Juan Maria Bordaberry
Juan Maria Bordaberry was elected president of the most stable democracy in South America and dissolved its parliament within a year. Uruguay had been the exception on the continent: universal suffrage from 1918, an eight-hour day, free secondary education and a welfare state built decades before most of Europe had one, funded by beef and wool sold to a world that wanted both. It was called the Switzerland of South America, and the description was not entirely flattery. The economy stopped growing in the 1950s when the export markets contracted, and the political system had no answer. The Tupamaros, an urban guerrilla movement that robbed banks and published the ledgers, grew through the 1960s, and the state's response was to hand the counter-insurgency to the army. Bordaberry, a cattle rancher and a conservative, won a disputed election in 1971. The army destroyed the Tupamaros militarily within eighteen months, and then declined to go back to barracks. In June 1973 he closed the legislature and ruled with a council of officers - a coup carried out by the elected president against his own congress. What followed is measured in a statistic rather than a body count. Uruguay had proportionally more political prisoners than any country in the world, and torture was systematic rather than incidental; the deaths were fewer than in Argentina or Chile because the method was imprisonment rather than disappearance. Uruguay was a full participant in Operation Condor, the arrangement by which the southern-cone dictatorships hunted each other's exiles across borders, and Uruguayans were seized in Buenos Aires and flown home in secret. The army removed him in 1976 when he proposed abolishing political parties permanently, which was further than they wished to go. He was convicted in 2010 of homicide and of the crime of destroying the constitution, and died under house arrest.
- Lived: 1928 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Uruguayan
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
