Last
Sunday, the runoff was held to determine who, of the two candidates with the
most votes in the first round of the general elections in Uruguay, would be the
winner of the new edition of the electoral farce to elect the president of the
republic. The opposition candidate Yamandú Orsi of the Frente Amplio (FA) was
elected, and Álvaro Delgado (Partido Nacional), who will replace the current
president Luis Lacalle Pou of the Partido Nacional. The change will take place on
March 1. Lacalle Pou expressed on the same election morning his intention that
whoever is president-elect would accompany him during the Mercosur summit, on
December 5 and 6, which Uruguay is hosting. Only 11 days after the elections.
Asked about
the challenges at the level of diplomacy, he said that "the challenges are
first internal, the situation of children, adolescents, security problems.
These are the challenges that were present throughout the campaign, in all the
casts; And with respect to the region, I am deeply integrationist, in a world
that is closing even more you have to have a good relationship with the region,
because today in a month everything can change, the world is sitting on a
powder keg.”
That is to
say, in the electoral debate and in the plans of the new government the great
problems of the country do not figure, not even remotely.
The new
government of the FA, will be a government of continuity as part of the
rotation in office, between representatives of the buyer faction and the
bureaucratic one of the great bourgeoisie of this country. A semi-colonial and
semi-feudal society on which a bureaucratic capitalism is developed at the
service of mainly Yankee imperialism. The President of the Republic is the head
of the Uruguayan State, a landowner-bureaucratic State at the service of
imperialism.
As the
media has reported about the future cabinet and as Orsi himself has said: “we
must sit down in terms of political balance, profile and technical strength.”
The above
indicates that, due to the lack of a parliamentary majority, the new government
will not be a stable government, but one that will depend on lobbying with the
opposition parties. Just as it was with the government of its predecessor, the
comprador faction of the Uruguayan big bourgeoisie (Lacalle of the FN), which
replaced the previous government of the Frente Amplio (FA), there will not be
any major differences except for a certain bias towards state intervention in
the economy but with the well-known IMF recipe of macroeconomic discipline and
economic openness - to foreign investment and imports. Thus, there is no need
to think about weak policies to promote industry, which has made Uruguay one of
the most expensive countries in the world. Less than addressing the land problem,
one of the most unjust in Latin America with one of the highest concentrations
of land in the hands of large landowners, as indicated by the Gini index of
0.84.
The
appointment of him as future Minister of Economy and strongman of his election
campaign says much about the hesitant character of this new government of the
bureaucratic faction, which the reactionary media call “leftist”. We
quote:
For now,
his cast has only one confirmed member: Gabriel Oddone, a respected economist
who comes from the private sector and who has been called to lead the Ministry
of Economy and Finance. When he was presented, three months ago, in the middle
of the campaign, the most radical sector of the Broad Front (minority)
protested for considering him too center, but those complaints fell on deaf
ears.”
According
to his own definitions, Orsi, who leads the moderate majority of the Broad
Front, will support, together with Oddone, the guidelines of the current
administration in terms of macroeconomic order, clear rules for investors and
openness to the outside. In fact, the same formula that the Broad Front
supported in its 15 years of government.”
The above
paragraph leaves no room for doubt about the character of the new Frente Amplio
government, which will be of the same stamp as that of “Pepe” Mujica and Tabaré
Vázquez, that is, a follower of the economic policy recipes of the
international imperialist institutions such as the International Monetary Fund,
World Bank, CEPAL, IDB, etc., in the service of mainly Yankee imperialism,
which, in order to justify the sale of the country to imperialism, distributes
as “social policy” the crumbs that the imperialists leave behind from the
exploitation of the country.
Regarding
the benefits of the system with respect to “income distribution” and the “low
levels of inequality,” which the FA speaks of in its own electoral discourse,
these are only words, which abruptly clash with the reality of the character of
Uruguayan society itself. Because it is not a problem of a change of government
but of the old society that is in general crisis ready to be swept away by the
people's war. Let's read:
"During
the presidential debate last week, Orsi said that the Frente Amplio has a
commitment to stability, which involves "macroeconomic balance and the
certainties that every government must provide." He added that emphasis
must be placed on "income distribution."
His
designated minister had explained days before, in a much-talked-about
television interview, his vision of the country's development, in order to know
what could be expected from his eventual leadership of the national economy.
"There
is no prosperous country in the world that has high levels of inequality. The
success of societies in the world are societies that generate sufficient
resources and that at the same time unite society with low levels of
inequality. That is the key and Uruguay has that in its matrix, and that
requires active employment policies and active income distribution
policies," he said.
“This is
the menu of policies that the Frente Amplio is going to put on the table,
because we firmly believe that there is a combination, a balance between
stimulating growth, stimulating innovation, stimulating entrepreneurs to take
risks and have attractive returns for those risks, but at the same time that
this is distributed equitably, not waiting for it to spill over,” he added
in his conversation with Nicolás Núñez.
According
to what economist Aldo Lema explained to LA NACION (Argentina), “the biggest
challenge will be to increase economic growth in an external context that is
projected to be very complex. Initially there may be a certain tailwind due to
Argentina's reactivation and the rise in the price of dollars. But from the
extraregional environment the wind would be against due to low global growth,
still restrictive financial conditions, the global strength of the dollar and
the consequences of the Trump government.”
Economist
Ignacio Munyo said that there was no longer room to increase spending. “For me,
the absolute priorities are competitiveness and the reorientation of spending
without an increase, focusing on the priorities that are established in the
commitment made by the candidate who won. For example, in child poverty, which
is very high in Uruguay, in more investments in security, which is a whole
issue, more investments in health, in education, research and development,” he
said.
Regarding
the future minister, he said that “he has worked a lot as a consultant with the
private sector, he understands the restrictions, he understands the problems of
competitiveness, that is good because he is someone who understands where
Uruguay is and what it needs to be able to grow. He will have to roll up his
sleeves and put into practice what he has written and said in hundreds of
conferences.”
During the
three previous FA governments, FDI, that is, imperialist investment,
"tripled its historical values"
When the
candidate and the future minister of economy talk about productivity and
competitiveness, they are referring to the old bureaucratic path at the service
of imperialism, as they themselves confess, when in a journalistic note in La
Diaria Uruguay, Changes and continuities in the Uruguayan productive structure
after 15 years of left-wing governments, March 22, 2021, Fernando Isabella,
refers to his previous 15 years of government:
"The
growth of productivity is also observed with special emphasis in some agricultural
productions, which clearly leave behind the stagnation that characterized this
sector for most of the last century. In particular, the growth of productivity
is especially intense in competitive agro-export chains, which, while
developing, reduce their job creation. Productivity jumps are also observed in
services, whose general growth is driven by the most important activities.
(...)
The
context, international insertion and the productive structure
This entire
process described was possible within the framework of an international context
that was especially favorable for Uruguay, with high prices for the main export
products and significant flows of foreign direct investment. However, a
detailed look at the productive structure and the characteristics of the
international insertion of our economy does not detect clear evidence in the
sense of a structural transformation that would feed back into the cycle
described above, through impulses of endogenous growth, that would generate
firm bases for the continuity of the process and that would expand the margins
of economic autonomy with respect to international cycles. In particular, the
dependence on the prices of the few primary products on which the country bases
its international insertion is clear.
Although
important, the only exception in terms of transformation in international
insertion is found in non-traditional services, which encompass various
activities of relatively high sophistication and increasing weight in the
country's export basket. In terms of goods, although changes are observed in
the export basket, it continues to be centered on activities strongly
associated with the country's natural resource endowment, with the historical
presence of meat, the emergence of agricultural products, wood and cellulose,
and some growth in dairy products; products that in general, with the exception
of meat, continue to show little differentiation and low sophistication.
Likewise,
it is observed that the traditional external restriction that has characterized
most Latin American economies, including Uruguay, is still active. Thus,
sustained economic growth leads to persistent and significant current account
deficits, which calls into question the sustainability of growth in the long
term and generates vulnerability to the reversal of international financial
flows. This has its roots in deep structural causes associated with the
external insertion of the Uruguayan economy, its role as a supplier of
commodities with little processing and the consequent sectoral composition of
the national economic structure, its low technological intensity and its
specialization in activities that show low income elasticity of demand; that
is, whose demand does not accompany the growth of people's income, which tends
to concentrate progressively on goods and services of a higher technological or
cultural level.
(...)
On the
other hand, the process observed in the manufacturing industry indicates a
continuity of a long-term process of specialization in the processing of national
raw materials in the sense of static comparative advantages. In particular,
there are three branches that explain the growth of the sector: food, cellulose
and paper, and wood and wood products.
(...) Even
in several of the branches that are expanding, a tendency to reverse the
value-added process is observed, since exports are concentrated in increasingly
primary links. In this way, the manufacturing industry, far from being a
driving force of development and productive diversification, has acted in a
reactive manner, in a kind of primary-dependent re-specialization. The only
relevant exceptions in this sense would seem to be the chemical and
pharmaceutical branches, which have managed to maintain their share of
industrial added value."
But, as propagandists of the 15 years of FA
government, they themselves do not feel very comfortable with the fact that the
FA has promoted remote imperialist exploitation of the workforce in the Irish
way or better as in India, when in a whiny tone and seeking relief they write:
"In
passing, we mentioned the main flash of structural transformation observed:
non-traditional services. These services cover a wide variety of activities, some highly
sophisticated and others not so much, but which have shown significant export
and employment dynamism, particularly in the case of highly skilled workers. Activities
such as information technology, professional and technical services, financial
services, logistics, administrative and back office services in general, whose
operating logic is associated with the most recent global trends towards the
relocation of activities. Driven by advances in information and
communications technologies, tasks are carried out here that are part of the
internal processes of companies located in different regions of the world,
mainly the United States. Although the most common statistical sources
do not allow us to adequately assess these activities, they can be approximated
through the branch "services provided to companies", which, however,
appear aggregated with other traditional activities of very low sophistication.
However, when analysing the educational level of workers in this sector, we can
see a firm trend towards growth in more sophisticated activities in a sector
that, as a whole, accounts for approximately 120,000 jobs. It is a figure that
is not insignificant."
This is the
present of oppression and exploitation by imperialism, bureaucratic capitalism
and semi-feudalism that the Frente Amplio serves with its program of a
landowning-bureaucratic character of the bureaucratic fraction of the big
Uruguayan bourgeoisie at the service of imperialism. It is not a future
perspective for the proletariat and the people of Uruguay. They have the
pending and overdue task of reconstituting their Communist Party as a
militarized Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party to start the popular war and direct
it to bring the democratic evolution to its culmination and move immediately
and without any interruption to the socialist revolution.
SOME NOTES ON THE LAND PROBLEM IN URUGUAY
In Brazil,
the number of farms decreased by 10.7% between 1985 and 2006. In Argentina, the
number of farms also decreased by 20.8% between 1988 and 2002. Chile also recorded
a decrease of 6.4% in the number of farms between 1997 and 2007. In Uruguay,
the reduction was 21.4% in the period 2000-2011. The decreases experienced in
these latter countries have been mainly in small-sized farms, which means that
this downward trend could be concentrated in the family farming range, in favor
of medium- and large-sized farms (Díaz-Bonilla, Saini, Creamer, & Henry,
2013).
Particularly
striking are the values and the trend of the land concentration index for some
countries (see last column of table 1). In general, all coefficient values
are very high, which shows the high concentration of land (in fact, 12 of the
23 countries with complete information have Gini index values equal to or
greater than 0.8; 1.0 means a total degree of concentration). Among the
countries that show a tendency to increase the index, all have values greater
than 0.8. (Structure and tenure of agricultural land in Latin America and the
Caribbean Germán Escobar March 2016)
URUGUAY – UDELAR Rural Studies Center NINTH
REPORT (2024)
he year
2023 was marked by a historic water crisis that affected the drinking water
supply of 60% of the population (in the metropolitan area) and a drought
throughout the national territory whose recorded history dates back more than
70 years. The water crisis (revealed) in addition to land grabbing (...)
Uruguay is experiencing a hoarding of water by large companies that, during the
water crisis, continued to use magnificent volumes, even increasing sales and
profits from bottled water, but also developing foreign direct investment
projects based on the exploitation of water resources. While for some
specialists the “rural exodus” is a “demographic myth”
In Uruguay
(Calvo, 2020), in order to correlate land grabbing with the depopulation of the
countryside, the General Agricultural Census (hereinafter CGA) of the Ministry
of Livestock and Fisheries (MGAP) are one of the few databases that allow
generating more evidence.
The last
CGA was published in 2011. With the intention of maintaining a 10-year
frequency, it was applied in 2022 and 2023 without reaching the universe of
agricultural establishments included, which generates difficulties in
constituting updated information on rural areas and changes at the agricultural
level.
The
denomination of the rural population, and therefore of rural territories in
Uruguay, pose challenges for both public policy and academia. At the academic
level, the diversity of meanings responds to the lack of consensus on its
nature. During the 20th century, there were positions that proposed a dichotomy
between urban and rural (Solari, 1958), as well as a coincidence between rural
and agricultural, while referring to a continuous urban-rural gradient (Sorokin
and Zimmerman, 1929).
Recent
debates have taken up this discussion again and propose the necessary update, considering
the rupture between rural and agricultural, which is why they point out the
convenience of integrating criteria of residence and occupation into the
definition of the rural population (Piñeiro, 2001; Mascheroni and Riella,
2010).
In more
structural terms, access to territory and land in Uruguay is mainly linked to
two forms of property: public and private. (...) the figure of corporations
(Laws 16,060 of 1989 and 18,461 of 2009) has prevented the measurement of the
foreign ownership of land, which is registered in the CGA when its owners are
natural persons. This means that 40% of productive land, which is in the hands
of companies with a contract (mainly corporations), may be covering up
phenomena of foreign ownership.
(...)
At the
level of applied socioeconomic statistics, perhaps family agricultural
production is the one that has a higher degree of standardized data based on
the Family Production Registry dependent on the General Directorate of Rural
Development of the MGAP to account for the demand of collective subjects
self-identified as family producers (...) On the other hand, rural wage earners
have updated information from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, from
the ECH statistics of the INE, from the CGA information provided by the owner
of the establishment that constitute a basis for generating public policies.
(...)
With
respect to the ethnic ancestry of artisanal fishermen, rural workers and family
producers, it would be desirable to generate an identification of the rural population
with mainly Afro and indigenous ancestry, in order to adjust the intervention
of the State for the promotion of their rights. In Uruguay, not only are there
no affirmative policies for access to land and territory for Afro-descendants
or descendants of indigenous peoples, but there is also no quantification of
their participation as owners of agricultural establishments, artisanal
vessels, or fishing permits.
On the
other hand, (...) the debate on the "real demand" for land is reduced to
the adjustment that the technical evaluation (...)
(...) given
the scarcity of land (...) the quantification of the demand for
land requires disaggregating".
And, the
REPORT on Uruguay states the following:
In Uruguay,
the water crisis and the scarcity of water, exacerbated by the advance of
commercial monocultures and the extractive model, has generated a deep
environmental and social crisis in rural areas. The commercialization of public
lands and the foreignization of large areas, mainly by multinational forestry
companies, have displaced many rural communities, affecting both their access
to resources and their way of life.
Despite
these difficulties, peasant organizations and local communities continue to
fight (...) rural communities seek to preserve their ways of life, defending
water, land and their right to exist in rural territories."
It is an
important fact, regarding the development of bureaucratic capitalism in
Uruguayan agriculture on a semi-feudal and semi-colonial basis and official
statistics (agricultural censuses) to determine the weight of the peasantry in
that country, there are similar problems to those in the rest of Latin American
countries as we have seen above in the Report, whose authors are: Pablo Díaz
Estévez and Verónica Núñez Scorza, researchers at the Land Policy Observatory
of the Rural Studies Nucleus of the Northeast Region University Center of the
University of the Republic - CENUR, Uruguay.
https://nucleodeestudiosrurales.wordpress.com/
