MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Uruguay: Mujica favors “Aye” vote against “aristocratic” LUC

“Freedom will exist when basic issues are resolved,” Mujica insisted

Former Uruguayan President José “Pepe” Mujica said Thursday said the Law of Urgent Consideration (LUC), which has been a pillar of the current Multicolor coalition, had a certain “aristocratic” ring and a barrack-like approach at issues.

The Broad Front (FA) leader made those remarks during a speech with which the “Ayes” were closing their campaign ahead of Sunday's referendum on whether to repeal or not 135 provisions of the controversial norm.

Mujica also expressed his concerns that should the “nays” prevail, Uruguay would be “Argentinized,” which is a most curious argument, since it was also used by Julio María Sanguinetti, also a former head of state of the Colorado Party, who was campaigning for the LUC to be left unchanged.

During a meeting at Piedras Blancas, Mujica insisted that the requirement to collect signatures to call for a referendum stems from “an aristocratic vision of human history,” whereby “they are the bosses who are out there, they are the ones who command and write. And what do the common people have to do with that? That they choose every five years? All right, let them choose, but after that, let them stay out of it. Dad, life is not like that. If there is technological evolution, if any guru today walks around with a university in his pocket even if he does not know how to use it, we must predict that the institutional evolution of the world is going to change. That the possibility of consulting the population will become easier and easier if modern intelligence and electronics are used. And there is also the political history of peoples who are used to having plebiscites practically every month and nothing happens.”

Mujica also pointed out that “people are not managed with 'order and command' because that ”is a law of war and a barracks education.“

”In society, everyone fights for their interests but also for their vision of freedom. (...) The first law is necessity. If you don't have enough to eat, if you don't have a roof over your head, what kind of freedom are you talking about? You are just like any other bug that the first thing it has to do is to eat, then take shelter, then take care of its nest and reproduce,“ Mujica went on.

The former leader also pointed out that ”freedom will exist when these basic issues are resolved. And if they are not resolved, there is no freedom.“

Mujica said the LUC ”has been a comical law because it was concerned with the fiscal rule and the artisan sausage“. ”They put the picket lines with the artisanal sausage and there is an idea that things are fixed on the spur of the moment, that to govern is to command. It is a half-barracks vision. And to govern is not to command, to govern is to convince“, he explained, as he added that was the reason why ordinary citizens had to get involved in decision-making, ”because they are the ones who have to pull the cart and if they are not convinced, they don't do it.“

He also said that the day after the referendum things will go on as usual: ”problems continue and we will have a better country if we worry politically.” Mujica also recalled former President Luis Alberto Lacalle Herrera (1990-1995), Lacalle Pou's father, “ and president between 1990 and 1995, ”did not campaign at all” for the Law of Public Companies and also Sanguinetti, during his first presidency (1985-1990), did not participate in the campaign for the expiration law and they both survived unharmed until the end of their terms in office.

Mujica also said he sensed Uruguay was “becoming Argentinized,” with political discussion boiling up to things being either black or white with nothing in the middle.

“I have many years as a parliamentarian, I was a friend of [Alejandro] Atchugarry, of [Jorge] Larrañaga. They went to see me at my house, they went to see me at the hospital. We argued, we talked at the bowling alley. When I was elected president, Atchugarry called me to give me advice. The real Uruguay had a way of working, we could be at loggerheads but we maintained a degree of cordiality that meant collaboration,” he said.