On the Friday before the day of Sovereignty he posed hugging and with a radiant smile next to Governor Axel Kicillof. The ATE store in Lanús was full. Gonzalo Civila, general secretary of the Uruguayan Socialist Party in the Frente Amplio, had a set behind that was tailored to November 20. The images of José Gervasio de Artigas and Alfredo Zitarrosa. The Protector of the Free Peoples and the singer-songwriter of that verse in the song La Vuelta de Obligado: “Ninety merchant ships / Twenty of war / They come pechando above / Our waters …” After the act, the candidate for president of the main force An opposition member in Uruguay in the internal elections on December 5, a professor of Philosophy and the highest leader of her party, spoke with Página / 12 about the urgent issues on the other side of the Río de la Plata.
-What is the Frente Amplio doing today, on the way to the March referendum, to reject 135 articles of the Urgent Consideration Law as proposed in the campaign where they collected 797,261 signatures, far exceeding the legal floor?
– We are going to work intensively on hand-to-hand dialogue, closeness, with the residents of the entire country to inform them about the contents of the law. The government wanted to make this debate invisible during the collection of signatures, but since the signatures came together, it is now forced to debate. We have to work with the truth, informing, and relating the articles of the law that we want to challenge with the consequences of the model that the government is carrying out and that are part of its legal and political scaffolding. This is a job that the Broad Front should do, but also all the social organizations that are promoting this resource, since it is not exclusively our strength.
-To what extent would Uruguay be affected if the government of Luis Lacalle Pou manages to ratify the 135 articles?
-The possibility of the triumph of the no in the referendum would determine that these articles are maintained and would have very negative consequences on the life of the country, because it would be upholding a series of norms that already generates negative consequences on the great majorities of Uruguay. The beneficiaries of these articles, as well as the policy carried out by the government in general, are a very small part of the population that is basically linked to agro-export sectors. The government is making a brutal transfer of income and also of power due to the cuts of rights and conquests of the popular sectors and of the workers to the richest of the population. If these articles are validated, they would consolidate that orientation and would imply that the Coalition goes ahead with other anti-popular measures that it has in the pipeline, such as a Social Security reform that aims to reduce the assets of retirees and increase the retirement age.
-As a university teacher, could you tell us how the law harms the educational community of Uruguay?
-The law contains a series of norms that advance the privatization of public education from within. What has been called endogenous privatization. This is what the neoliberals are doing in many countries of the world, given that selling public assets no longer has a very good press. They install logics of the private within the public and thus favor the advancement of the private in educational matters. The articles to which I refer include norms that they withdraw from the councils that govern the different subsystems of education, Primary, Secondary, Technical-Professional to the teaching actors, that is, there is a setback in social participation and the management of education .
-In what other aspects does this law advance from the regression it describes?
-There are also regulations that incorporate private and business sectors in the control of the system. Norms that allow a managerial model where the appointment of teachers is the responsibility of the directors themselves. An article deletes a reference contained in the General Law of Education of 2008 according to which it was prohibited to sign international agreements that commercialized education. There is another by which the title of Public Education System is modified to Education System. In short, several articles that advance in a privatization orientation and in the reduction of social participation.
-Based on the privatization policy of Lacalle Pou and the responsibility of previous governments of the Broad Front for the installation of the pasteras, the analyst Nicolás Centurión of the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis maintains that the concept of sovereignty is an empty noun.
-There are policies carried out by the government that affect central aspects of the country’s sovereignty. Without going any further, an agreement with a multinational company for the concession of a container terminal in the port of Montevideo for a period of sixty years. This was done without transparency, without publicity of the procedures, of the characteristics of the agreement. It is a policy that clearly compromises aspects of national sovereignty. But also the very foreign policy that Uruguay is carrying out has broken with some traditions of its international relations. The country has aligned itself with the United States’ proposals in several important forums and is maintaining a right-wing ideological orientation in almost all its foreign policy positions. This implies leaning towards international power actors who clearly will not allow us to deepen the idea of sovereignty in our country.
-You are going to contest the candidacy for president of the Broad Front on December 5. What is your proposal?
-We came to Argentina in this framework and that implies the election on that date of its collective leadership and the position of president at the national level, its departments, its plenaries. It is a fundamental moment because the Broad Front is going to decide its course and we are making a proposal for change. We want you to be encouraged to raise your voice clearly to denounce the anti-popular policies that are being carried out in Uruguay. We have to delve into this and we must also build an alternative with a lot of participation, a lot of openness, with generational change, with decentralization of political action, with closeness to the people that generates social organization. In addition, the Frente Amplio must give some debates that it has pending from the self-criticism that we have made after the electoral defeat. On the productive project, regional integration, wealth distribution, the educational model, among others. A Broad Front with more ideological debate and standing on its own feet that reconciles with many Frente Amplio who are angry. In the case of Argentina, those who are linked to our space will be able to vote on December 12.
.