There are few lies as successful in Uruguayan politics as the one that claims that the Colorado Party and the National Party are the “guarantors of institutionalism.” It is the certificate of good conduct that official history extends to them every time a challenge to the status quo arises: we are the Republic, the rest is adventure.
The problem is that the archive tells a different story. And it is not necessary to seek marginal sources: consolidated historiography and the work of counter-hegemonic authors like Federico Leicht and Diego Andrés Díaz, who have spent years dismantling the narrative with documents in hand, are enough.
Born from war, not from the Republic
The traditional parties did not arise from a program or a constitution. They were born from a battle: Carpintería, September 19, 1836, where the white and red colors were adopted to avoid mistakenly killing fellow party members. They were armed factions, hosts of caudillos, and preceded the very Uruguayan State. They are not children of institutionalism: they imposed their factional logic from the cradle.
The result was the bloodiest 19th century that can be managed in such a small territory: the Guerra Grande (1839-1851), twelve years of civil war between the white Cerrito and the red Defense that dragged in interventions from Argentina, Brazil, France, and England; the revolutions of 1897 and 1904; thousands of dead in a country of a few hundred thousand inhabitants.
And how did each war end? Not with institutions: with distribution pacts. The famous “co-participation,” which is today taught as a republican virtue, was born as a distribution of departmental leaderships and positions among armed groups. A modus vivendi among factions, not a civic contract. Carlos Real de Azúa defined it better than anyone: Uruguay as a “buffer society,” where conflict is never resolved, only bought and deferred.
The religion of the State
The first Batllismo is sold as a modernizing epic. The critical reading — developed by Diego Andrés Díaz, a history teacher and essayist from eXtramuros — inverts the sign: what was built was a religion of the State, with the party as clergy and public employment as sacrament.
Nationalizations, monopolies, Banco República, Banco de Seguros, power plants, then ANCAP: a patron-state that turned public employment into the main mechanism of social integration and, not coincidentally, of electoral loyalty. The citizen was replaced by the client, and the political class became the professional intermediary of state favor. Herrerismo, far from being an alternative, integrated into the scheme as a minority partner of the loot: the “co-participating opposition.”
The theory had anticipated it. Robert Michels formulated in 1911 the iron law of oligarchy: every party ends up being a power machine that prioritizes its survival over its ideas. And the public choice school (Buchanan, Tullock) precisely described the Uruguayan mechanism: politicians who maximize positions, budget, and permanence, and use the state apparatus to distribute rents among their clientele. The boards of the distributed entities “3 and 2” are not an anomaly: they are the system.
The coups d'état were carried out by them
This is where the myth collapses with a crash. The three constitutional breaks of 20th-century Uruguay were not executed by Martians or foreign agitators: they were executed by presidents of the traditional parties.
1933: Gabriel Terra, a Colorado and Batllista president, dissolves the chambers, shuts down the opposition press, and governs by decree, with the decisive support of Herrerismo — the majority sector of the National Party — and the Colorado Riverism. It was, literally, a coup by the traditional parties against the Constitution. And they sealed it with the Constitution of 1934, which divided the Senate equally between Terristas and Herreristas: the “half and half,” the co-participation of the spoils. Baltasar Brum committed suicide in the street defending the Constitution that his own political family had just executed.
1942: Alfredo Baldomir, another Colorado, again dissolves Parliament outside any constitutional procedure. Complacent historiography dubbed it “the good coup.” The name says it all: legality is measured according to who violates it.
1973: Juan María Bordaberry, an elected president from the Colorado Party, dissolves the chambers on June 27, with civilians from both traditional parties accompanying different stages of the process. The collective work "Camino al golpe de Estado: cinco miradas desde la contrahegemonía" (2023), edited by Federico Leicht, documents that the coup was not a bolt from the blue but the culmination of a three-decade crisis incubated within the political system itself. Leicht has also traced the responsibilities of the left and the unions in that process, but the scenario, direction, and presidential signature belong to the traditional political world.
The managed agony
And why did the country reach 1973? Because when the statist model entered a terminal crisis in the mid-fifties, the traditional parties did not reform it: they prolonged it. Díaz describes it with a devastating image: the crisis of state reformism did not produce its death but a “long and destructive agony in slow motion,” which collapsed the economic and social foundations of the country — and with them peace and coexistence — in order to preserve the myth of the Batllista “golden age.”
Translated: the system preferred to set the country on fire rather than dismantle its power machine. Chronic inflation, stagnation, the banking crisis of 1965, and Pachequismo governing under almost permanent emergency measures: a normalized state of exception by a Colorado government years before any coup.
The restoration of the cartel
The exit from the dictatorship in 1985 was narrated as a democratic epic. It was also the restoration of the business: the Naval Club Pact negotiated among elites, and the immediate return to the distribution of boards, entities, and positions as if nothing had happened.
Political scientists Katz and Mair named it in the nineties: cartel-party, organizations that merge with the State, live off its resources, and collude to block the entry of competitors. The law of slogans was exactly that for a century: a device for the two slogans to contain their own internal opposition and neutralize alternatives. And when the duopoly felt threatened, the constitutional reform of 1996 — including a runoff — was explicitly designed to contain the rising third party. That the Frente Amplio ended up absorbed by the same logic, to the point that it is now described as “just another traditional party,” does not refute the thesis: it confirms it. In Uruguay, parties do not guarantee institutionalism; institutionalism guarantees the parties.
Response to the consensus political scientists
We know what Garcé, Chasquetti, Caetano, and Rilla from academia are going to respond: that Uruguay is a “party democracy,” the most stable in Latin America, and that this stability is the merit of its party system. They are serious academics — Garcé has written valuable pages about pre-coup Uruguay, Chasquetti knows Parliament like no one else — and precisely for that reason they deserve a serious refutation, point by point.
First: the argument is circular. From “the parties occupy the center of institutional life” it is inferred that “the parties are the guarantors of institutionalism.” That is a tautology, not a demonstration: if institutionalism is defined as what parties do, the thesis is irrefutable by design — the mark that Popper pointed out as characteristic of pseudoscience. To be empirical, the thesis should be able to fail. What evidence would falsify it? That the parties themselves broke the Constitution. It happened three times.
Second: the survival bias. The party-centric narrative credits the parties with all the stability and externalizes the three collapses as meteors: “the crisis,” “the Cold War,” “the military.” It is the balance of an investment fund that publicizes its good years and omits the years when it bankrupted its clients. And attention: Garcé himself has written, with an honesty that distinguishes him, that it is not enough with the CIA or the anti-communist military to explain the dictatorships, and that there must be intellectual courage to acknowledge strictly domestic processes. Let’s take him at his word: the domestic process that led to 1973 was managed, from start to finish, by the system that presents itself as a guarantor.
Third: the comparative standard is a standard of mediocrity. Being the best student in a class that is on fire does not attest to its own virtue. Measured against its own potential — the most prosperous country in the region in the mid-20th century, homogeneous, literate, without ethnic cleavages — the performance of the party system is a relative decline of seventy years. And the argument confuses correlation with cause: Uruguayan stability is overdetermined by size, social homogeneity, and the absence of religious or ethnic fractures. Attributing it to the virtue of the parties is to choose, among all available variables, precisely the one that suits the guild studying it.
Fourth: academia has already accused itself. The denunciation that Uruguayan political science constructed a self-satisfied narrative did not arise from any liberal trench: it was born from within. Álvaro Rico — historian, former dean of Humanities, leftist — early questioned how the post-dictatorship reinstated the narrative of “Uruguayan exceptionalism” with the parties as champions of the transition, and denounced the restoration of the state-centric-party-centric paradigm as a narrative functional to power and without self-criticism. Garcé himself had to respond to him. When a thesis is accused of being apologetic from both Marxism and liberalism at the same time, it is advisable to review it.
Fifth: the consensus itself admits that the model is creaking. In 2018, before the self-convened, Garcé wrote that the entire Uruguayan partyocracy was creaking, and that when it creaks, it is advisable to pay attention. He quoted Przeworski: when all parties converge, the citizenry loses interest, cannot control its representatives, and distrusts democracy. Exactly what cartel-party theory predicts. The difference between the political consensus and us is not in the data — it is in the name. They call it “culture of pact and co-participation.” We call it collusion.
Conclusion
The traditional Uruguayan parties were born from civil war, governed through clientelism, broke the Constitution twice on their own, and a third time accompanied its demolition, managed the decline to the abyss, and wrote the electoral rules to suit their survival. Calling that “guarantee of institutionalism” is a semantic abuse.
