Uruguayan lawmaker Jaime Trobo, a good friend of the Falklands' people and who visited the Islands in several occasions died this week at the age of 62 after a long battle with cancer. Trobo was first elected a Montevideo Councillor for the National Party in 1984, when Uruguay emerged from eleven years of military dictatorship.
Luis Alberto Lacalle, the Ex-President of Uruguay, is currently in the Falkland Islands on a week-long tour, along with Uruguayan Elected Representative Mario Jaime Trobo. Lacalle served as President from 1990 to 1995 and Trobo is presently a Member of the International Affairs Committee.
By Jaime Trobo (*) - For some time now we have been arguing that Uruguay must strengthen its bonds and contacts with a neighboring territory, in the southern cone, part of our American continent, where families who arrived in our region during the first half of the XIX century live, and with whom those contacts, once very intense, have waned, particularly in the last decades.
Uruguayan lawmaker Jaime Trobo said that a blockade in the Americas was 'unacceptable' and called for closer links between the Falkland/Malvinas Islands and the continent, urging the private sector to take advantage of the business opportunities in trade and services.
By Jaime Trobo (*) - Parlasur, acronym for Mercosur Parliament, decided to approve a declaration relative to the Malvinas Islands situation, and more specifically on the sovereignty conflict between the Argentine Republic and Great Britain, which has been ongoing for over 180 years with no reasonable accord.
Lawmaker Jaime Trobo came out strongly is support of close links between the Falkland Islands and Uruguay in a column which he published in Mercopress underlining the ”interesting lesson of discovering a reality mostly unknown for Uruguayans despite the (Islands) geographic, cultural and historic proximity to Uruguay”.
The cross-party delegation of Uruguayan parliamentarians currently visiting the Falkland Islands appear quite unmoved by what their leader Jaime Trobo described as the “dust storm” that their visit had created both at home in Uruguay and in neighbouring Argentina.
The visit of four Uruguayan lawmakers to the Falkland Islands is receiving ample coverage from the Argentine media particularly the intention of closer links between Montevideo and the Islands including the possibility of sending Uruguayan manpower as well as promoting trade, tourism, culture and social relations
The Argentine embassy in Montevideo through a Forum Malvinas Uruguay release totally rejected the decision from a group of Uruguayan lawmakers, representing all parties in parliament, accepting an invitation from the British embassy to visit the Falkland Islands.
“We have come for people-to-people contacts, to talk about business opportunities and for the resumption of the close and historic links between the Falkland Islands and Uruguay”, repeated Falklands’ lawmaker Dick Sawle during one of his many presentations in Montevideo.