MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Uruguay Senator receives “Malvinas war honor” from Argentina for volunteering in 1982

Senator Rosadilla

Uruguayan Senator Luis Rosadilla said that he received Argentina's honors for having volunteered when the Malvinas war broke out in 1982, in the name of “all those Uruguayan citizens that have done so much for the anti-imperialism cause”.

 The former Uruguayan Defense minister from the ruling coalition was distinguished this week at a special ceremony in the Argentine embassy in Montevideo with the “Order of May” in the degree of Grand Officer.

The event was headed by Argentine ambassador Dante Dovena and attending the ceremony was President Jose Mujica, members of his cabinet, lawmakers, Argentine officials and members from the local branch of the Malvinas Forum. Special guest of the occasion was Colonia mayor Walter Zimmer, a doctor, who back in 1982 also volunteered to join the Argentine forces. He received his medal in a previous occasion.

“I received the distinction with pride and great pleasure” said Rosadilla who added that he did so “in the widest possible understanding of what an elected lawmaker, representative of national sovereignty means”.

Likewise “I accepted it as an honor to so many Uruguayans that history teaches us have risen to fight against imperialism” and recalled that his volunteering “was a gesture of a young man of 29 years, just out of jail and faced with the highhandedness which the Malvinas war meant, also supported by the United States, I wanted to volunteer and enlist and get out all that ill feeling inside me”.

He pointed out that he detested the Argentine military government of the time but he believed his task was to fight imperialism and colonialism. “It was a kiss to the moon as a gesture, and I had to separate one thing from the other and could not stop from volunteering”.

But Rosadilla also admitted that “if they had really enlisted me I would have been anything but a nuisance because at that moment I was just a pack of bones: with 50 kilos I wouldn't have been at all useful”.

The Senator summed up saying “my experience is a mere anecdote, but I have accepted the honor because the Uruguayan people deserve it. You can't give the prize to all of them, so that is why I take it as something personal”.

However he insisted that current difficulties or petty squabbling “should not distract us from the big task for the future” and as brotherly peoples “we must be true followers of those who shed blood in the fields and that means the fight continues. The robbed us of our past, don't let them rob us our future”.

“We must keep on fighting for independence and for the large motherland of all our peoples in the continent”.

Rosadilla a baker by training joined as a young militant the Tupamaro urban guerrilla movement and was imprisoned several years for seditious activities. On release he did odd jobs until the return of democracy in Uruguay in 1984, when he went full time into politics next to Mujica and other guerrilla leaders.