There is a paradox that democratic Uruguay has never fully processed, perhaps because processing it involves discomforts that none of the major parties have been willing to assume honestly. The paradox is as follows: the same State that was attacked, sabotaged, and challenged with bombs, kidnappings, and murders by the National Liberation Movement between 1963 and 1972 ended up becoming, decades later, the main employer, financier, and economic support of its protagonists. Not through the silent and natural reconciliation that time produces in peoples, but through a law, a decree, a bureaucracy, and a tap of public money that has yet to be turned off.
Law 18.033, approved in 2006 during the first government of the Broad Front, established a Special Reparatory Pension for those who were deprived of liberty between February 9, 1973, and February 28, 1985. The argument was the reparation to victims of the dictatorship. The reality, which the data from the Social Security Bank confirms without ambiguity, is that a considerable proportion of the beneficiaries were not victims of the dictatorship in the conventional historical sense of the term: they were members of armed organizations that first attacked, for years, a functioning democracy, and who were then detained in the context of that conflict they themselves initiated.
Three years later, Law 18.596 expanded the umbrella. And in doing so, it committed what journalist and historian Álvaro Alfonso —author of more than seventeen books on the recent history of Uruguay, including Operation Truth and The Intrigue of Human Rights— described as a fraudulent rewriting of national chronology.
Law 18.596 has two facets: reparations for those who did not access Law 18.033, and stabbing the national history. It induces through its article 2 to state that the dictatorship was established on June 13, 1968, when the constitutional president Pacheco Areco applied urgent security measures that are embedded in the Constitution. That illegitimate government of Pacheco Areco called for free elections in 1971. This legislative act is the lying stain of our history.
— Álvaro Alfonso, interview with Infobae, November 2023
Alfonso's observation is not minor. By retroactively moving the start of "state repression" to 1968, under a democratic and constitutional government, the law opens the door for those who attacked that democracy before the coup —tupamaros operating since 1963, militants from the armed wing of the Communist Party— to be sheltered under the umbrella of victims. It is a logical leap that the Uruguayan legal architecture has never had the modesty to recognize for what it is: a political decision disguised as historical reparation.
"By retroactively moving the start of repression to 1968, the law allows those who attacked democracy before the coup to be sheltered as its victims."
The numbers are what they are, and it is advisable to present them without euphemisms. The monthly amount of the special reparatory pension is equivalent to 8.5 Bases of Benefits and Contributions, about 52,500 Uruguayan pesos at current value, approximately 1,300 dollars per month. In 2016, the BPS paid this benefit to about 5,700 people, with an annual expenditure of around 60 million dollars, fully funded by General Revenues. Alfonso, researching the same system for Operation Truth, recorded that in 2020 —with almost ten months of pandemic in between— more than 32 million dollars were paid, and at some point in the process, about 9,000 people applied for the benefit, with more than 4,000 cases still under review. By 2023, the number of active beneficiaries had reduced to 3,101, due to the natural death of the original holders, with an annual expenditure of 51.6 million dollars.
BPS DATA
2016 — 5,700 beneficiaries — US$ 60 million annually
2020 — more than US$ 32 million (10 months, pandemic) — source: Alfonso, Operation Truth
2023 — 3,101 beneficiaries — US$ 51.6 million annually
Estimated total accumulated 2007–2024 — between US$ 750 and US$ 850 million
Applicants at some point in the process — 9,000 people, with more than 4,000 cases still pending
If we reconstruct the spending curve from 2007, when the system began to operate, until 2024, the most conservative estimate gives a total accumulated of between 750 and 850 million dollars. The most likely figure hovers around 800 million over sixteen years. To put that magnitude in context: it is more than double the annual budget of the Ministry of National Defense of Uruguay in a typical year. It is a figure that did not exist in the public debate with that precision because the BPS has not historically broken down this item in accessible series, and the only specific data emerged from parliamentary requests and the work of journalists like Alfonso who had the patience to seek them out.
The law also has a generational transmission mechanism that few call by its name. When a holder dies, the pension is transferred to the spouse, partner, or declared incapacitated adult children. This means that the fiscal commitment does not close with the death of the guerrilla: it extends, in some cases, for additional decades. A decree by Tabaré Vázquez signed in February 2020, days before leaving office, established that survivor pensions generated by a PER would be paid at 100% of the original amount —instead of the lower percentage that would correspond in the general regime— thus creating an even more privileged category within the already privileged reparatory system. The government of Lacalle Pou attempted to reverse this through the pension reform of 2022, with partial success.
"The fiscal commitment does not close with the death of the guerrilla. It extends, in some cases, for additional decades."
It is worth pausing on a precision that defenders of these pensions often wield as a shield: not all beneficiaries are tupamaros. The law also includes militants from the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Eastern Revolutionary Movement, and other organizations. That is technically true. And Alfonso pointed it out with an irony that the historical record only confirms: the Uruguayan Communist Party supported the coup d'état of 1973 —a documented reality that the communists themselves took decades to admit— and yet their militants ended up being beneficiaries of the reparations conceived for the victims of that same coup. It is a contortion of historical logic that only politics, with its peculiar relationship with coherence, can produce.
The argument for reparation deserves to be taken seriously because it is the only one that has conceptual weight. No one disputes that the dictatorship committed crimes, that torture was systematic, that deprivation of liberty was brutal and unjust in many cases. The problem is not in recognizing that. The problem is that the law does not distinguish sufficiently between those who were detained for being unionists, teachers, or peaceful activists, and those who were prosecuted for having actively participated in armed actions against the democratic State before any dictatorship existed. The law erases that chronological line with a technical elegance that is, in fact, exactly what Alfonso called: a stab at national history.
What remains, stripped of the language of human rights with which it is wrapped, is the following: Uruguay spends approximately 50 million dollars a year on special pensions for people who, in a significant proportion, participated in violent actions against democracy, later transformed into a political party, governed the country for three decades, and during that time designed, approved, expanded, and legally shielded the pension system that benefits them. It is an operation of impeccable ideological consistency. It is also, for those who look at it without the blinders of the narrative, the most complete example of what happens when a political movement comes to power with the ability to legislate in its own cause.
The discussion about whether these pensions should be maintained, modified, or eliminated is legitimate and does not have a simple answer. What is not legitimate is that this discussion has been avoided for twenty years behind the argument that questioning it is equivalent to denying the crimes of the dictatorship. These are two different things. Alfonso has been writing about it for more than a decade, with documentation and without reservations. Uruguayan democracy, which often prides itself on its institutional maturity, would do well to rise to the level of that question.
