MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

In Uruguay, the President also reads mammograms

Every Tuesday from nine to past noon, Dr. Vázquez, a 66-year-old oncologist who specializes in breast cancer, can be found at the Mammary Diagnostic Centre, which serves more than 23,000 patients.

His affiliation with the clinic began 36 years ago, and he is not about to give it up just because other duties compete for his time.

"Practicing medicine is not only my vocation, it gives me an opportunity to continue to be in direct contact with people, to see them and hear their needs,". "Only rarely do patients touch on political issues during a consultation. But I'd feel empty and isolated if I couldn't practise my profession and had to give up that contact."

Elected to a five-year term in 2004, winning 51 percent of the vote after falling short in two earlier runs for office, Dr. Vázquez is Uruguay's first left-wing president.

A member of the Socialist Party, he leads an unruly, often-squabbling coalition called the Broad Front, whose factions range from the Communist Party and former Tupamaro guerrillas on the far left to European-style social democrats near the centre.

A South American diplomat here said Dr. Vázquez reminded him of "one of those dog walkers you see in the park.'' "He's got a dozen animals straining to go off in different directions and always yapping at each other, and he's struggling to keep the whole pack under control," he said.

Dr. Vazquez's cabinet, for example, includes representatives of six factions in the front plus an independent. His finance minister has been publicly advocating a trade agreement with the United States, while his foreign minister has vigorously opposed it, forcing Dr. Vázquez to step in this month and say that he is now the only authorized voice on the matter.

When he took office, the main question was: "Will he be Lula or Chavez?" ? meaning would he take a moderate or a radical approach. The answer is now clear. He has shunned the Venezuelan president's provocative, confrontational behaviour in favour of market-friendly policies, but so far without the corruption that has stained the Brazilian president's reputation.

"Because of my medical and ideological training, I am accustomed to saying that life is adaptation and symbiosis," Dr. Vázquez said in explanation. "Knowing how Uruguayans feel, we in the Broad Front have always stood for change in our discourse. But change has to take place at a Uruguayan pace. This is a society that is measured and serious, that wagers on change, yes, but changes that are rational and gradual."

That approach strikes opposition parties and some other observers as waffling and indecisive. "So far, he has shown himself to be politically deft in riding the waves, but now he has to take decisions and pay political costs, and that is the hard part," said Pablo da Silveira, a political scientist at the Catholic University here and a newspaper columnist.

But Dr. Vazquez's supporters describe him as a master of consensus "who likes to build coalitions and not leave anybody on the side of the road," in the words of Senator Rafael Michelini, an ally who has sometimes disagreed with the president. "Perhaps because he is a doctor, he has always been humble and would rather save a life or a situation than reap personal glory."

Back when he was a medical student, Dr. Vázquez said, "I was fascinated by each area I studied, whether neurology, urology or surgery," and found it hard to chose a specialty.

But then his mother and an older sister died of cancer within a short time, and so it seemed to him that "given the circumstances I had lived through, this should be my battlefield."

Studying on a government scholarship, "I saw how poor people paid taxes so that I and other young people could study," he said. "So I felt a strong commitment to social service," and went to work as an oncologist in a poor neighbourhood and became a professor of radiotherapy at the University of the Republic medical school.

In 1989, he ran for mayor of Montevideo, thinking that "I would campaign for four months, lose and return to my medical practice." Instead he won, in an upset that immediately established him as the Broad Front's most promising figure.

Only rarely do Dr. Vazquez's two worlds converge. He found time on a state visit to Italy last year to address a congress of oncologists. And in March, as the result of a presidential decree, Uruguay became the first country in the Americas to prohibit smoking in all indoor public spaces.

"The point is to diminish the number of deaths from cancer" and reduce demands on the health system, he said. "By 2020 more people will be dying from cancer in underdeveloped countries than the developed world, unless we start with intelligent policies on tobacco, chemical products and the like."

Though initially criticized by restaurants, bars and casinos, the measure has been grudgingly accepted by Uruguayans. But that has not prevented a small joke from circulating here: "Thank goodness Tabaré is an oncologist and not a sexologist."

At the clinic, which is affiliated with the country's best-known private hospital, Dr. Vázquez wears a white smock with his name embroidered on a pocket. His colleagues, men and women alike, greet him with a kiss on the cheek, as is the custom here, and address him as "Doctor" rather than "Mr. President."

As he made the rounds with a visitor, a colleague asked Dr. Vázquez to look at the mammogram of a patient with a pair of tumors in one breast and asked his opinion. "We like to avoid surgery whenever we can, but this is going to require a mastectomy," Dr. Vázquez said. That afternoon it was back to the presidential palace and his other job.

"I don't see working in these two realms as schizophrenic, since both are forms of service to society," he said. "To me, politics is an extension of what I do in medicine,'' he said. ?'But society is also a human organism, and politics is a way of dealing with the pathologies that a society can have. You have to act on that society as you would a human being." Buenos Aires Herald