José Batlle y Ordóñez
José Batlle y Ordóñez was president of Uruguay from 1903 to 1907 and from 1911 to 1915, the Colorado journalist who made the country the first welfare state in the Americas and one of the first anywhere. His name is the adjective the country still uses for the kind of state it has. He spent the years between his two terms in Europe, mostly in Switzerland, deciding that the presidency itself was the problem. The first term was the last civil war. The Blanco caudillo Aparicio Saravia rose in 1904 against a Colorado president who would not share the provinces, and was killed at Masoller in September. After that the country had one government for the first time since independence. There were the first reforms, the eight-hour day proposed, the divorce law, the abolition of the death penalty in 1907. The second term was the programme. There were the eight-hour day passed in 1915, and the state insurance bank and the state mortgage bank, the electricity and the port and the railways in state hands. There were the free secondary schools, the university opened to women, the divorce at the wife's request alone in 1913, and the old-age pensions. There was the separation of church and state. He carried it through by renaming the holidays, so that Christmas became family day and Holy Week tourism week, which they still are. There was the church's quarrel with him, which he enjoyed. The idea he brought back from Switzerland was the colegiado, a nine-member national council in place of the president. He proposed it in 1913. It split his own party. The constitution of 1918 half adopted it, as a council sharing power with a president. The country tried it twice, in 1919 and in 1952, and abandoned twice, in 1933 and 1967. He was born in Montevideo, the son of a president, Lorenzo Batlle. He founded the newspaper El Día in 1886 and wrote its editorials for forty years. He fought a duel with a Blanco senator in 1920 and killed him. He was the president of the national council himself from 1920 to 1923. He died in October 1929, before the depression tested what he had built, which it did. Terra's coup of 1933 was the answer, which did not last.
- Lived: 1856 CE – 1929 CE
- Nationality: Uruguayan
- Roles: president, journalist, politician
