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Mazda's Maps and Mwikiboxes

The 1966 election was a slightly unusual one, in that it featured a constitutional referendum whose result would apply to the election that was being held. The UBD government opened the floor to a reform of the Executive to return from a Colegiado to a Presidential system, and all the participants therefore presented both a list of Colegiado candidates and a Presidential ticket (this time with a Vice-President for the first time), with the former holding office if, for whatever reason, the referendum failed. With the history of the Colegiado and the increasing economic distress of the country borne in mind, it shouldn't be a surprise to learn that a Presidential system gained the support of about 60% of the voters - however, the compromise motion of the Blanco and Colorado parties (the Reforma Naranja) only got 47%, with the rest going to the individual Blanco and Colorado motions that couldn't be removed from the ballot. Worth an honourable mention is the Reforma Amarilla of the Communist Party, which sought to make serious and responsible changes while retaining a Collegiate model, and helped push FIDEL to its best ever result - 5.7%.

Within the other minor parties, things went less well: the Christian Democrats suffered a split in which the old guard of Catholic conservatives formed the 'Civic Christian Movement' and sank beneath the waterline, preventing the Uruguayan party from emulating the success of the Chileans (some of the PDC went even further, expressing support for Cuba and coming on board with the liberation theology that would be codified in the Medellin Conference of 1968). The Union Popular, meanwhile, split between Enrique Erro's gang (who kept the name and the Deputies, but none of the votes) and the Socialist Party. The Socialists had always made a point of only presenting a single list to the electorate, to show their distaste for the factional tactics of the traditional parties - but now, the Socialists were subject to factionalism themselves, and thus the moderate social democrat Emilio Frugoni presented his own list against the more radical (again, comparable to the Chilean socialists) majority. Neither won a seat, even though the factions' votes were pooled.

Four years of government in difficult circumstances and the death of Daniel Fernandez Crespo had finished the Union Blanca Democratica as an organisation, and the Blanco corner was carried forward by three rival candidates for the Presidency (I'm not going to pay attention to the Colegiado candidates here, in the interests of brevity): the most intelligent of Herrera's followers, Martin Echegoyen, had been in politics for fifty years and represented the resurgence of conservative interests within the National Party. He won a plurality of the Blanco vote but was outnumbered by the others - rather confusingly named Alberto Gallinal Heber and Alberto Heber Usher. Both were grandsons of Alberto Heber Jackson, whose widow had remarried Luis Alberto de Herrera. Despite this family connection, both were vying for the UBD vote. Heber Usher had been a Herrerista follower of Fernandez Crespo, while Gallinal Usher had come from the Independent National Party. As the UBD no longer existed, both ran with the support of minor lists, so that Gallinal Usher ran as a member of the National Movement of Rocha despite - notably - not being from Rocha. The result between the two candidates of the left was therefore more than usually subject to local fluctuations based on departmental machines and personalities, which is presumably how Heber Usher managed to win Rivera.

In the red corner, the death of Luis Batlle Berres had left a gap in the leadership of List 15, which was of course filled by his son, Jorge Batlle. Jorge did not follow his father's expansionist and state-driven ideas, being more openly fond of the market (he would later be called a neoliberal, when that word was coined). Opposing Batlle from the left were two rival candidates, Amilcar Vasconcellos (who had lost the List 15 primary against Batlle and lured Renan Rodriguez temporarily from List 99 to serve as his running mate; his organisation was the short-lived List 315) and Zelmar Michelini of List 99. If either of these men had joined forces with Batlle, their votes would have been enough to take him over the line against Oscar Gestido of the Union Colorada y Batllista. With 21% of the national vote, Gestido won the presidency for the right. A former General, he represented the ingress of the military into civilian politics, but was essentially benign and showed no intention of using emergency powers for anything other than emergencies (in this case, to close the money markets when the peso collapsed). His death of a heart attack in 1967 would mark the real beginning of Uruguay's tribulations.

Uruguay66.png
 
I'm going to conclude this run with 1971, partly because this is a bit too much effort to put in just for Max's benefit, but mostly because it was the last election held before the 1973 military coup.

As you might expect from the fact that there was a military coup, things weren't going massively well at this point. Oscar Gestido, who had even managed to convince the social-democratic Amilcar Vasconcellos to serve as a Minister, died in 1967, leaving the Presidency to his '66 running mate, Jorge Pacheco Areco. The Areco part of his name came from a distinguished political family, one member of which had served as Minister to the original Batlle; the Pacheco part signified his membership of the even older Pacheco clan, which had been prominent in politics since the Great Siege of Montevideo in the 1840s. It also reveals his relationship to the Batlle Pacheco brothers who ran List 14 - he was their nephew, and inherited their newspaper in 1965. Better Batllista and Colorado heritage could not be wished for. So obviously Pacheco Areco used emergency measures not only to target the Tupamaro guerrilla militias who started cropping up about now, but also the more legimitate forms of dissent, such as the student protests of '68 and unionist marches to oppose wage freezes and welfare cuts. Things weren't going well, so naturally a big chunk of the population considered Pacheco to be the only man strong enough to keep Uruguay on the straight and narrow.

He therefore announced a constitutional referendum to allow immediate re-election of the President, to be applied retroactively to the 1971 election and held in conjunction with it. So again, there was a situation where the outcome of the referendum could decide whether the President would be the official candidate, Pacheco, or his little-known running-mate and Livestock Minister, Juan Maria Bordaberry. Bordaberry had entered politics as a Ruralista ally of the Blancos, and only later returned to the Colorado fold, meaning that he was immediately suspect to UCB voters and isolated in the corridors of power - Pacheco presumably thought that the prospect of Bordaberry as President would prompt people to vote for Yes. It didn't. The result was a convincing result for No, while Pacheco/Bordaberry fended off weak challenges from Jorge Batlle (who would finally become President in 2000) and Vasconcellos.

If things had been calculated on a winner-take-all basis, Bordaberry's 22% would have been beaten by the Nationalist Wilson Ferreira's 25%, but the overall Colorado-Blanco margin was less than one percentage-point in the Colorados' favour, so the powerless authoritarian was elected President - setting in train the final denouement of Uruguayan democracy. Senator Ferreira, by contrast, was a liberal and socially progressive Blanco from the Independent Nationalist tradition who now founded his own faction (Por la Patria) and allied it with the Movimiento Nacional de Rocha from the same gene-pool. Por la Patria was the pre-eminent faction within the Blanco Party until the 1980s, and still exists as a populist sector. Against him, a Herrerista general teamed up with Alberto Heber Usher, but Ferreira wiped the floor with them - margins in the urban areas of Montevideo and Maldonado (with Punta del Este now firmly established as a holiday resort for the people of Buenos Aires) reached over 60% between the two contenders.

The final piece of the puzzle was the Frente Amplio. As the name implies, it was a broad front of all the opponents of the traditional parties, from the usual Communists and Socialists to the Christian Democrats (a minor right-wing splinter group stayed out and was promoted briefly as a 'party of the regime' by the military, to no avail), plus groupuscules of anarchists, Trotskyists, Posadists and the legal front of the Tupamaros. Also in this alliance was Enrique Erro of Union Popular, elected a Senator in this election. His relations to the Tupamaros were to be the excuse used by Bordaberry to dissolve the legislature in 1973. The FA cannot be regarded as a seriously constitutional force of the left - as well as the sympathies of certain people with the Tupamaros, it chose as its leader General Liber Seregni, a military man who hoped for a 'Peruvian' solution to Uruguay's problems, namely that the Generals would launch a coup and then do Generic Nice Things. Zelmar Michelini, who took most of his Colorado List 99 into the FA, took the opposite view and did much to publicise the human rights abuses and downright torture practiced by the Armed Forces under Bordaberry's use of emergency powers.

It will not surprise you to learn that the electoral system has changed somewhat since 1971.

Uruguay71bis.png
 
More Uruguayan content, this time the elections for the Constitutional Assembly in 1916.

The strongest personality in Uruguayan politics in the first quarter of the twentieth century was Jose Batlle y Ordonez, the liberal reformer who smashed a Blanco rebellion in 1903 and forced them to participate in the democratic politics of the nation. His own party, the Colorados, had been in power for over fifty years, initially imposed by a Brazilian invasion and later promoting a series of military dictators, until the strange ideas of Pepe Batlle began to gather momentum in the younger generation of the Colorado elite. One of these ideas, acquired during a visit to Switzerland, was a constitutional reform to replace the Presidency with a nine-member body to be elected by the general public for staggered terms - in theory, it would be harder to achieve dictatorial power in this scenario, and the parties would be forced to become more organised and more programmatic with the necessity to have an election every year. Batlle, of course, expected that the electorate would stick with what they knew and endlessly re-elect Colorados from his own organisation and espousing his own programme.

After much haggling with Colorado and Blanco deputies, it was decided that the election to the constitutional convention would be the first in Uruguay held under the secret ballot, with as little as possible of the usual Colorado 'moral influence' over voters, and the franchise would (again for the first time) be extended to illiterates. These negotiations were necessary because the Colorados were far from united behind Batlle's faddish idea. His institutional character in the political scene and his proven ability to win were appealing to most Colorados, but hardly anybody was really invested in this complicated and untried 'Colegiado' idea, and many were opposed. It was thought that the proposal would make it easier for Batlle to perpetuate himself in power, and that decision-making would be slower and more transactional. Some of Batlle's oldest allies broke with him over the Colegiado and formed a new party called the Anti Colegiado Colorados, with the balance of power in the Senate. At first, this was a single issue party, but it was closely linked to the Rural Federation that was being set up at the same time, and consequently there were friendly conversations with the Blancos with whom these Colorados had been at war only a decade previously. When you add the fact that the anti-collegialists were often influenced by their distaste for the prospect of more Batllismo, it's hardly surprising that the party rapidly became defined as a friend of the big cattle-farmers and an opponent of social reform.

The other new feature in this vote was the introduction of a form of proportional representation. In previous elections, two thirds of the seats in a Department would go to the highest-polling party and one third to the second-place party. Third parties only got a look in when the Partido Nacional boycotted the elections. Now, though, the one-third minority seats would be allocated proportionally (unless the second-place party exceeded 40%, in which case they'd get the full one-third), while the majority party still got two thirds of the seats - even if they were only the victors on a plurality vote. The initial plan was to boost the Colorado numbers while diluting the Blancos by letting the Socialists and Catholics in - but then the Anti-Colegiado split happened.

It turned out that a majority of the voters, particularly those voting for the first time, were not enamoured of the Colegiado. Colorado voters found it easier to go for the new party (ostensibly the 'real' Colorados) than to commit treason or heresy by switching to the Blancos, while the National Party itself benefited from the fact that their landowner supporters could now march all their illiterate tenants into the voting booths. The opposition won a surprising number of interior Departments, with their majority seats, while the Colorados now had to share their minority seats with their erstwhile friends. In the Constitutional Assembly, there was no majority for the Colegiado, and the anti-collegialists held the balance of power.

Batlle (who had by now passed the Presidency on to his scheming ally Feliciano Viera) now had to break the Blanco-Anti Colegiado alliance up if he wanted to salvage any of his constitutional reform. Viera's strategy was to tempt the anti-collegialists back into the fold by halting all the reform projects that were still on the books - which, needless to say, annoyed Batlle quite a bit. The ex-President began his own tactical manoeuvres: he got himself selected as the Colorado candidate for the next Presidential election, which basically meant he was certain to win if there was no electoral reform passed by the Constitutional Convention. So the Blancos were now faced with two choices. Either they could retain the existing Constitution and hand the Presidency back to their least favourite person in the world, or they could come to a compromise with him on the Colegiado.

They chose the latter.

Uruguay16.png
 
The Constitutional Convention election of June 1916 provided the first electoral defeat for the Colorados in half a century - and, to make things worse, there was a general election due the following January.

Some factors pointed in the Colorados' favour. Viera's Halt of all progressive legislation requiring extra state expenditure seemed to be popular among moderates, and the electorally damaging Colegiado proposal wouldn't be the defining issue of a legislative election. Plus, of course, this poll would be held under the old conditions, without the secret ballot or illiterate voting, and with an electoral redistribution enacted by Viera which added 15 seats to Montevideo and none to any Departments in which the Blancos were strong.

However, the registration push earlier in the year had swelled the rolls and got many people into the habit of voting for the first time, and nobody could quite depend on the new voters' loyalty. In addition, there was the risk that the anti-collegialists (now organised into a formal party called the Partido Colorado General Fructuoso Rivera) would make further advances.

This risk was countered by the electoral system still applying to the Chamber of Deputies: two thirds of the seats in a Department went to the largest party, one third to the second-place party, and that was it. Not in a position to challenge either of the major parties to that extent, the Riveristas would have to enter an electoral alliance if they wanted to remain in public office. First they tried to negotiate with Viera, alongside the discussions about constitutional reform which were then continuing in parallel. They demanded 20 seats and were laughed out of court. This left them with the prospect of allying with the National Party, with whom they had a shared opposition to Batllismo. The way this worked in practice is that the Blancos would have the top half of the candidate list, and the Riveristas the bottom, meaning that if the coalition lost the Department, only Blancos would be elected, while the Riveristas would get seats if they managed to tip the balance for a majority.

However, the coalition was unpopular. Departmental Blanco organisations which were already safe wins opposed giving seats away to basically-Colorados for free, while many Riveristas and even more of their potential voters still had an antipathy towards the hereditary enemy. In some Departments, a coalition ticket was formed only for an independent National list to emerge in competition with them; in others, the Riveristas refused to form a coalition at all. The Departments with a full coalition are shown with an asterisk below, and the ones with independent Riverista lists are coloured on the map on the right.

Vote-splitting handed two Departments to the Colorados which might otherwise have gone to the coalition, and the Riveristas appear to have alienated about half of their voters from June (and that's just in the areas they maintained their independence - they may have declined even further where they allied with the Blancos). Only in Rocha and Canelones were the terms of their agreements favourable enough to get them seats - three in total, rather fewer than they'd asked Viera for.

When the votes were tallied, the Colorados were able to congratulate themselves on a narrow but clear parliamentary majority on a minority of the national vote. The price of passing the constitutional reform, however, would be the implementation of the secret ballot and proportional representation in the Chamber of Deputies - 1917 was the last election held under the old system.

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General Fruity Creek, yes.

Rivera was the founder of the Colorado Party and one of the leaders of the Independence struggle. A landowner and power-hungry caudillo, he is renowned as the codifier of the Colorados' urban liberal outlook because he was defeated in the interior by Manuel Oribe and had to take cover in the city of Montevideo for 7 years (although he spent a lot more time outside the city, harassing Oribe from the rear). During the siege, it transpired that Rivera had virtually no support from actual Uruguayans: the vast majority of the Montevidean forces were exiled Argentines who expected to be executed if they surrendered, and foreign adventurers from France, Spain and Italy such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, who were also less willing to make peace than the locals. So the Colorado Party became defined around the liberal opinions of these few thousand people.

When Batlle came along and introduced social liberalism, the Riveristas adopted General Rivera for their party name to emphasise their loyalty to the non-socialist liberal principles of the 1840s (and, just quietly, to Colorado Party elites and landowners), and - like all liberals - ultimately became indistinguishable from conservatives.
 
I dunno, man

“What sort of music do you like, granddad?”​
“Aw well, you have to understand that I grew up in Derby. Which, in, sort of, late Noughties, early Teens, was the absolute epicentre of the neo-post-skiffle craze.”​
“The - ?”​
“Yeah, so you had groups like… Uttoxeter Health Club - The Carphone Warehouse - Hod Robinson and his Amazing Bassoon Quintet - “​
“Who - ?”​
“I mean, I had a hell of a time with the Babcock Boys.”​
“Sure, but - “​
“And of course, alongside them in that scene were ban - incredible bands like the Mickleover Sports. Allestree in Ordnung. Jaunty Quentin. I mean.”​
“Okay - “​
“89.5% White Town.”​
Yes, b - “​
“It was a wonderful melting pot for a young man to get lost in. Halcyon days. Speaking of which, Halcyon Afternoons were a great bunch of lads. I think their drummer went on to play for Newton’s Grundle.”​
“Derby in the East Midlands?”​
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, we’re talking 2011, so you had the likes of Spondon knocking about that scene. And then there were The Likes of Spondon, who covered their songs slightly more popularly than they did. Curzon’s was absolutely packed out on Thursdays when they were in town.”​
“Right - “​
“But Spondon, yeah, they were, like, epochal. I can still remember the first time Gaz Golightly got up onstage at the Batavian Revolution, wielding his clarinet. I shit you not, every 17-year-old in the place chucked out their rap mixtapes and their techno mp3s, and went out and bought a classical woodwind instrument. Those lads were seminal.”​
“Um.”​
“And, like, there was a lot of dross from kids who didn’t know one end of a piccolo from the other, but underneath it all was a real torrent of creativity that I don’t think has been matched since. You look at people like Unpleasant Kenneth - “​
“Shut up, let me guess. Was he the punk of that crowd?”​
“Quite the opposite - it was actually a five-piece group, Unpleasant Kenneth was the main character of their quadrilogy of concept albums. He drinks some tea made out of magic mushrooms and gradually becomes a better person over the course of his trip. And nobody else was doing this kind of stuff! Gong only managed to spin the idea out to a trilogy.”​
So - “​
“But that just gives you a picture of how these guys operated. Like, if you walked down any street you care to name, in and around the Mackworth estate, you’d hear bunches of lads in garages and box rooms, shredding their electric violas to within an inch of their lives. They went right back to the pulsing roots of rock ‘n’ roll, and then abandoned those roots to do something more modern. I always say, Derby in 2010 was the closest you’ll ever get to London in, sort of, early 1967, UFO club times, just before everything went mainstream and commercial.”​
“Wow. Anything else you recommend from that era?”​
“Aw, y’know. Jessie J, Flo Rida. LMFAO were fun!”​
“Char - ”​
“Chart music, yeah. Yeah.”​
 
Massive, massive health warnings on this - but I've mapped the Paraguayan election of 1917.

Health Warning 1: I cobbled the map together from an atlas of 14 maps of the Departments which was published in 1920, but the maps were all on different scales, so there was a bit of fudging.

Health Warning 2: The source I found for the results is riddled with minor errors, mostly involved in adding up totals. I've chosen to trust Excel in these matters rather than a Paraguayan bureaucrat with an abacus. But the worst example of this is the supposed national total of Colorado Senators being 4, while the Colorado Senators elected by each constituency add up to 5. I've gone with five but am happy to be corrected.

Health Warning 3: In the electoral law reigning at this time, there should have been 40 Deputies and 20 Senators elected. According to the official report there were apparently 28 and 13/14. No fucking clue, sorry.

Be that as it may. Paraguay had never been a hugely democratic country: apart from a few mass congresses in the revolutionary era, there had been no representative institutions to speak of until the end of the War of the Triple Alliance, when a constitutional convention was called in 1870. Over the next 10 to 15 years, a party system emerged, supposedly out of the divisions left over from the war.

The patriotic supporters of the Lopez dictators were typified by Bernardino Caballero, a dashing cavalry officer who formed the Republican, or 'Colorado', Party. On the other side of the aisle in the 1870s were the governments put in place by the occupying powers, Argentina and Brazil, formed by the leadership of the Paraguayan Legion of anti-Lopizta exiles who took up arms against their own country. Caballero and the Colorados accused their new foes, the Liberal Party, of being disloyal Legionaries - the worst of whom in their eyes was Benigno Ferreira, who had negotiated a £6million loan from Baring's and run off with the money himself, leaving the Legionary government to raise a new loan just to pay off the extortionate interest from the first.

In reality, however, the tribes were less clear-cut than this: most of the leadership of the Colorados were in fact former Legionaries, while the majority of the Liberal leaders had in fact been Lopiztas. This has not stopped the Colorados from tarring the Liberals with the Legionary brush, at all, for a century and a half.

The Colorados came to power in the 1880s and promptly introduced nationalist policies like... selling off huge tracts of state land to foreigners to raise money to pay off the debts the state owed to those same foreigners. But in 1904, Colorado faction-fighting and Liberal discontent combined to turn over the government to the latter party in a brief civil war. Whatever policy aspirations the Liberals had at the outset, they were rapidly distracted by a stream of barracks revolts led by officers who had actually really enjoyed that civil war. The worst confusion came in 1911-12, when a Liberal government controlled by Colonel Albino Jara sat in Asuncion, opposed by a Radical Liberal insurrection led by Eduardo Schaerer and funded from overseas, and finally stabbed in the back by an alliance of Civic Liberals and Colorados which lasted three weeks before the Civic Liberal militia walked off in the middle of the night. Out of the confusion came a Schaerer government - he was a radical, but had contracted so much debt from the overseas backers of his revolt that he was unable to do anything radical or liberal in office.

Schaerer, however, became the first 20th century President to complete a full term, and handed the reigns to the honourable and distinguished Manuel Franco in 1916. Franco sought to bring genuinely democratic elections to Paraguay: previously, whichever faction had the Ministry of the Interior could be confident of winning as many seats as it wanted, and the opposition groups had therefore abstained unless they could make a pact with the government. Franco's law changed the system from First Past the Post to a system of Incomplete Vote - a system which mimics proportional representation by giving the first-placed party two thirds of the seats and the second-placed party one third of the seats. Therefore, whatever skullduggery the authorities pulled, the Colorados would be guaranteed minority representation for the first time. This, of course, split the Colorados between those who wanted to participate and get some of the spoils, and those who refused to condone elections which didn't offer a genuine chance of actually winning.

The participationist Colorados got about a third of the votes (making the incomplete list system proportional by a massive fluke) and took their minority seats, while the radical faction of Liberals took the rest. In a number of rural areas, the Colorado vote was in the single digits, or even Literally Zero - it's hard not to suspect foul play. In the First Department, a third ticket of Labour candidates stood, but their best result was 12% in the parish of Asuncion where the rail yards were. Additionally there were four rural partidas where no results were made official: in one, the election simply wasn't held for some reason; in two others, there were irregularities in the counting procedure; and in a fourth, the results were submitted to Congress after the deadline.

The incomplete list system survived until 1927, when 'limited proportional representation' was introduced (proportional representation but only counting the top two parties).

Maps as attachments because they're a bit humongous.

View attachment Paraguay 1917.png
View attachment Paraguay 1917 seats.png
 
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The multi-member electorates introduced in 1917 were only used a few times.

Before the Incomplete List reform, Paraguay used First Past the Post with 20 single-member electorates for the lower house in the countryside, and 6 Deputies elected by the city of Asuncion. The six parishes of Asuncion were paired up, four non-contiguously, and each pair of parishes returned two Deputies by bloc vote (this is true from 1870 to 1911, anyway, the electoral law of '11 wasn't phrased very clearly and might have changed it to each of the six parishes electing one Deputy, I'm not quite sure). Two electoral districts, or two parishes of Asuncion, together elected a Senator, as per the attached map.

It is worth noting that the electoral Districts were not the same as the administrative Departments, and when the 1917 system came in, the electoral Departments were still very different from the administrative Departments. All, however, were defined as groups of partidas, the basic building block of Paraguayan internal boundaries - unfortunately new partidas were constantly being created on an ad hoc basis. So these might not be the boundaries going all the way back to 1870 (for instance it's possible that a new partida was created out of parts of two existing ones which were in different electoral Districts) but this is the general vibe of the thing. The maps I based this off were printed in 1920 and already there were a couple of (minor, easily researchable) discrepancies from the 1917 list.

View attachment Paraguay 1870-1917.png

I haven't been able to work out why the 1917 boundaries (four electoral Departments each returning 10 Deputies and 5 Senators, with the Deputies elected by halves and the Senators elected by thirds - 1917 was supposed to be all-ups but clearly wasn't, possibly because the previous system was similar and some members still had time to run - but if so, this isn't mentioned in any of the electoral laws - gasp, anyway: ) were changed so soon, but in 1924 they were superseded by a new electoral geography. From then on, the Chamber of Deputies was elected from two large constituencies returning 20 members each, while the Senate was to have three constituencies with six or seven members each, for a total of 20. Partial elections continued, but in a different way: every two years, one constituency of each House would come up for election. And as the constituencies didn't map onto one another, some Paraguayans would be voting for both, some for one, and some for nobody at all. Turnout must have been interesting.

View attachment Paraguay 1924-1947.png

These boundaries survived until 1947, but the Incomplete Vote didn't. In 1927 it was changed to Limited Proportional Representation (only counting the top two parties), and then in 1937 to full PR. From 1947, constituencies were done away with and the country became one big electorate, although when Stroessner legalised some of the opposition parties he made a slight return to the old electoral system: 60% of the seats automatically went to the top-polling party and the rest were split proportionally between the other competing parties.

I suspect that, as now, votes in the post-'47 period were counted by administrative Department, but these were different from the ones of the Liberal era and also from the modern-day ones (the maps on Wikipedia for elections in the 1950s and 60s show the post-1992 departmental boundaries - I sure hope someone was fired for that blunder!) At some point I'll do a map of those, as the benefit of having unopposed elections is that you can map them really easily without needing to check the official results.
 
There is frustratingly little information about Uruguayan elections online, especially before the 1950s, so I thought I’d do a big project of writing up the main features of each one from 1900 onwards until I get bored. Also, there are maps.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Uruguay was a divided country. About a third of the population was concentrated in the capital city, Montevideo, a place endowed with railways and tramways, along with an Athenaeum, a University, loads of newspapers with strongly political editorial lines, and all the trappings of a rising middle class engaged in commerce and the liberal professions. It was a different story in the interior: an endless expanse of flat grassland and low hills, dominated by estancias full of cattle whose fate was to be killed, dried, salted, and exported to feed people who didn’t mind the taste of salt beef. The landowners had only reluctantly converted to fencing their lands and breeding their cattle for advantageous features, while refrigerated shipping was in its advent in Uruguay. And although free universal education was legally provided for, the bulk of the rural population lived in ‘rat towns’ far from the reach of the state. The literacy rate only barely scraped 50% - although this was better than most of the rest of Latin America.

The popular truism is that this divide was reflected in the political affiliations of Uruguayans, with the urban liberals supporting the Colorado Party and the rural conservatives marching their peons to the polling place in the ranks of the National Party. In fact, both parties had a roughly even divide between rural estancieros and urban ‘doctores’, and your partisan feelings would probably have had a lot to do with who your father and grandfather had supported over the last 70 years. The Colorado Party was founded by a military leader of the Independence period, Fructuoso Rivera, while the Nationalists, or Blancos, had followed his rival Manuel Oribe. Both were power-hungry caudillos leading bands of their clients in the 1830s, with the parties solidifying during the great Civil War of the 1840s, in which Rivera’s faction was holed up in Montevideo for seven years. This is usually said to be the beginning of the Colorados’ identification with urban issues: in fact the vast majority of the Colorado forces at this stage were foreign volunteers like Giuseppe Garibaldi, with maybe 300 Uruguayans in the city. It was convenient to both the Colorado leaders and their mercenaries to present themselves as radical liberals to each other and the outside world.

Another truism is that the Colorados and Blancos hated each other for their mutual crimes during the 1840s and various other civil wars and revolts. This is true: there was a hereditary odium between the parties, and fellow party supporters were usually called ‘co-religionaries’. But since the 1870s, there had been a second cleavage in Uruguayan politics: between traditional conservative caudillos on the one hand, and ‘principistas’ on the other, who preached political reform, education and free trade as a means of becoming ‘civilised’. There were principistas in both parties, but some were grouped in their own Constitutional Party, which was on its last legs at the end of the century.

In 1897, the Blancos (both rural rednecks and urban doctores) rose up under an uneducated cattle-rancher named Aparicio Saravia, protesting at over 20 years of exclusion from the corridors of power: they wanted to end electoral fraud and to allocate six of the 19 Departments to Nationalist chiefs (the term is ‘jefe politico’, and the role involved heading up the local civil administration and the police), thereby allowing the opposition party to use the police as a tool to commit their own frauds. The national Army, controlled by the Colorados, failed to staunch the rebellion, and President Idiarte Borda was shot on the steps of the Cathedral by a young hothead. The new President, Juan Lindolfo Cuestas, took dictatorial powers to sideline the old Colorado elite and came to terms with Saravia - he now had his six Departments.

The first poll in the new century was a Senate election. One third of the Departments elected a Senator every two years, for a six year term. Except the voters didn’t choose a Senator directly: they elected a 15-member electoral college in which the winning party would get either 10 or 15 seats, depending on whether or not they exceeded two thirds of the popular vote. The electoral college would then choose a Senator. Theoretically these elections would be contested by Colorados and Nationalists, but there was also an option for the parties to come together and put forward a ‘single list’ of civic dignitaries from both parties or neither. Although these lists would be unopposed, the parties still tried to get as many of their voters to turn out as possible, essentially as a way of keeping their supporters mobilised for the next war.

In 1900, Aparicio Saravia felt strong enough to run a contested election against Cuestas and his loyal campaign manager, Jose Batlle y Ordonez. Batlle is possibly the most significant figure in Uruguayan history, but for now, let’s just say that he was a firm supporter of Cuestas’ dictatorship and was rumoured to have had a hand in the assassination of Idiarte Borda. And he fancied himself as the next President - hoping to get elected on Cuestas’ apron-strings. But things didn’t quite turn out that way, as (for the first time in forever) the Colorados lost an election. Batlle had expected to lose in the four Departments run by Blancos since the Cuestas-Saravia pact, but the opposition party had also taken narrow victories in Rocha (east coast) and Rio Negro (not racist, it’s just the name of the river) along the eastern littoral.

Uruguay1900.png

The lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, was due to be renewed the following November, 1901. Aparicio Saravia’s dream was to take control of the Chamber at this election, which would set him up for the Presidential election of 1903. Presidents at this time were elected by a joint session of the Chamber and the Senate, rather than by popular vote. But now we have to introduce a key feature of the Nationalist Party. Although Saravia was its spiritual leader, the Party was in fact governed by a ‘Directorio’ of elected dignitaries - and because they had to have the free time and proximity to Montevideo to attend regular meetings, they tended to represent the ‘doctores’ and liberal intellectuals. Both Saravia and the Directorio had their own independent legitimacy, and often decisions made by the Directorio would be sent by train and horse to Saravia’s ranch, only to be met with a curt request to rethink the issue (without any specific guidance on what Saravia actually wanted - his authority depended on an air of manly mystery).

In this case, though, the Directorio got their way, on account of the fact that their view coincided with that of Saravia’s arm’s-length ally, President Cuestas. Both factions felt that a seriously contested election would lead to another civil war, and came to an agreement with Saravia. In this ‘acuerdo’, Cuestas would turn a blind eye to the Blancos’ importing of arms from abroad, in return for an uncontested election.

This, again, was bad news for Batlle, who had responded to his loss of face within the Cuestas faction by getting closer to the hard-line partisan Collective (the principista/elite group of the Colorados) which had formerly been represented by President Idiarte Borda. To do this, he had hyped up his opposition to the Nationalists, tried to allege electoral fraud on their part in Rio Negro, and pledged to expunge the shame of 1900 by contesting the coming election twice as hard and ‘reconquering the Departments’. The militaristic overtones were deliberate. But the Collective were also reluctant to enter into a new civil war, and Batlle was now thoroughly isolated. And now, with the acuerdo, he didn’t even have a campaign to manage.

I should explain the electoral system for the Chamber at this point. Each Department had a number of seats up for grabs, and up until 1898, these all went to the winning party - but with Cuestas’ pact, there was now representation for the minority. If the losing party achieved between one quarter and one half of the vote, they would get one third of the seats. Any less than that, and they’d get zero seats; any more and they’d be the majority. In this election, both parties marched their voters to the booths as a head-counting exercise… but in the acuerdo, they agreed how many candidates each party would stand in each Department, thus making the election uncontested in every way that mattered. Consider Flores and San Jose, the two Departments in the southwest won by the Nationalists - if you look at the map, you’ll see that the Blancos won the popular vote in both, but had agreed to only stand one candidate in each, thus pre-determining a result of one Nationalist to two Colorados.

This may be the reason why, evidently, not enough people cared about the vote tallies to pass the numbers in three Departments down to us today - these are left white on the map.

At this time, the six Blanco Departments were San Jose, Flores, plus the three Nationalist-won Departments along the northern border (westernmost is Rivera, which will become important later), and finally Maldonado, the strongly Colorado Department in the southeast. So apart from Maldonado and neighbouring Rocha, every Department voted the way its Jefe Politico would have wanted it to.

Uruguay1901.png

The Senatorial election of the next year is less easy to waffle about - six Colorado-held Departments elected six Colorado Senators. Three of them were uncontested by Blancos and elected on ‘single lists’, indicating that the 1901 acuerdo was still in effect, in spirit at least.

It wouldn’t for much longer.

Uruguay1902.png[1902 map]

Name of the Week: there are some fun Grandiose Spanish Names knocking about, but at the end of the day I have to go with the subtly mysterious Nationalist Deputy for Durazno - Juan Smith.
 
Quite a lot happened between the 1902 Uruguayan Senate election (which is where we got to in the last instalment) and the 1905 Chamber of Deputies election. The first main event was the appointment of a new President to replace Juan Lindolfo Cuestas in 1903.

The election of a President was then in the hands of a joint session of the House and Chamber, rather than being directly elected by the voters. And the Colorados had majorities in both houses, so the result ought to be fairly predictable, right? Not so much. The Colorado Party was in fact split into two major factions: the pro-Cuestas gang favoured one of his Ministers, a man named Eduardo MacEachen, but the other front-runner was Juan Carlos Blanco, a figure closer to the principistas, the Situation (the elite conservative group of Colorados which had governed for most of the 1890s) and the opposition Nationalists. Other minor candidates included General Tajes, a former dictator, and Jose Batlle y Ordonez, who we met last time.

With the Colorados badly split, the Nationalists in the legislature had a fantastic opportunity to sell their votes to a Colorado candidate in return for political concessions. But some in the party had grown tired of acuerdos. Eduardo Acevedo Diaz, for instance, had been a leader of the 1897 rebellion, and had hoped that the Blancos could win the election of 1901 and take power outright. At this point, he stopped playing ball with his fellow Nationalists and got friendly with Batlle, who was in favour of a return to competitive democracy as a means of ‘reconquering the Departments’ lost in the pacts and acuerdos of the Cuestas years. So, ironically, the anti-acuerdo Nationalist, opposed to voting for Colorados, made an accord to vote for one of the Colorado presidential candidates.

The precise complexities of the next few months are too onerous to discuss here, but basically, the Acevedo Diaz Nationalists were expelled from the Nationalist Party and lined up with Batlle y Ordonez. This changed the calculus somewhat, and Batlle made some skilful political plays and secret deals to get the other Colorados behind him as well, becoming President in March 1903. Batlle’s main political principle was to bring competition between the parties into the open and regularise it in a broadly peaceful and democratic manner. But he also had an ideological perspective, expounded in the newspaper he owned, which can essentially be summed up as liberal progressivism: he was forthrightly anti-clerical, and had imbibed Henry George’s land tax ideas as a young man in the Atheneum. But most of his early career had been about political issues rather than policy, and his only progressive move in the early months was to order the police to remain neutral in labour disputes, rather than acting as strikebreakers.

His early moderation was typified by the appointment of a fiscal conservative (and principista member of the nearly-defunct Constitutionalist Party) Martin C. Martinez as his Finance Minister. But Martinez wasn’t the only non-Colorado given a job by Batlle - he also named two Acevedo Diaz men as jefes politico as repayment for that faction’s support in the presidential election. The mainstream Nationalists hated Acevedo Diaz by this point, and were especially perturbed by the fact that one of his followers would be in charge of the Department of Rivera - just over the Brazilian border were the Blancos’ major stocks of weapons and ammunition, so holding that Department was key for Saravia. He mobilised an army of 15,000, larger than he’d managed to gather in 1897, and forced Batlle to negotiate: the President would only name Nationalist jefes politico who had been approved by their own Party Directorio. This was a greater concession than Cuestas had ever given.

During the civil war scare, some crimes had been committed in Rivera and Batlle sent a detective to investigate. One thing led to another, and ultimately, two Regiments were posted there to keep the peace. This was unwelcome news to the Nationalists, as the men in those units would vote in Rivera in 1904 and probably swing the result to the Colorados.

This time, negotiation failed, and Aparicio Saravia’s army marched on Montevideo. This isn’t a military history blog, so I’ll just sum up by saying that Saravia was shot at the Battle of Masoller after spending most of 1904 in the field, and his revolt dissipated almost immediately afterward.

With the Nationalists vanquished, all of the Departments were now reconquered from their Blanco jefes politico, and Batlle was the master of the situation. He delayed the November 1904 elections to February 1905. Meanwhile, he rushed through a new electoral law, reapportioning seats to benefit strong Colorado Departments and raising the ‘minority vote’ threshold so that now, for the minority party to get a third of the seats in a Department, they would need a third of the vote - rather than a quarter, as before. It will not surprise you to learn that the Colorados won the election.

There is one point of interest around dissident groups: the Acevedo Diaz Nationalists were given the bottom third of the Montevideo Colorado list, so that if their voters pushed the Colorados over three quarters of the vote, their faction would survive. They did neither. Meanwhile, General Tajes and some old members of the Situation went in precisely the opposite direction, and sought places on the Nationalist ticket. Likewise, they would only have got in if they’d pushed the Nationalists over the majority line. As it was, though, all the elected Deputies were approved by their own party machines.

Uruguay1905.png

Now surrounded by a bloc of handpicked Deputies, Batlle was able to proceed with the policy aspirations he’d been nurturing privately from his youth. Divorce was legalised and crucifixes banned from hospitals; a rather anaemic rural land tax was passed; small state institutes were set up to test whether cash crops would grow in Uruguay’s soil; the President intervened in a watersiders’ strike to the relative benefit of the workers; and a roading programme was undertaken to challenge the ability of the English-owned railway company to simply set fares as high as it liked. But politically, matters weren’t as clear-cut: in actual fact, Batlle was in the process of manipulating the next Presidential election in favour of a conservative Colorado who worked as a lawyer for the English railways.

Immediate re-election of the President was unconstitutional, but Batlle felt that he could achieve much more of his programme with the benefit of a second term - so he made a deal with the well-respected Claudio Williman to make him President for the 1907-1911 term and keep the seat warm for Batlle’s return. In contrast to the last presidential transition, things played out pretty much as expected, partly thanks to Batlle’s success in the 1906 Senate elections. These were the seats which had swung to the Blancos in 1900, and they were now in the hands of Colorados pledged to the Williman candidacy. Five of these contests were uncontested by the National Party, although Aparicio Saravia’s brother, Mariano, attempted to organise another revolt. Batlle averted this new conflict by arresting a bunch of Nationalist leaders - which worked great, until a Blanco judge in Rio Negro retaliated by arresting a Colorado organiser. The election in that municipality was consequently delayed by a week: the Colorado candidate lost the other booths by 6 votes, which meant that the dodgy organiser now knew exactly how many votes he needed to get out!

Uruguay1906.png

Name of the week: another simple pleasure, but I really like the long Basque surnames like that of Juan Campisteguy, who was elected Senator for Montevideo in 1905 after being one of Batlle’s Ministers. We’ll be seeing more of him. Campisteguy. Roll the word around in your mouth, it’s lovely.
 
Quite a lot happened between the 1902 Uruguayan Senate election (which is where we got to in the last instalment) and the 1905 Chamber of Deputies election. The first main event was the appointment of a new President to replace Juan Lindolfo Cuestas in 1903.

The election of a President was then in the hands of a joint session of the House and Chamber, rather than being directly elected by the voters. And the Colorados had majorities in both houses, so the result ought to be fairly predictable, right? Not so much. The Colorado Party was in fact split into two major factions: the pro-Cuestas gang favoured one of his Ministers, a man named Eduardo MacEachen, but the other front-runner was Juan Carlos Blanco, a figure closer to the principistas, the Situation (the elite conservative group of Colorados which had governed for most of the 1890s) and the opposition Nationalists. Other minor candidates included General Tajes, a former dictator, and Jose Batlle y Ordonez, who we met last time.

With the Colorados badly split, the Nationalists in the legislature had a fantastic opportunity to sell their votes to a Colorado candidate in return for political concessions. But some in the party had grown tired of acuerdos. Eduardo Acevedo Diaz, for instance, had been a leader of the 1897 rebellion, and had hoped that the Blancos could win the election of 1901 and take power outright. At this point, he stopped playing ball with his fellow Nationalists and got friendly with Batlle, who was in favour of a return to competitive democracy as a means of ‘reconquering the Departments’ lost in the pacts and acuerdos of the Cuestas years. So, ironically, the anti-acuerdo Nationalist, opposed to voting for Colorados, made an accord to vote for one of the Colorado presidential candidates.

The precise complexities of the next few months are too onerous to discuss here, but basically, the Acevedo Diaz Nationalists were expelled from the Nationalist Party and lined up with Batlle y Ordonez. This changed the calculus somewhat, and Batlle made some skilful political plays and secret deals to get the other Colorados behind him as well, becoming President in March 1903. Batlle’s main political principle was to bring competition between the parties into the open and regularise it in a broadly peaceful and democratic manner. But he also had an ideological perspective, expounded in the newspaper he owned, which can essentially be summed up as liberal progressivism: he was forthrightly anti-clerical, and had imbibed Henry George’s land tax ideas as a young man in the Atheneum. But most of his early career had been about political issues rather than policy, and his only progressive move in the early months was to order the police to remain neutral in labour disputes, rather than acting as strikebreakers.

His early moderation was typified by the appointment of a fiscal conservative (and principista member of the nearly-defunct Constitutionalist Party) Martin C. Martinez as his Finance Minister. But Martinez wasn’t the only non-Colorado given a job by Batlle - he also named two Acevedo Diaz men as jefes politico as repayment for that faction’s support in the presidential election. The mainstream Nationalists hated Acevedo Diaz by this point, and were especially perturbed by the fact that one of his followers would be in charge of the Department of Rivera - just over the Brazilian border were the Blancos’ major stocks of weapons and ammunition, so holding that Department was key for Saravia. He mobilised an army of 15,000, larger than he’d managed to gather in 1897, and forced Batlle to negotiate: the President would only name Nationalist jefes politico who had been approved by their own Party Directorio. This was a greater concession than Cuestas had ever given.

During the civil war scare, some crimes had been committed in Rivera and Batlle sent a detective to investigate. One thing led to another, and ultimately, two Regiments were posted there to keep the peace. This was unwelcome news to the Nationalists, as the men in those units would vote in Rivera in 1904 and probably swing the result to the Colorados.

This time, negotiation failed, and Aparicio Saravia’s army marched on Montevideo. This isn’t a military history blog, so I’ll just sum up by saying that Saravia was shot at the Battle of Masoller after spending most of 1904 in the field, and his revolt dissipated almost immediately afterward.

With the Nationalists vanquished, all of the Departments were now reconquered from their Blanco jefes politico, and Batlle was the master of the situation. He delayed the November 1904 elections to February 1905. Meanwhile, he rushed through a new electoral law, reapportioning seats to benefit strong Colorado Departments and raising the ‘minority vote’ threshold so that now, for the minority party to get a third of the seats in a Department, they would need a third of the vote - rather than a quarter, as before. It will not surprise you to learn that the Colorados won the election.

There is one point of interest around dissident groups: the Acevedo Diaz Nationalists were given the bottom third of the Montevideo Colorado list, so that if their voters pushed the Colorados over three quarters of the vote, their faction would survive. They did neither. Meanwhile, General Tajes and some old members of the Situation went in precisely the opposite direction, and sought places on the Nationalist ticket. Likewise, they would only have got in if they’d pushed the Nationalists over the majority line. As it was, though, all the elected Deputies were approved by their own party machines.

View attachment 80427

Now surrounded by a bloc of handpicked Deputies, Batlle was able to proceed with the policy aspirations he’d been nurturing privately from his youth. Divorce was legalised and crucifixes banned from hospitals; a rather anaemic rural land tax was passed; small state institutes were set up to test whether cash crops would grow in Uruguay’s soil; the President intervened in a watersiders’ strike to the relative benefit of the workers; and a roading programme was undertaken to challenge the ability of the English-owned railway company to simply set fares as high as it liked. But politically, matters weren’t as clear-cut: in actual fact, Batlle was in the process of manipulating the next Presidential election in favour of a conservative Colorado who worked as a lawyer for the English railways.

Immediate re-election of the President was unconstitutional, but Batlle felt that he could achieve much more of his programme with the benefit of a second term - so he made a deal with the well-respected Claudio Williman to make him President for the 1907-1911 term and keep the seat warm for Batlle’s return. In contrast to the last presidential transition, things played out pretty much as expected, partly thanks to Batlle’s success in the 1906 Senate elections. These were the seats which had swung to the Blancos in 1900, and they were now in the hands of Colorados pledged to the Williman candidacy. Five of these contests were uncontested by the National Party, although Aparicio Saravia’s brother, Mariano, attempted to organise another revolt. Batlle averted this new conflict by arresting a bunch of Nationalist leaders - which worked great, until a Blanco judge in Rio Negro retaliated by arresting a Colorado organiser. The election in that municipality was consequently delayed by a week: the Colorado candidate lost the other booths by 6 votes, which meant that the dodgy organiser now knew exactly how many votes he needed to get out!

View attachment 80428

Name of the week: another simple pleasure, but I really like the long Basque surnames like that of Juan Campisteguy, who was elected Senator for Montevideo in 1905 after being one of Batlle’s Ministers. We’ll be seeing more of him. Campisteguy. Roll the word around in your mouth, it’s lovely.

Yeah, so many Basques moved to the Americas and became the upper crust of society there (probably because all Biscay people were automatically hidalgos and had an easier time moving as administrators), it’s kind of wild.

And Batlle is very very much a Catalan surname
 
During the civil war scare, some crimes had been committed in Rivera and Batlle sent a detective to investigate. One thing led to another, and ultimately, two Regiments were posted there to keep the peace.

Batlle sent a Montevideoan intellectual detective and devout Colorado to work with his earthy local counterpart, a firm Blanco, in what historical records call "a mediocre attempt to piggyback on the success of Life On Mars".
 
Although Jose Batlle y Ordonez had convincingly defeated the Nationalist opposition in both war and electoral politics, he was a controversial figure - both among the bitter Blancos and the more conservative end of the Colorados, who regarded his labour-friendly and anti-rancher policies with alarm. To maximise his chances of election as President in 1911, he needed to leave power to a safe pair of hands in 1907: and he chose Claudio Williman.

Williman was a lawyer for the British railway companies and an eminently conservative gentleman of the old school. He had never been directly involved in politics until being elected President of the Colorado Party Executive on Batlle’s coat-tails, and regarded the Presidency of the Republic as being an act almost of civic-minded generosity. After being elected by the Deputies and Senators, he continued to meet high-minded intellectuals at cafes and teach Physics at the Military Academy. Williman, then, was designed to cool politics down while still being friendly enough with Batlle to manufacture his re-election after a four-year sabbatical. Of course, if Batlle were still in Montevideo and editing his newspaper, he might destabilise Williman’s term - so he went off to Paris to sample the high life, while micro-managing El Dia from afar.

The Williman years were more economically successful than Batlle’s first term (which themselves had ended with an unprecedented budget surplus), and allowed the taking of the first real census the country had ever undertaken - which revealed that Uruguay had fewer people than had been anticipated, and far more cattle. Williman also expanded the road network by 25% and the number of schools by an incredible 50%, setting the stage for the development of a literate and predominantly middle class society. However, the government was not particularly imaginative, and most of the proposals made by Batlle’s outriders in the legislature were left on the table or died in committee. Williman also sided with the railway companies in a major strike.

It was significant, however, that Williman was a political newcomer, without much training in when to negotiate and when to stand firm. The opposition Nationalist Party was complaining of the electoral law passed in 1905, which made it harder for the Blancos to win the ‘minority’ seats allocated to the second-place party in each Department. The Party’s Directorio, controlled by hard-liners, threatened to abstain altogether from the coming lower house election if the status quo ante wasn’t restored - which was understood to be a step towards another civil war. Although Batlle advised him not to give in, Williman made a compromise, and retained the system of one third of the votes for one third of the seats for some Departments, but lowered the vote threshold back to one quarter in others - but now, a quarter of the vote would only get the Nationalists a quarter of the seats. Williman heavily implied that he would allow the Blancos to win all these minority seats: at this time, the secret ballot had not yet been introduced, while the Colorados had a doctrine of ‘moral influence’. Moral Influence was opposed to a Nationalist dogma of a ‘non-political’ presidency (on the grounds that it was a state job rather than a party one) while the Colorados responded that the President should be able to endorse particular parties and policies… as should all other state functionaries. So Army officers, police officers and civil servants were all expected to exert moral influence by being openly partisan. For some reason, almost all of these people were pro-Colorado. Yes, it’s a mystery to me too.

All this meant that Williman could easily have handed 27 seats to the Nationalists, as they expected. But the Nationalists didn’t make it easy. They were internally divided between pro-War Radicals, who controlled the Directorio, and the business and rancher elite, or ‘Conservatives’, who were quite enjoying the prosperity of the post-1904 era and didn’t want to mess it all up with another costly and hopeless conflict. The Conservatives welcomed the Williman law, but the Directorio called on them to pledge their “constant and energetic opposition” to all Colorado proposals. Ultimately, the Conservatives put up independent slates under the name ‘Civic Reaction’ (basically meaning ‘constitutional opposition’) in a number of Departments, splitting the Blanco vote and preventing them from reaching some minority thresholds. In Montevideo, it became clear on election day that neither Blanco faction would reach even a quarter of the vote, so Williman frantically ordered Colorados to stop voting halfway through the afternoon so as to give the Nationalists a sporting chance. But this was to no avail.

Uruguay1907.png

In the meantime, the peaceful, boring Presidency of Claudio Williman threatened to become substantially less so. The Argentines appointed a new Foreign Minister, Zeballos, who was on record as believing that, because the Uruguayan Declaration of Independence called the putative new country of 1825 ‘the Banda Oriental’ or the Eastern Bank, this was a tacit acknowledgement that the entire Rio de la Plata was Argentinian - Uruguayan independence started at the bank of the river, and not before. This led to a series of diplomatic contretemps, and finally Zeballos was sacked - although the Argentines didn’t actually stop claiming the whole river.

In the meantime, a Senate election was held in six Departments, which was predictably one-sided.

Uruguay1908.png

But the Zeballos affray had a sequel: at the start of 1910, a ship full of armaments was stopped in the Rio de la Plata by the Uruguayan coastguard, but the sailors argued that it was going from Buenos Aires to the upriver port of Concepcion, both in Argentina, through Argentinian waters. It was allowed to carry on. In reality, it was a shipment of weapons sent by people linked with Zeballos to a group of Radical Nationalists who were hanging out in Concepcion, just opposite the Uruguayan town of Paysandu. The Argentine port authorities remanded the guns, so the Blancos assaulted Concepcion. However, Williman and the Argentine President co-operated on sending reinforcements and rolling up the rebels.

The return of Batlle was imminent, and although Williman and others advised him to conciliate Nationalist opinion, Batlle published a manifesto in which he promised to base his second term on the model of his first. Which, obviously, was not what the Nationalists wanted to hear. Yet another rebellion from the Radicals was sparked up, but by this stage the Conservatives controlled the Directorio and the rebels (led by a brother and a son of Aparicio Saravia) were nowhere near as strong as they had been in 1904 - they dissolved after being promised an amnesty. Now the road to revolution was closed, but the Conservatives’ hopes of winning compromises from a second, ‘mature’ Batlle presidency were also destroyed, so the Nationalists reunited… to sulk in the corner. They announced their abstention from the forthcoming 1910 lower house election.

As Montevideo had by now been given a special clause in the electoral law to give some minority seats to the second-place party so long as it reached one twelfth of the vote, this provided an unusual opportunity for a third party. The largest of these was the Catholic party, but these were unwelcome to the anti-clerical faction surrounding Batlle. To prevent the Catholics from getting in, Batlle’s local frontman, Pedro Manini Rios, arranged the formation of a ‘Liberal Coalition’ between the single-issue anti-clerical Liberal Party and the small Socialist Party: thanks to Manini ordering a few hundred Colorados to vote for the Coalition in Montevideo, they beat the Catholics and won seats for the Liberal leader, Pedro Diaz, and the Socialist leader, Emilio Frugoni, the latter of whom would now be in and out of the Chamber for over fifty years.

The Liberal Coalition was also the major opposition party in the interior, running in another 8 Departments. The other three Deputies elected on their slate were dissident Blancos.

1910 was, as you can clearly see, the most one-sided Uruguayan election of the twentieth century.

Uruguay1910.png

Name of the week: with a surname which sounds almost like a tribal confederation from the Sahel, and a first name deriving from a third-century martyr, Fermin Hontou is the standout in these elections, elected both times by the people of Treinta y Tres. This Department, literally meaning ‘Thirty-Three’, itself memorialises the boatload of rebels who landed on the Banda Oriental in 1825 and founded an independent state. Nobody can agree on how many of them there actually were.
 
When the results of the 1910 legislative election were counted, the Colorado Party could afford to pat itself on the back: it possessed every seat but one in the Senate, and every seat but five in the Chamber. And as almost all of these people had pledged before their election to vote for Jose Batlle y Ordonez as President in March 1911, the Maestro could afford to be fairly relaxed as well. He returned from France in early February to much rejoicing and only one or two assassination scares.

Once ensconced in his old role, Batlle unleashed a ‘rain of projects’. Before his election, he had remained fairly quiet on his aims in Government and tried to imply that he was more ‘mature’ and conservative than he had previously been. In fact, his second presidency is regarded as one of the most radical and seminal in Uruguayan history. He nationalised the Bank of the Republic, increased the national Budget by 27% in his first 18 months, pushed forward the eight hour day and divorce (at the request of the wife), tried to set up a state insurance monopoly (ultimately blocked by British diplomatic intervention) and started a high school for girls. In general, though, the programmes put forward by Batlle’s ministers tended to be petty pilot schemes, such as the state Fishing Institute which never actually got around to buying a boat.

It is clear that Batlle, although not in any way an orthodox or ideological socialist, imagined that his presidency would in fact be a baseline for further reforms. To do this, he had come up with a constitutional reform inspired by the Swiss Federal Council: he would fight for the replacement of the presidency with a nine-member ‘Colegiado’, with one member being elected every year and a chairman who would simply be a primus inter pares. Spreading power would prevent any future President from imposing a dictatorship (which had been a common occurrence in 19th century Uruguay), while annual elections would build up democratic energy to give rise to mass participation in politics. Traditionally, turnout was always very low, partly because voters had to publicly sign their ballot papers. The other advantage of the new system was that all the members of the Colegiado would in practice always be Colorados, and would almost certainly have to sign up to the Colorado manifesto in order to be nominated, thus building the power of the Party over its leading members - and Batlle envisioned that he would have the partisan authority to impose his visions on a party which still had a lot of unreconstructed conservative ranchers in its ranks.

Before the Colegiado could be introduced, both Houses would have to call a constitutional convention - but in this, Batlle made a huge error. He simply forgot to ask his handpicked candidates for the six Senate seats up for election 1912 whether they favoured the Colegiado. As it was, five of them were uncontested for the Colorados because the Blancos were still abstaining, while Rio Negro had two rival Colorado candidates: ex-President Claudio Williman, and one of the few religious Catholics in the Colorado Party, Manuel Tiscornia. Both were backed by rival machines in the Department, but the Executive favoured Williman. But then Williman intimated that he was against the Colegiado, so Batlle couldn’t be expected to help him out if push came to shove. And then, Finance and Interior Minister Jose Serrato took against Williman. Serrato, too, was against the Colegiado, but mainly because he hoped to succeed Batlle as President, and he feared that Williman’s election would put him in pole position for the succession. So Serrato gave blatantly partisan instructions to the local police chiefs to manipulate matters in favour of Tiscornia, and the exceedingly close result was therefore put under intense scrutiny. Serrato was mired in scandal until his resignation, but the adjudication of the result took three years, with the seat ultimately being given to neither candidate.

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The new Senate included Pedro Manini Rios, a loyal outrider of President Batlle and a promising young man of 32. But Manini, too, aspired to be President at some point, and furthermore, he couldn’t see a way of making the Colegiado work without including Nationalist members - which would be a betrayal of the old Colorado principle of Government by Party, against which stood the Blanco ideal of ‘co-participation’ of both parties in government. Indeed, an idea along these lines had been promoted by a Nationalist leader in the previous decade. It was also similar to a concept promoted by the minuscule Socialist Party, which favoured a directly elected Council of Ministers, with each member responsible for a Government department. Manini, already feeling disillusioned about the fast pace of reform, asked in a famous speech, “are we Colorados or are we Socialists”. He now took the step of gathering another ten Senators (the majority) to delay the calling of the Convention until after Batlle had left office, thus hopefully removing the delegates from his influence.

Outside of hardcore Batllista cultists, few Uruguayans were particularly interested in the Colegiado. Most of the political elite thought it ridiculous, to such an extent that almost all of Batlle’s Ministers resigned en masse and his remaining allies, Domingo Arena and Feliciano Viera, were reduced to chasing prospective conscripts down the street. Batlle had to push forward a younger generation of Colorados to replace the already-fairly-young Manini group, landing on Baltasar Brum (who he’d never actually met) to fill the Education portfolio. We will meet Brum again - for now, the only important thing is that he was under the wing of Viera, a shrewd tactician and the clearest ‘machine politician’ of this era, which bore the corollary that he was substantially devoid of principles. But Arena was more of a charismatic clown, so Viera was the only choice for the Batllistas as President from 1915 until the passing of the new constitution.

The candidacy of Feliciano Viera was approved by the Colorado mass organisation and all official candidates for the 1913 lower house elections. As these occurred shortly after a gold convertibility crisis (basically it was an unfounded panic, but a run on the Bank of the Republic limited the ability of both the state and private enterprise to get credit for the rest of Batlle’s second term, severely limiting the potential of the economy) and, more importantly, in the wake of Manini announcing that his ‘anti-Colegialist’ organisation would contest the election, the Nationalists were emboldened to give up their abstentionist stance. The anti-Colegialists combined with a previous conservative split from the Colorados, the ‘Independent Colorados’ of Juan Campisteguy and Uruguay’s foremost intellectual, Jose Enrique Rodo, to form the ‘Colorado Convention’, under which name they contested the election. This party got about 9% of the votes but no seats (they didn’t poll at second place in any Department and true proportional representation had yet to be passed), which retrospectively justified Rodo’s preference for an alliance with the Nationalists - but the anti-Colegialists had split off because they favoured a single-party Colorado government, so they could hardly enter a coalition with the Blancos right off the bat.

In Rivera, along the northern border, the Nationalists endorsed a conservative principista and hereditary foe of the Batlle family, Juan Andres Ramirez, who stood under the name of his own ‘Partido Civismo Independiente’, but officially joined the Blancos halfway through the term.

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Now with no easy access to credit and a solidifying opposition majority in the Senate (Manini and half a dozen of his Senate followers now split off to form the ‘Partido Colorado General Rivera’, which proclaimed the classical liberal, or simply conservative, principles of 19th century Colorados), Batlle couldn’t pass much progressive legislation. But he introduced another flurry of hopeless bills as a way of setting the stall for what could be achieved under the Colegiado: the asphalting of more miles of Montevidean road than Paris had at that point; the provision of an old-age pension available from the unprecedented age of 65; a state railway network to compete with the British-owned Ferrocarril Central; confiscation of state land which had been squatted on by ranchers for the last hundred years. The conservatives complained that Uruguay was being treated like a lab rat - but when the First World War started and a fresh economic crisis raised its head, they proposed an equally untried scheme to back the Uruguayan peso with wool rather than gold.

Finally, at the end of 1914, a Senate election was held: the Nationalists stood candidates and won a seat, but the Partido Colorado General Rivera (the ‘Riveristas’) saw no likelihood of winning a seat under First Past the Post, and abstained. Manini’s conservative majority was no more - but by this stage, Batlle had been forced to start retrenching, and in any case he only had a few more months to run in his presidential term. The Colegiado, upon which the permanency of his project seemed to rest, would have to be entrusted to a Constitutional Convention called by Feliciano Viera.

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Name of the week: has to be the superlatively forenamed deputy Duvimioso Terra. As a Blanco rebel back in 1897, Aparicio Saravia had called him “that little lawyer with the strange name”.
 
When Feliciano Viera took power in 1915, he was pledged to continue the progressive policies of his predecessor, Jose Batlle y Ordonez, and in particular, to push for the replacement of the President with a collegiate executive, or Colegiado. The first electoral test during the Viera administration would be the convocation of a Constitutional Convention to decide on that very issue in 1916.

Viera, who had risen to the top through long experience in making backroom deals, was a tactician rather than a conviction politician, but for the moment, he viewed Batllismo as his best option for maintaining his power and popularity. Leftover Batllista policies such as the eight-hour day and old age pensions were persevered with, while public restaurants for the poor were spread around the country and an old bill to tax land more intensively was dusted off.

Before the First World War, the primary source of state revenue was customs receipts from imports, but at the moment, Uruguayan wool and meat products were fetching high prices from European armies at the same time as those European economies directed their industrial focus away from export goods - so although the rancher elite became wealthy, they couldn’t spend their money abroad, so the state stayed poor. The obvious choice was to change the tax system to land more heavily on the estancieros, but this invited the opposition of the most powerful sector of Uruguayan society. The Rural Federation, an advocacy group, was set up to oppose Viera’s policies, and a major leader was Pedro Manini Rios, the leader of the anti-Colegialista Colorados - who were now established as an independent party, the ‘Partido Colorado General Fructuoso Rivera’. Manini’s identification with rural landowner interests marked a transition from a single-issue constitutional perspective to a generalised opposition to Batllismo.

Minor parties like the Anti-Colegialists would have a fighting chance in the elections to the Constitutional Convention, as this body would be chosen under a new voting system. Three fifths of the seats in each Department would go to the highest-polling party (assumed, based on past evidence, to be predominantly the Colorados) and the other two fifths would be split by proportional representation between the other parties. This would weaken the Nationalist Party, while offering representation to minor parties and ensuring that they wouldn’t actually have any influence over the Colorado majority. Along with the Anti-Colegialists, the other main new party was the Union Civica, a small party promoting the interests of the Catholic hierarchy in opposition to the laicising tendencies of the Colorados, and espousing collaboration between capital and labour and the introduction of corporatist solutions to governance. Slightly older was the Socialist Party of ex-Deputy Emilio Frugoni, which was actually very moderate in policy terms and based on bourgeois intellectuals rather than massed workers. Unionisation hadn’t progressed very far in Uruguay, and what development there had been before the strikes of 1911 had been led by Anarchists.

The other innovation in this election was the introduction of the secret ballot (previously the voters had been expected to sign their ballots in public), which attracted more citizens to register than ever before. The Colegialist Colorados were fairly relaxed about this, as they expected that workers and rural peons would now be brave enough to vote in ways that their bosses might not approve of. But in fact, the opposite happened, and the bulk of the new voters turned out to be beyond the reach of Batllista pro-Colegiado propaganda. In most Departments, the three-fifths majority seats went to the Blancos, while the Colorados were forced to share the minority seats with their Anti-Colegialist brethren. This was the first time the Blancos had won an election in living memory.

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The balance of power in the Constitutional Convention was held by the Anti-Colegialists, which meant that Viera had to negotiate with them. In truth, Viera’s confidence in the popularity of his Batllista programme had been shaken by the election results, so he lost no time in announcing a ‘halt’ to all initiatives which might incur expense - and therefore to the very progressiveness of the government. He also appointed principista Nationalist Martin C. Martinez as his new Minister of Finance. However, the Riveristas wanted more: at least 20 seats on Colorado slates in the legislative elections scheduled for January. Viera rejected this price. He had other ideas: shortly before the elections, he presented a new electoral law, adding thirty-three new seats to the Chamber of Deputies, all of them in Colorado-favouring Departments.

Rejected by Viera, the Anti-Colegialists had only one option in an election with no proportional representation: coalition with the Nationalists. They had largely held aloof from this during the Convention elections because of the virulent hereditary odium between Colorados and Blancos, but now there was no choice. The Popular Coalition was also joined by the Union Civica, while the Rural Federation nominated Coalition candidates who just happened to be Anti-Colegialists. These minor-party candidates were all in positions around halfway down the list of candidates, so that if they delivered a majority in a Department to the Nationalists, they would get in; and if not, not. But the coalition turned off a lot of voters on both sides of the alliance, and in some Departments, dissident Riveristas ran alone. In others, anti-coalition Blancos also presented lists. This vote-splitting and the sense of betrayal in combining with the enemy was bad enough - but added to the lack of a secret ballot, the dead stop in the pace of divisive projects, and the fact that the Colegiado was no longer an electoral issue, it didn’t come as much of a surprise that the mainstream Colorados won a majority. The Riveristas won only three seats.

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Back in the Constitutional battle, Viera continued to attempt a compromise with Manini’s Riveristas. But ex-President Batlle wasn’t finished yet. Disturbed by Viera’s Halt and becoming increasingly distant from his former protege, he focused on his role as the Messiah of the Colorado Party activists. Soon, he convinced the previously-selected presidential candidate, Baltasar Brum, to stand aside in his favour, thus masterfully creating the prospect of a third Batlle presidency running from 1919 to 1923. Who knew what the old crackpot would do next? As Batlle had anticipated, the Nationalists didn’t want to find out, so they came to the negotiating table with a Batllista deputation including Domingo Arena and Brum.

In return for the secret ballot, and proportional representation, and the right to veto Batlle's candidacy, the Blancos gave way on the Colegiado. Sort of. Rather than the Batllista concept of replacing the President with a nine-member executive junta derived entirely from the Colorado Party, the compromise that came out of this committee was for a ‘bicephalous’ or two-headed Executive. The President would remain, but only in charge of the police, the Army and foreign affairs, while a nine-member National Council of Administration with representation from the two largest parties (elected three members at a time under the old two-third/one-third system) would control the administrative portfolios such as Finance and Public Works. Batlle had outplayed Viera at his own game, weaponising his own unpopularity to get the bulk of what he wanted.

Once this was accomplished (and the new Constitution was passed with a boring-to-map 95% of the vote), Viera announced an end to the Halt. However, the financial situation and the Colorados’ small majority precluded any major initiatives, while a split between Batllistas and Vieristas was beginning to emerge. The 1918 Senate election would be the last under the old Constitution - as well as one of the last with only two parties contesting. Gone were the days of strong parties marching to war by means of the ballot-box, as in the Batlle era. The 1920s would be a time of Viera-style deal-making.

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Name of the Week: The 218-member Constitutional Convention is a veritable treasure-trove of cool names, most of them from the Blancos: Adolfo Artagaveytia is my favourite, but this election also provides us with all-time greats such as German Roosen, Escolastico Imas and Coralio Capillas from that party alone.
 
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