Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Uruguay is country of the year. But not everything is so well as may seem.

Recently Uruguay came on focus from everybody because The Economist nominated it "best country of the year". I believe it does deserve the nomination due its historic tradition of being the most stable country in Latin America socially and politically, despite the difficulty of maintaining itself as neutral as possible from its neighbors influence (Argentina is 13 times bigger and Brazil is 43 times bigger). Uruguay has the highest and GDP per capita in Latin America.

However, unfortunately it is far from being the ideal country that many think it is. With all it's beauties, and it's strong and stable democracy, the rule of law is being shaken by the party that today is in government. It's known to the whole world that South America is passing through a period of populist left governments that still live the romanticism of the revolutionary ideas of transforming their countries through violence into what they consider to be the ideal communist or socialist State. And when I talk of violence I don't only mean guns and bombs, but also violence against democratic values and the Constitution. Examples of this are Chávez, Maduro, Evo Morales and the Kirchner family of presidents in Argentina (Néstor and Cristina).


Uruguay is not free from this kind of populism. Although the economy may still grow due to more technical than political aspects, politically the government has been hurting the democracy since 2005, when the previous president decided that he would govern "por decreto" (by decree, or his command) in some sensitive issues because the Parliament was annoyingly not willing to vote for what he wanted to impose.

From those times on, the Judicial Power (which should be hierarchically as important and independent as the Executive Power, per Constitution), which is the most idonious to analize the unconstitutionality of a law or decree, has been telling the government and the press that the government is acting against the Constitution. And since then the government has been taking this as a personal battle against the media and against the Judicial Power.

Ever since, the government has been punishing the Judicial Power by hurting it and forcing it to become more and more dependent of the president. To the point that it was vox populi that the government even has a black-list of the lawyers and judges that were "against them".

Some few years after, with the current president Mujica, he decided to increase the salary of the Ministers of State. But he forgot that, per Constitution, many other public employees were paid a fraction of those. So, by increasing the salary of the ministers, the government needed increase the salary of most other public officers, including, of course, judges and higher officers of the Judicial Power. So president Mujica insisted that everybody else would receive their increase that is due by law (per the Constitution) except the Judicial Power. Of course this caused the Constitution and his proceedings to be analyzed, and finally it was confirmed that it was against the law to exclude the Judicial Power of the increase that would be given to everybody else, and without a reason. After some insisting, the President just threatened that if the Ministry decided to pay what was due to the judges, we would resign and quit being the President. But it must be mentioned that the Uruguayan judges have by far the lowest salary in the region. And in relative terms (considering the cost of living and the average salary) their salaries may perhaps the lowest in the Americas. But perhaps the only reason the president has to punish just the Judicial Power is to transmit a national message for nobody to dare go against his revolutionary ideas, same as the other populist presidents in the region, although fortunately not as extreme and severe yet. But things here are not as wonderful as they may seem...

No comments:

Post a Comment