The president of the Broad Front of Uruguay, Fernando Pereira, does not hesitate to define the leader of the executive branch Luis Lacalle Pou as the least prepared to govern since post-democracy. “It could be said that with whites life is worsecontradicting the campaign slogan that said that life is better with whites,” says a verbose Pereira, referring to the identification of the president with the historic National Party.
On the case of the former head of presidential custody Alejandro Astesianoarrested for falsifying official documents so that Russian citizens obtain a Uruguayan passport, Pereira maintains that Lacalle Pou chose “the path of opacity”. The former leader of the single union center of Uruguay, the PIT-CNT, welcomes the fact that, in view of the 2024 general elections, the Broad Front is leading the polls. “Leaders are circumstantial. What remains is the mobilized and organized people, the people who push and fight”explains Pereira in dialogue with Page 12in the middle of a lightning visit to Buenos Aires.
– Were you surprised by the Astesiano case? It does not seem like a usual scandal in a country like Uruguay.
-Astesiano was the head of presidential security. Be careful because when we say custodian, we think of a bodyguard but no: he has 160 custodians in charge of him. Take care of the Uruguayan Head of State and all the Heads of State who arrive from anywhere. Access all intelligence systems, video surveillance, police information. He is not a parsley. For the size of Uruguay, a company with 160 workers is a big company. And what did you use it for? For illegitimate Uruguayan passports, or for monitoring two senators of the Republic for the purpose of extorting them to file a complaint. This is a mafia method. Justice has to go to the bone without mercy, because if we allow the senators and deputies of the Republic to be vulnerable, what do we expect for the rest of mortals?
-So far the government’s response is that the opposition uses the leaks of the chats to “give a handle”, or that nothing has been proven by the justice system yet.
-It’s outrageous, people don’t write joking chats. As a joke, the president’s security chief does not write to number two or three of the police; jokingly, he is not paid by a company as Vertical Skies paid Artesiano. Much remains to be done in the courts, but we all have indications that a crime situation was set up on the fourth floor of the Executive Tower. How far justice will go, I don’t know, but the one who has a responsibility to clarify the facts is the Uruguayan government. They say from time to time “we ate a garrón”, but it was not the Broad Front that placed Astesiano, they chose to place him with 29 previous police investigations, some for fraud, others for theft, others for issuance of checks without funds. Twice he had been in jail. How are you going to hire that person as the president’s head of security?
-The other scandal is that of the Uruguayan drug lord Sebastián Marset, who was detained in the United Arab Emirates and received a passport that he ordered from there.
-In the case of Marset, we delivered a legitimate Uruguayan passport to a citizen who, according to the undersecretary of the Ministry of the Interior (Guillermo Maciel), was a heavy and dangerous drug trafficker. And we delivered it to him at home, we gave it to a relative to take it away and when he was released, he could leave the country with total impunity. Today no one knows where Marset is and in Paraguay he is being sought for the murder of prosecutor Marcelo Pecci. The government has not yet made any charges available for this horrible thing. I think that out of shame or ineptitude, six or seven men from the government should have already left. All this damages the democratic health of the country.
-What is the position of the Broad Front (FA) regarding the social security reform project that is being debated in the Senate?
-Like all the government’s social security projects, they are not reform projects, but rather adjustment ones. They want workers to contribute more for longer. This project is really regressive, and that of education, nobody knows what it is. The teachers and professors do not know what they are going to do next year. 80 percent of the educational sector rejects the educational reform. It is that we have not had a government so little prepared from the post-democracy to here. On the one hand, there is an ideological problem: concentration of wealth and lack of distribution. On the other, there is a scary lack of operational management. Deep down they were not prepared to govern.
-Was this what you expected from Lacalle Pou?
-It was much further than I thought. Perhaps in the first year of government, protected by the pandemic, because we all had a highly responsible attitude, many of its policies have passed by. But the truth is that his public policies have deteriorated people’s quality of life; He has not fulfilled his campaign promises and was far from up to the task for such an important place. The problem is not whether Viviana Canosa likes him in an interview, she can even do extremely well on TV because she is a good communicator, but people’s real lives have gotten substantially worse since the whites took over. They did not achieve the progress they promised in terms of security, employment, education, health or housing. If you will know the tree by its fruits, the fruits have really been few.
-The FA led the campaign to repeal a large part of the Urgent Consideration Law (LUC) that promoted economic adjustment and limited the right to strike. The referendum was held at the end of March and they lost. Did the party learn anything?
-All. It was a kind of life. We collect signatures during the pandemic. We managed to gather 30 percent of the signatures of the people who live in Uruguay. That would be impossible almost anywhere in the world. And we lost the referendum by one point. And the publicity of the “No” in relation to the “Yes” was sometimes four to one. With those disadvantages we were 18 thousand votes away from winning. When the left feels that it is standing on its own two feet, when it does not lose its independence but does not become indifferent either, it is empowered. The left is the daughter of the street, it is the daughter of the worker, student, environmental, and human rights struggles. The left is from you to you, to be seen on the street and embraced as one more partner. As General Líber Seregni said, life is a struggle and it is a struggle. The fight is against a model and the fight is to transform society.
-How do you see the Broad Front facing 2024?
-Today there are winds of change. People no longer believe in the promises they have been made, rather they have followed a patronage policy that is to distribute noodles and flour in exchange for votes. And people will probably get the noodles and flour, but they’re going to vote for the FA because they know how they’ve done over the years. And what the FA cannot do is fail people. I would say that the Broad Front had a very armed macropolitics and in some micropolitics we failed. And it hurts us when they tell us that. Recovering the soul is the first job of the FA presidency throughout this year. There is FA for a while and the generation that comes after us is a generation of men and women who are going to take the helm on the left. We have the responsibility to build an alternative to the neoliberal model for the Uruguayan people.