’ turn to lose an election thanks purely to their own internal odium. The Blanco Radicals put up a no-hope ticket in this election, and still received 3,800 votes - well in excess of Campisteguy’s 1,500 vote margin over Herrera. More to the point, though, the Nationalists complained of a number of instances of electoral fraud, the largest of which involved 1,400 ballots in Minas being printed on slightly the wrong colour paper, which the opposition feared was an attempt to identify and intimidate voters. In reality, the printer just ran out of the right paper stock. But the new Electoral Court had partisan representation, and the Nationalist members of the Court blocked any adjudication on these issues until the end of February 1927 - and the new President had to be sworn in on the first of March. If no decision had been made by then, the Council could nominate one of its members as an interim President… but this body would be evenly split between the parties until the election results were approved, so it would be deadlocked. Which meant that the Senate would appoint an interim President until the Council could name an official interim. And the Senate was largely Nationalist. Outgoing President Serrato moved a number of Army units to the outskirts of Montevideo to forcibly appoint Campisteguy if the situation arose, while Batlle plotted to use his own loyal Army officers to return to power himself at the head of a Junta - you may recall that his entire rationale for the Colegiado was that it would prevent coups and dictatorships.

As it was, though, the fact that the heavily Colorado Army was sitting outside the Electoral Court and the Senate had an invigorating effect on the Nationalists within, and Campisteguy was declared elected the evening before his inauguration.



In the election to the Senate, the new Senator for Canelones (the Department surrounding Montevideo) was Pablo de Maria, an old member of the Constitutionalist Party who was now effectively an Independent - but he was elected by the Colorados on the electoral college, so I’ve marked him down as a Colorado. Meanwhile, the electoral college in Salto were unable to come up with a nomination for the entirety of this six-year term, meaning that Salto was without a Senator until 1933.

Name of the week: Eofelio de Dovittis (Colorado, Colonia) beats out his coreligionaries Rodolfo Scheckleton, Miguel Oficialdegui and the Riverista Felisberto Carambula.

 

[Alex Richards]

There is a sheer magnificence in a system that just starts having massive fluctuations in the number of Deputies a department could have at the same time as not having any provision for unfilled senate seats to be filled out of the election period, meaing somewhere could theoretically just end up with almost no representation for a few years.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

Now both Batlle and Herrera, the populist leaders of their respective parties, were facing each other in the Council of Administration, with the balance of power being held by a Vierista, Caviglia, who had made a lukewarm commitment to vote together with the rest of the Colorados. But Herrera skilfully drove a wedge between Caviglia and the Batllistas: he proposed an investigation into the administration of the Customs house, which was filled with Vierista appointees, to which Batlle was forced to accede over the opposition of Caviglia - who, once exposed to Ballista vitriol, tended to vote with the Nationalists thereafter. In protest, the Batllistas called on their Ministers to resign. But the Council couldn’t agree on replacements (the Herrerista and Principista factions of the Nationalist Party couldn’t agree on whether to vote for Vieristas), so the positions remained vacant for eighteen months.

At this point Feliciano Viera died, meaning that his Partido Colorado Radical was effectively dead as well. But it had an afterlife, largely because their domination of the casting vote in the Council had allowed them to dominate civil service appointments - in areas with lots of public works or civil service offices, they still attracted lots of votes from their loyal clients. They didn’t have a single leader after 1927, mainly split between Caviglia and Senator Jose Espalter, the former of whom (unexpectedly) drifted towards the Batllistas over time.

The Batllistas themselves were in the middle of another split, this time due to Julio Maria Sosa’s ambitions. Often accused of fascism, his positions were virtually identical to mainstream Batllismo except in the constitutional realm: he proposed four-yearly instead of almost annual elections, and wanted the Senate to become a corporatist chamber. Sosa founded a committee of supporters, the Partido por la Tradicion Colorada, which was supposedly a pivot around which the Colorado Party could reunite, which in turn meant that Batlle would look bad for expelling them and the Sosistas would look bad for splitting formally. So they just never did, they just stopped attending each others’ meetings.

Nominations for the Colegiado in 1928 were relatively smooth on both sides. The Colorados ran two slates, one for the Batllistas and the other for a ‘Concentration’ of Sosistas, Riveristas and Vieristas. But Sosa’s hopes of pulling most of the Batllistas along with him were hopeless. Overall, the Colorados won the majority seats in the Council thanks to the failure of the Nationalists to deal with the Blanco Radicals, but the combined Blanco total in the Chamber exceeded the Colorado total for the last time until 1958.



The relative Nationalist majority in the Chamber shook the Batllistas into action: they now insisted that the Electoral Court, hitherto supposed to be elected by the Parliament, should have neutral justices holding the balance of power - which was what most of the Nationalists had wanted all along. Herrera’s faction passed this proposal, partly because the Batllistas were threatening to withdraw from electoral politics just as the Blancos had done whenever they were preparing an armed uprising.

In the meantime, a generational transition was occurring in the Colorado Party. Jose Batlle y Ordonez died in 1929 leaving no clear successor (Sosa had shot his wad a fraction too early and now moved to Europe in a huff, although his faction survived). Batlle’s sons, Cesar and Lorenzo Batlle Pacheco, inherited his newspaper, El Dia, and some of his influence, but Gabriel Terra was another leading figure. Terra badly wanted to be President, which was a problem because Batllista doctrine declared that the Presidency was pointless now that the Colegiado existed, and Batllista tactics dictated that the Presidency should be offered as a bargaining chip to the minor factions.

Thus started some of the most complex intra-party negotiations the Colorados ever witnessed. Ultimately, they presented the following electoral menu under their united ‘lema’:

• Riveristas backing Pedro Manini Rios for President; and
• A cartel supporting Terra for President, combining:
  • Some dissident Riveristas; and
  • A sub-cartel combining:
    • ‘El Dia’ Batllistas supporting Terra for President and two Batllistas for the Council
    • Vieristas supporting Terra and two Vieristas
    • Pro-Terra Batllistas supporting Terra and two Batllistas, but different ones from the ‘El Dia’ faction
    • Sosistas supporting exactly the same candidates as the Terristas, only their ballot papers weren’t decorated with the picture of Batlle that the Terristas used.

Just to make this even more confusing, there was an informal agreement that if Terra won but Manini Rios got more than 17.5% of the vote, Terra would resign in his favour - it was necessary to artificially level the playing field to convince Manini to lead his Riveristas into any sort of alliance, no matter what the electorate wanted. But because there was no VP system, what would actually happen is that a replacement would be selected by the Senate. Which had a Nationalist majority. Who wouldn't necessarily vote the way the Colorados wanted them to. It was probably for the best that Manini was 138 votes off the ‘handicap’ threshold in the end.

The Nationalists also got in on the act. Aggrieved at Herrera’s occasional conciliatory actions towards the Colorados, the sons of Aparicio Saravia (principally Nepomuceno Saravia, the original nepo baby) went on a national tour to whip up fervour for a possible uprising. They were entirely against the Colegiado, and also taxes. Meanwhile the differences between the Herreristas and the Principistas broke out into open conflict as an ambitious Herrerista, Roberto Berro, announced his candidacy for the Council against the official Nationalist candidate. An unseemly panoply of lists mushroomed up, not helped by the fact that the Saravistas were only contesting the Presidential election and allowing their supporters to vote for any Council list they liked, or none. Predictably, Herrera lost again, but it was close between Berro and the Principista list in terms of the minority seat for the Colegiado. Herrera tried to go for a recount, not just to resolve this problem, but also to cause trouble in the Terra-Manini race - but nobody wanted to open that can of worms.



1931 marked Herrera’s nadir. Having lost so many times in national elections, he had lost credibility within the party and now the Principistas gained control of the party executive. These people, like the veteran Martin C. Martinez, believed strongly in the rule of law, which now included the Colegiado. They collaborated with the Batllista plurality instead of obstructing their policies - but not without getting some wins for their own party. This gave rise to the ‘pork barrel pact’ between Batllistas and Principistas, either a modern political coalition or a return to venal 19th century acuerdos, depending on your point of view.

As the name suggests, it was not the Principistas’ most principled hour. They agreed to a number of new public corporations, including the National Administration of Fuel, Alcohol and Cement (ironic acronym: ANCAP), with the quid pro quo that all the governing boards would reflect the political makeup of the Council - two thirds Colorado, one third Nationalist. This would flow down to all public appointments, leading to a situation of ‘empleomania’ which lasted for decades and caused grievous problems to the Principista doctrine of tight fiscal control.

The opponents of the pact were the minor Colorado factions (who had been over-represented in the civil service up to now, and would now be purged to make room for pact appointees) and the Herreristas, whose furious objections ultimately boiled down to the fact that the Council would be the model and not the makeup of Parliament, which was much more favourable to the Nationalists. There was also a difference of opinion on whether the Principistas had invited the Herreristas to share the spoils or not. The furore permitted Herrera to regain control of the party executive at a convention meeting which lasted until 3:30 am.

Herrera was vindicated in the Chamber elections of November 1931, in which the voters backed him over the Principistas and gave the Nationalists another solid phalanx in the Chamber. The Batllistas also did well within the Colorado contest - but their delegation was split roughly half-and-half between supporters of Gabriel Terra (Terristas) and ‘straight’ Batllistas (‘netos’, supporters of the Batlle Pacheco brothers).



Gabriel Terra had been nursing grievances against the Colegiado system, but it wasn’t clear what he wanted instead: at various points he favoured parliamentarism, presidentialism or the ‘full colegiado’. He invited notables from all parties to discuss constitutional reform but absented himself from the meeting before he could be pinned down to a position. It’s not even clear that he understood any of the concepts involved, as he asserted at this point that the USA also had a Colegiado system. What is clear, though, is that he considered the Council’s recent spend-up to be foolish and its long-term impotence (before the pact) to be unworkable.

Terra became more and more authoritarian, while extending his control of the police. He appointed his brother-in-law, Alfredo Baldomir, as police chief of Montevideo, and then sacked the head of CID on the basis of a denunciation from the nephew of Jose Espalter, his Vierista Interior Minister. Espalter resigned, to be replaced by the late Batlle’s one-time attack dog and football reporter, Francisco Ghigliani. This new Minister closed down the Communist party newspaper and arrested one of their Deputies - illegally. He resigned, to be replaced by another guy, who also resigned soon after because Terra had suspended diplomatic relations with Argentina in a fit of pique. Terra was supported in this by the Herreristas, in a telling portent for the future.

The final election for the Colegiado was the only one which resulted in the kind of blowout Colorado majority that Batlle had once dreamed of. And yet it was only this way due to the unique circumstances in which the election took place: the straight Batllistas and Riveristas both abstained for various reasons; nevertheless, these abstentions were outweighed by the withdrawal of the Herreristas, who were now fundamentally split from the Principistas. (Incidentally, Herrera himself spent 1932 as a volunteer in the Paraguayan Army, where he was made an honorary General and saw action at the Battle of Boqueron). The winning slate consisted of Terristas in a cartel with Vieristas and Sosistas which was governed by some mysterious formula whereby the winners would resign in favour of minor faction substitutes partway through the term, the exact dates depending on the share of the vote each component of the cartel managed to attract.



Name of the week: Can’t beat the simple menace of Lizardo Gonzalez, although I’m also a sucker for the neo-Visigothery of Hermenegildo Melo.

 

[Alex Richards]

I feel like more parties should have de facto splits that are basically just everyone sitting in different rooms sending apologies to the other faction.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

In 1933 things got really heated. Gabriel Terra’s fourth Minister of the Interior, Demicheli, walked out of the Senate while he was being questioned on his basic principles - which seemed to be given to fluctuate more than you would expect from a statesman. After the walkout, the Senate passed a motion of no confidence in the President who had appointed him. Terra had also irritated the Council, responsible for financial policy, by suggesting in public that they should suspend payments on the foreign debt - which made it much more difficult for them to borrow on favourable terms.

On 31 March Terra launched his coup. Having squared the Army and installed his cronies as police chiefs, he was able to seize the key positions with just the fire brigade. The coup was bloodless, except for the suicide of ex-President Baltasar Brum, who shot himself in the street after failing to inspire the masses to rise up in defence of Uruguayan democracy. He thereby became a symbolic martyr, occluding the memory of his relatively lacklustre period in office. Some, however, have speculated that he was planning to commit suicide anyway due to some unspecified financial irregularities and simply spotted a good opportunity to (metaphorically) kill two birds with one stone.

One reason for the lack of opposition to the coup was that it had the tacit backing of the Herreristas. Terra had held a prior meeting with Luis Alberto de Herrera in which the latter promised to cancel his ‘March on Montevideo’ (directly copied from Mussolini, of whom Herrera was an admirer) and to use his good offices to convince Nepomuceno Saravia to disperse a gaucho revolt he was gathering over the border in Brazil. Herrera’s price was nothing more than a share in the spoils: the pork-barrel pact would continue, but with Terristas and Herreristas in command rather than ‘straight’ Batllistas and Principistas. By this point, ‘Terristas’ were mostly from minority sectors: of the 55 Batllistas elected in 1931, 25 had been Terristas, but only 4 or 5 of them supported the coup.

A constitutional convention was held within months in order to regularise the situation, but the election received a turnout of only 58% - Socialists and Blanco Radicals abstained along with the Batllistas and the Principistas, the latter now becoming organised as the ‘Independent Nationalist Party’. The broad support of a significant part of the population is demonstrated by the strong showing of Terrista lists versus Herreristas and minor Colorado parties.



The convention quickly agreed on a new single-President constitution, with (you will be glad to hear) elections every four years. There was a slight nod towards corporatism with the option of creating a National Economic Council with nebulous powers, but the most distinctive features of the new constitution were the ban on ‘usury’ (which still remains in the Uruguayan constitution) and the new rules for the Senate. Previously there was one Senator for each Department, but long periods of dominance by the Vieristas and later the Nationalists had made this unattractive to the new regime. The Terra-Herrera alliance settled on a unique model: a Senate of 30 members, 15 from each party. In other words, Herrera would be guaranteed half the seats in the upper house and, therefore, a veto over most legislation. Obviously this displeased minor Colorado supporters of Terra, such as the Riveristas, who had preferred a corporatist chamber in theory and a few seats for themselves in practice. Which was what they settled for in the end.

The final major action of the Terra dictatorship was the murder of Julio Cesar Grauert, a left-wing Batllista who was virtually a Communist fellow-traveller. He embarked on a series of speeches but was arrested for sedition and shot in a police station over which Alfredo Baldomir had jurisdiction.

An election was held in 1934 alongside the approval of the new constitution, which was also held to be a plebiscite on extending Terra’s term. The result was a resounding victory for the ‘Marzista’ groups, although the Vieristas were now finally dead, and the Sosistas were not long for this world. Only the Terristas, Herreristas and Riveristas remained major parties, largely thanks to their prominent leaders. Batllistas and Independent Nationalists remained aloof, although the Socialist Party participated once more.



Now that the ‘dictablanda’ was over, the opposition finally settled on a strategy to fight back. They took the verb ‘fight’ literally: 34 Nationalists, led by Basilio Munoz (veteran of the Aparicio Saravia revolts) and consisting mainly of left-wingers like the Blanco Radicals and Carlos Quijano, crossed the border as a proper old-school mounted gaucho troop. But the government had planes and could see where they were and where they were going, so after some brief exchanges of shots the survivors fled back from whence they came. A few months later, an individual malcontent tried to assassinate Terra while he was playing host to Brazilian dictator Getulio Vargas, but was unsuccessful.

The record of Terra’s second term was one of corruption and aimlessness. Far from being a right-wing corrective to Batllista excesses, Terra actually suspended the payment of overseas debt and protected certain industries, while pumping money into the construction of a large hydroelectric dam on the Rio Negro - with help from the German government. But certain Batllista projects, such as ANCAP and the national meatpacking works, which had been intended to challenge foreign trusts, were weakened under pressure from the business elite. Opinions differ on exactly what Terra did that wouldn’t have been done by the Colegiado government.

On the minor party circuit in 1938, the Socialists and Communists attempted a United Front for the Presidency, but it didn’t extend to the parliamentary elections. On the Terrista side, many of the supporters of the coup had died or distanced themselves from the government for various reasons - including Ghigliani, Espalter, Demicheli and Manini Rios. There was therefore a lack of heavy hitters to carry on as President, so the choice ultimately fell between Eduardo Blanco Acevedo (Terra’s son-in-law) or General Alfredo Baldomir (Terra’s brother-in-law). Baldomir was viewed as a more liberal and reformist figure, so he attracted the votes of the masses in Montevideo to fend off Blanco Acevedo - which was clearly not the outcome Terra had wanted, because he immediately moved to Italy. The backers of the two in-laws split the Colorado seats in the Senate and Chamber fairly evenly.

1938 was the first time women had been able to vote in Uruguay - a right which had been introduced under the 1934 constitution - and Baldomir apparently benefited heavily from women’s votes due to being something of a heart-throb by political standards. There was also an ‘Independent Democratic Feminist Party’ which attracted 122 votes nationwide, which at least put them ahead of a party for black civil servants who were aggrieved at racial biases in public sector promotions.



Name of the week: the constitutional convention was fantastic for names that could have belonged to minor Jedi - Toribio Olaso, German Roosen. I also admit to emitting a loud guffaw at ‘Ricardo Bonapelch’, but Anglophone surnames are my jam, and Miguel A. Pringles has to run away with the crown.

 

[Alex Richards]

Somehow it feels distinctly Uruguay at this point for the Dictatorship to have managed to narrow down the list of viable candidates to only members of the leader's family, and then still have a horrible split over that.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

Shortly after Alfredo Baldomir was sworn in as President, the Second World War broke out, with Uruguay being rapidly propelled into the limelight by the affair of the Graf Spee. This German naval vessel was chased into the Rio de la Plata by British (and New Zealand) warships and took refuge in the neutral port of Montevideo. After a couple of days, Foreign Minister Guani informed them that their time was up and, unable to effect much-needed repairs, Captain Langsdorff scuttled the ship outside the harbour. The Baldomir government gained international respect for its adherence to the laws of neutrality.

The general population favoured the Allies, who comprised many of Uruguay’s closest trading partners, but the proximity of neutralist powers in Argentina and Brazil made support for the Allies politically complicated. It was revealed early in the war that Germany had interfered in the lives of expatriates, including those involved in building the hydroelectric dam at Rincon de Bonete, by threatening to victimise their families in Germany if they failed to join the Uruguayan section of the Nazi Party. This, likewise, did little to win hearts and minds in the country.

One opponent of the pro-Allied policy was Luis Alberto de Herrera, who had been on holiday in Italy and loved it. Breaking point came when Baldomir agreed to host an American military base, which Herrera believed was a betrayal of the doctrine of firm neutrality and a challenge to the sovereignty of Uruguay. Herrerismo was a strongly nationalist current of opinion, which occasionally gave it some commonality with anti-gringo sections of the left. In this instance Herrera withdrew his Ministers from Baldomir’s government, leaving the President without a solid majority in the parliament.

This was a significant problem because Baldomir had been elected on a platform of reforming the constitution in order to return to full democracy (principally by removing the ‘half-and-half’ Senate in favour of proportional representation, and ending the compulsory sharing of Ministerial positions by the minority party). Barred from doing so within the institutions of 1934, he responded by undertaking a ‘good coup’, postponing the elections of 1942 and governing with a Council of State consisting of his supporters together with some Batllistas. The coup was bloodless except for a small scuffle in Congress, and Baldomir broke definitively with the Herreristas by claiming that their leader desired a ”government with a Nazi attitude”.

New elections were held under the new constitution later that year – and both the Batllistas and the Independent Nationalists participated for the first time since the coup of March 1933, the former due to a law change which allowed multiple sectors of the same party to ‘own’ the party name equally, although the Independent Nationalist Party remained separate from the official (entirely Herrerista) Nationalist Party. The Colorados therefore presented three presidential formulas: one of survivors of the Riverista party (Pedro Manini Rios had been lined up to succeed Baldomir before the ‘good coup’, but stepped aside now); one headed by Eduardo Blanco Acevedo consisting of hardline supporters of the previous regime; and a coalition of Baldomiristas and Batllistas headed by Juan Jose Amezaga, a jurist convert from a Nationalist family who had broken with Batlle over the Colegiado long ago.

The official Blancos fell to just over a fifth of the vote; the Independent Nationalists accrued half of that figure; a minor candidate who ran on a candidate of putting milk fountains on every street corner attracted 40 votes. But 57% of the national vote went to the various Colorado tickets, with Amezaga’s (‘Amezaga – candidate of democracy’) convincingly ahead.



Amezaga governed with a coalition cabinet largely comprising Batllistas and Baldomiristas, and entrenched the statist, developmentalist tendency of Uruguayan governments in the 1940s and 1950s. The Allies, desperate for imports such as wool (for uniforms), paid well over the odds for Uruguayan goods, boosting the national economy and providing money for social programmes. Ultimately, this was a short-lived boom as the end of large-scale wars after Korea and the rise of synthetic fabrics removed the essential conditions for primary export growth. In the meantime, however, Amezaga presided over advances in sectoral wages, annual leave and family allowances.

Another development of these years was the ‘Larreta Doctrine’, formulated by Independent Nationalist Foreign Minister, Eduardo Rodriguez Larreta (which would have been called the Rodriguez Doctrine if it hadn’t been popularised by US commentators). The Doctrine asserted that Latin America’s tradition of non-interventionism could be qualified when the country under discussion was not democratic. In the short term, this meant that Uruguay would support American interference in the domestic politics of Argentina as long as it was ruled by strongmen such as Juan Peron. In response, relations in the Rio de la Plata became frigid – Peron even organised a separate network of trade unions in Uruguay who carried out a general strike to destabilise the Colorado government. (Incidentally, a relative of Rodriguez Larreta ran for the Argentine presidency last year.)

The government did well enough at destabilising itself: the opposition Herreristas ramped up an anti-corruption campaign which implicated a number of figures in public office, including ex-President Jose Serrato and even Amezaga’s own son. The worst culprits were the Baldomiristas, remnants of the dictatorship who in some cases had backed democracy in order to stay in power for their own ends. In 1945, Amezaga broke with the Baldomiristas and formed a new agreement with the more doctrinaire right-wingers, the Blancoacevedistas.

At the 1946 election, therefore, the three main currents of the Colorado party (Batllismo, Baldomirismo and Blancoacevedismo) were all in competition with one another, and Batllismo came out unequivocally on top – for the first time since before the Terra dictatorship. Another feature of this election was the rise of minor parties, especially the Communists, who received 5% of the vote in a flush of pro-Allied enthusiasm.



The new President was an old Batllista, Tomas Berreta – with the emphasis on ‘old’, because he died within months of taking office. Berreta, a veteran of the 1904 civil war and a local boss in the Batlle y Ordonez organisation, provided a marked contrast with his urbane predecessor, coming from a farming family and a thoroughly demotic political tradition. Like Juan Peron, Berreta agreed to write off Britain’s debts accrued during the Second World War in return for hitherto British-owned industries such as the railways. In the short term this served to enlarge the state and keep national capital onshore; in the long term it meant a turn towards the Americas and the lumbering of the state with a variety of loss-making public services.

Berreta’s successor was his Vice-President, Luis Batlle Berres – his first surname will be familiar to attentive readers. Batlle Berres was a nephew of Jose Batlle y Ordonez and had been more or less raised by him. Exiled by Terra, the younger Batlle returned to be part of the Batllista leadership along with his cousins, Cesar and Lorenzo Batlle Pacheco. The Batlle Pacheco brothers held true to the literal content of their father’s manifestos, being strong supporters of a restored Colegiado constitution; Batlle Berres’ politics were described later as ‘neo-Batllismo’, adopting the left-wing spirit of the original Batllismo in a new post-war context. In practice, this meant closer relations with labour (including Communist elements, for which he was criticised by the Batlle Pacheco wing) and import substitution industrialisation.

Batlle Berres stopped various anti-union projects that had been favoured by Berreta, while increasing state subsidies and protectionist tariffs for domestic industry. He also implemented the creation of the nationalised railway company that had been kicked off by Berreta, along with a number of other new state-owned enterprises. To provide stability to his administration, Batlle Berres gained the support of Herrera for this expansion of the state by offering him a share of appointments to governing boards. This, of course, was exactly the same deal as had been undertaken in the pork-barrel pact and the Terra-Herrera pact. This time, it was called the ‘Patriotic Commitment'. For the moment, a government used consensus to enjoy the fruits of Second World War neutralism – and the neo-Batllista regime is remembered as the time when Uruguay became ‘the Switzerland of America’.

In 1948, though, Batllismo split. Exasperated by Batlle Berres’ policies, particularly in the sphere of labour law and state pensions, the Batlle Pacheco brothers forced their cousin out of the traditional ‘List 14’ organisation. Batlle Berres solidified control of the Batllista radio station (in which he was bankrolled by the same man who had funded the conservative Riverista split of thirty years previously) and started his own newspaper, Accion. Cunningly, this was published as an evening paper so as not to directly compete with List 14’s long-established El Dia mouthpiece. The Batlle Berres organisation was named ‘List 15’, because it went one step beyond traditional Batllismo, and the two factions were consequently known as Catorcistas and Quincistas.

At the 1950 election, Luis Alberto de Herrera topped the poll with 31% of the vote, but due to the ‘Ley de Lemas’, the three Colorado candidates were able to pool their votes together to overcome him. Blanco Acevedo ran again for the right wing, but the main battle was between List 14 (18.3%) and List 15 (19.6%). The Quincista candidate for the Presidency was the respectable Andres Martinez Trueba, installed as a seat-warmer for the term-limited Batlle Berres’ eventual return.

The milk fountain guy dropped from 40 votes to 38.



Name of the week: Pantaleon Astiazaran of the Independent Nationalist Party was a long-serving representative for Durazno, and not a 17th century court composer as you would naturally assume.

 

[Alex Richards]

It's all feeling a bit Wheel of Fortune really.