MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Uruguayan Conservative Party integrates neo-Nazi member

The candidate and former commander said Tuesday at a press conference that they will expel the member from party if “his link to Nazism is confirmed.”

The political party of the former commander in chief of the National Army and candidate for president of Uruguay, Guido Manini Ríos, faces for the second time in a month an internal resolution on a member with a neo-Nazi past.

Germán Dorrego is a Cabildo Abierto member, a conservative party founded in March by Manini Ríos after being ceased as commander in chief by President Tabaré Vazquez.

Member of Purification group, with military training and referent of the western zone of Montevideo, as he appears in social networks, Dorrego, 30, has a past that is not in line with any of the ideas that his party ratified in late July, when an adherent was photographed with Manini Ríos at a party rally with a T-shirt with a neo-Nazi logo. The young man and his group were vetoed by the political force when the case was known in the Uruguayan press.

As El Observador revealed, until a few years ago, Dorrego was a skinhead and was part of a group that worshiped and sought to propagate the Nazi ideology in Uruguay, according to information from the Ministry of Interior.

The candidate and former commander said Tuesday at a press conference that they will expel the member if “his link to Nazism is confirmed.”

In several photographs, Dorrego appears next to Manini Ríos, and in several of those images, it can be seen that Dorrego took the floor in at least one public event.

For his part, the campaign coordinator of Cabildo Abierto, Rivera Elgue, stressed that the man will be called to the Ethics Committee of the party to clarify his relationship with Nazism.

Elgue stressed that what happened with Dorrego “has nothing to do” with the follower Esteban Klein, who wore a shirt with the inscription “HKN KRZ” (swastika without the vowels, in German) since ”this case is different because the person is a conventional to the party (a party leader), therefore we have to determine what responsibilities he have. The other was an adherent who was not affiliated, therefore, no action could be taken,“ said the coordinator to Montevideo Portal.

Dorrego also had a Facebook profile under the alias “Germán Panzerfaust”, where he has pictures of him tattooing the word skinhead on his left leg and also shows it with a tattoo on his right shoulder in which there is a shield with the Nazi eagle with the legend ”skinhead“. There are also photos of a street graffiti with an allusion to the skinhead culture and two images that allude to the ”Patriot Youth Montevideo“. The conventional also integrated a band called Contra Ataque 88, a symbolic number for neo-Nazis, since the pronunciation ”88“ in German sounds the same as ”H-H“ (abbreviation to evade censorship to state ”Heil Hitler”).

The image of the logo of that band appeared on the cover of two skinhead propaganda bulletins seized by the police of a group of followers of the national socialism who had starred in riots in a bar in Montevideo, on July 28, 2017, as reported at the time by the Ministry of Interior. Dorrego was among them, police sources confirmed to El Observador.

After the Klein episode in July, the far-right party campaign coordinator said his party does not accept “totalitarian ideas of any kind. Neither totalitarian nor racist nor xenophobic,” said Elgue.

After that case, in Cabildo Abierto they proposed the idea of ​​allocating computer resources to know “the profile of a person” through what they publish on social networks to compare the content of the profile of a member.