America.Former Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez dies at 80 years of age
The cold ran down the spine of tens of thousands of Uruguayans.
Tabaré Vázquez admitted being "in the final stage" of his life, but even so, he dared to answer the question of whether there is a God or not.
"Sometimes I believe that there is God, sometimes I believe that there is no God.
That we are a little window that opens to life and we go on stage. But many times I want, I wish, there was a God. But I can go that far."
The man who changed the history of the Uruguayan left, twice president for the Broad Front, spoke in
Legado
, a program in which fundamental figures in the country's history are interviewed.
The interview, recorded a few days before, was broadcast on Sunday, November 29, and had a great impact.
This Sunday he died at the age of 80.
Vázquez, for years head of oncology at the Spanish Association of Montevideo, was one of the most respected figures on the political scene in the most civic country with the best democratic tradition in South America.
A man who, when he contracted lung cancer in 2019, announced it himself at a press conference at the government headquarters.
His mother, father, and sister had died of cancer in the 1960s
.
It was no accident that Vázquez specialized in oncology.
Days before that announcement,
María Auxiliadora
, his wife and the support of his life,
had died
, according to what he himself said repeatedly.
A football lover, at the end of the 70s he presided over the modest Progreso club, which at that time with him at the helm achieved the only title in its history.
A lover of boxing and fishing, he was born on January 17, 1940. Grandson of Galicians and Italians, his father was a worker, an employee in the local oil refinery and later a union leader.
His humble origins marked Vázquez, who surprised when he won the mayor of Montevideo in 1990.
Honesty and good political work
That first incursion of the local left into positions of high institutional significance in the country was the prologue of his arrival to the Presidency in 2005 and of the absolute majority with which he won a second term in 2015. Between those two periods, José Mújica, formerly A guerrilla who represented the most combative and leftist soul of the Broad Front.
Vázquez was the moderate, the composer.
His first government, in which he created the Ministry of Social Development and launched the "Ceibal Plan" so that every Uruguayan child had a computer, was much more transformative and dynamic than the second.
"The Latin American left should tend towards social democracy", believed Vázquez, who criticized the extreme right and the dogmatic left.
"The extremes are not good, and in the end they touch."
Uruguayans still remember when, in 2018, Vázquez faced a demonstration of agricultural producers in the street, and fired up, he launched a phrase that would remain engraved:
"I can open my mouth because I am honest."
That honesty and good political work was recognized this Sunday by the entire Uruguayan party arch and President Luis Lacalle Pou, who established a good relationship with Vázquez in the weeks of the transition prior to the change of government on March 1 of this year.
President between 2005 and 2010 and again between 2015 and 2020,
Vázquez never strayed from medicine, which he considered a profession similar to politics.
"Exercising politics is how to do medicine. Society, the people, is made up of human beings. That society has dreams and pathologies. Exercising politics responsibly is also doing medicine in society."
Anti-tobacco law
In his first presidency,
Vázquez banned smoking in public spaces
, banned tobacco advertising, and raised taxes on cigarettes.
Tobacco company Philip Morris filed a lawsuit, which he lost.
According to the local newspaper
El Observador
, in his early days in high politics, Vázquez's speech was "vague and elusive, full of common places, but he enchanted a new public, like a famous preacher."
Every time he was asked, Vázquez admitted that one of the hardest moments of his two presidencies was when
Néstor Kirchner
, then Argentine president and theoretically related to the leader of the Uruguayan left, promoted the blockade for several years of the bridges that connect to both countries between the cities of
Gualeguaychú and Fray Bentos
, on the Uruguay River.
At the center of the scene was the alleged contamination of the water by logging companies.
US backing
That time, Vázquez maneuvered politically to gain US backing in the conflict.
First in dialogue with
Condolezza Rice
, then Secretary of State, and then with President
George Bush
: "If Uruguay needs something, it only has to pick up the phone and ask for it, because it has the United States."
Although it signed a Bilateral Investment Agreement with the United States in 2005, it did not achieve the proposed Free Trade Agreement.
Vázquez recalled a discussion he had on the subject with Venezuelan leader
Hugo Chávez
.
"One day Hugo Chávez told me: 'Tabaré: Are you going to sign an FTA with the empire, and I don't know how much and I don't know what?' Then I answered: 'Yes, if it is favorable for Uruguay, yes (... But if you don't sell him more oil, then I declare war on the United States. '"
Mauricio Macri,
who assumed the Argentine Presidency at the end of 2015, related months ago his first meeting with Vázquez, at that time in his second term in office, and his apology to the Uruguayan for the problems of the past.
According to the socioliberal Macri, at that moment Vázquez looked at his watch and told him:
"In two minutes we have resolved a decade of conflicts, let's go to the barbecue.
It has made me very happy, President."
A central figure in Uruguayan politics for three decades,
Vázquez said goodbye admitting that he was not able to achieve everything he set out to do
, that he could not help all those people who, like him in the first years of his life, would have wanted. he lives in an extremely humble way.
"What I missed? Maybe you finish with these
ranchos
(slums) of nylon sheet, because I met them
inside."
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