Leftist Favored to Win Vote in Uruguay

By Hector Tobar

Oct. 31, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — Standing in the central plaza of the neighborhood of humble homes known as La Teja, an old leftist militant points out monuments in the life of Tabare Vazquez, the local hero favored to win today’s presidential election.

“That building is La Escuela Yugoslavia, where Tabare went to grade school,” said Alvaro Medino, who runs a nonprofit radio station. “Over there is the Arbolito Sports Club, where he started the clinic after his father died of cancer.... And the night he was elected mayor, this was where we celebrated.”

If Vazquez, 65, is elected and brings the left to power for the first time in Uruguay, it will mark the culmination of a rags-to-riches story that began here amid the shuttered factories and the flare of the state oil company refinery, where his father once worked.

Vazquez’s campaign officially closed Wednesday night with a rally attended by about 250,000 people. Expectations are high in this capital that a leader with plebeian roots will bring change to a country of 3.5 million people hit hard by years of recession.

“What we need is to give people ... work and not abandon these young people,” Medino said as a group of children walked past Plaza Lafone.

A number of polls released Thursday -- the last day campaigning was allowed -- showed Vazquez with the support of more than 50% of the electorate. He leads his nearest challenger in the seven-candidate field by 20 percentage points.

If no candidate wins a majority today, a runoff will be held Nov. 28.

Vazquez, born in La Teja, was a bright young man whose progress through the educational system in the 1950s was a source of neighborhood pride.

“When he was taking his exams to become a doctor, a big group of us went to the hospital to support him,” said Daniel Mariscano, 70, a longtime family friend who still whiles away the hours at the Arbolito Sports Club. “We were cheering him on, the way you cheer at a soccer game.”

Vazquez’s parents and sister all died of cancer, said Mariscano, a communist who goes by the nickname Viejo Pistola, or Old Gun. Vazquez went on to become an oncologist and founded a health clinic for needy residents at the sports club.

In the 1980s, Vazquez became president of the Progreso soccer team and opened a soup kitchen and health clinic at the team headquarters. He won Montevideo’s mayoral election in 1989, the same year Progreso won the national soccer championship in an upset.

“People are excited, there is great hope that Tabare will win,” said Andrea Martirena, editor of a monthly community newspaper. “People are already celebrating even though we haven’t voted yet.”

Long popular in working-class Montevideo, Vazquez has won strong support nationwide thanks to widespread anger toward the government of outgoing President Jorge Batlle, who cannot run for reelection. The unemployment rate reached 20% during Batlle’s tenure.

Famous for its large middle class and the highest rates of literacy in Latin America, Uruguay now has an official poverty rate of 31%. Tens of thousands of young Uruguayans migrate every year to Europe and the United States in search of work.

Batlle was among many leaders in the region who tied their countries’ future to the neoliberal economic policies that gained currency in the developing world in the 1990s: fiscal austerity, privatization of state-owned industries and the elimination of barriers to trade and the free flow of capital.

Polls show the candidate of Batlle’s Colorado Party, Guillermo Stirling, running a distant third, with about 10%.

Vazquez is a lifetime member of the Socialist Party, one of several parties in the leftist Broad Front-Progressive Encounter coalition. But he is not expected to bring radical economic change to Uruguay.

Most observers believe that his presidency would be similar to that of Brazil’s leftist leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has won praise from the international financial community for his fiscal discipline.

Vazquez traveled to the United States and Europe this year to reassure financial observers that, if elected, he would honor the terms of Uruguay’s debt restructuring with the International Monetary Fund.

Vazquez said he would name as his finance minister one of the more moderate members of his coalition, Sen. Danilo Astori.

“We believe there will be broad continuity with current policy no matter who wins,” the Economist Intelligence Unit, the research arm of the Economist magazine, said recently. “Any change is likely to be gradual.”

Still, Vazquez has proposed a series of “emergency” measures, including expanded unemployment benefits and incentives to encourage investment in the fading industrial sector.

On Wednesday, he ended his final campaign speech with the phrase made famous a generation ago by Ernesto “Che” Guevara: “Ever onward to victory!”

Five years ago, Vazquez won the first round in the presidential election. But he lost in the runoff when the two parties that have dominated Uruguayan politics throughout its history -- the Colorado and National parties -- united behind Batlle.

Back at the Arbolito Sports Club, “Old Gun” Mariscano isn’t ready to cry victory yet.

“We’re leading 3 to 0 and there’s just 20 minutes left in the game,” he said, turning to soccer for a metaphor. “But the game isn’t over yet.”

He clutched at his chest and added, “I’m so anxious, I’m not sure I’m going to make it to Sunday.”