Uruguay: a mob mobilized against the government of Lacalle Pou | The general strike promoted by the PIT-CNT was felt in Montevideo

The streets of Montevideo have been popular for the year and a half of government of Luis Lacalle Pou. A strike with mobilization – the third against the coalition led by the president – was felt this Wednesday in the capital. It was convened by the workers’ union PIT-CNT with the basic conflict raised by the law of urgent consideration (LUC), “the flagship” of the executive power, as he said. PageI12 the official deputy Pedro Jisdonian. From the lodge at the corner of Avenida del Libertador, Brigadier Antonio Lavalleja and La Paz, the general secretary of the union, Marcelo Abdala, summoned another Uruguayan hero, José Gervasio Artigas, to sum up the slogan of the act: “So that the most unfortunate are the most privileged”.

The traditional thoroughfare that leads to the Legislative Palace at the intersection with Avenida de la Leyes was filled with people mobilized around noon. Thousands of workers stopped, concentrated and listened to the one-day speakers that Lacalle Pou defined as “political”. Fernando Pereira, the president of the PIT-CNT replied: “Yes, it’s politics, it’s against labor policy, against wage policy, against the policy promoted in the LUC”. The crowd merges with a hundred horsemen from within and who again summon the protector of free peoples: “As Artigas said, at the foot of the pingo. They were protesting against a government decision that plans to use funds intended for the National Institute of Colonization (INC) to transfer them to a trust that seeks to eradicate the settlements. The horse march was convened by the National Union of Salaried, Rural and Assimilated Workers (Unatra).

Lacalle Pou of Expo Prado

The countryside and the city have united against the measures of the government which took office on March 1, 2020. The president made statements at Expo Prado, an exhibition similar to the one held in Rural de Palermo: “I read the harangues or the PIT – Strike platforms of the CNT. They are within their rights. Uruguay just needs to work more, it needs to make an effort, we are emerging from a pandemic. It is a clearly political strike ”. Lacalle Pou also said it was an act against LUC.

The Front Broad deputy Gabriel Otero, consulted in his office in Congress by this newspaper, commented: “The LUC, although it is not the first time that it is approved in the country, touches 35 or 40 additional laws, as a backbone. It’s very ideological and tends towards the everyday right-wing aspects of our life and, therefore, the right-wing society. Because considering in Uruguay after a hundred years the right to strike, the recognition of trade unions, that mobilizations and pickets, everything that workers do in conflict, be declared illegal, is an approach that goes against all freedoms. trade unions. And I will give an example: in fifteen years of the Front Broad government, some four hundred new unions have been born and from 130 to 140,000 workers affiliated to our central one alone, we have grown to 400,000. It was a state policy. The LUC is the opposite. He came to plant an agenda, something that the right always does faster than the left ”.

National Party MP Jisdonian thinks very differently: “This law was raised during the election campaign. Over 270 articles have been amended and the constitutional mechanism of the LUC has also been used in the past by the Frente Amplio. We seek with her to give a dynamic to the government, and there is nothing in the law that could surprise anyone. Its first project dates from January 2020, it was not voted overnight. The Front Large was very hurt by the defeat at the polls and installed this issue with the meeting of signatures for the referendum. Nobody wants people to be bad, we are all looking for the same thing ”. Otero and Jisdonian are members of the same Lower House Labor Law and Social Security Committee.

About ten blocks from the headquarters of the annex of the Legislative Palace, Abdala was enthusiastic about the mobilization capacity of the PIT-CNT: “We will have to enlarge the Avenida del Libertador because it is too small for us ”. And he demanded that the crisis “not be paid for by the workers”. Uruguay’s social problems are seen in the modest neighborhoods of Montevideo and also in the streets of the center. There are too many people on the street or asking for money on Avenida 18 de Julio or in the old town. Lacalle Pou described another reality at Expo Prado. He mentioned that during his government the number of Uruguayans who received unemployment insurance decreased. And he compared it to the immediate antecedent of the last Front government: “There were more than 47,000 Uruguayans in unemployment insurance and the pandemic has taken it to a hundred years. Today, we are with 38,000 Uruguayans in unemployment insurance, less than when we expected ”.

For the opposition mobilized, these figures do not correspond to reality. Nor with the poster that a demonstrator brandished: “I’m starving,” she said. As the international and Uruguayan anthem chords descended from the box, a very warm image completed the civic day. Former President Pepe Mujica and his wife, Senator Lucía Topolansky, watched the event sitting on folding chairs.

The Avenida del Libertador towards the Legislative Palace which rises in the district of La Aguada had been transformed into a multicolored and at the same time compact mosaic. The images of Mario Benedetti, Juana de Ibarbourou and Alfredo Zitarrosa observed from a mural near the Congress painted in Plaza Michelini – Gutiérrez Ruiz square. This remodeled public space pays homage to the two Uruguayan legislators who were assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1976 as part of the Condor plan. It is part of a cultural corridor that surrounded the mobilization, the most important in a decade called by the union of Uruguayan workers.

Signatures for the referendum

Social tensions in Uruguay are increasing. The LUC is a milestone that will complete its course in the first months of 2022. The nine members of the Electoral Tribunal analyze the 796,526 signatures that the opposition and the various expressions of society have gathered to submit the law to a referendum. A survey by consulting firm Cifra claims that LUC is supported by 44% of the population, 34% reject it and 22% remain undecided. A week earlier, the same company reported that Lacalle Pou’s approval as chairman had dropped ten points in a year. “Management judgments have deteriorated, slowly but steadily, since July 2020,” the study said.